wow. your 89th birthday is today. crazy to think that the first birthday of yours we ever celebrated together was just last year. never at that moment did i understand just how much you would come to mean to me. still can’t grasp it in this moment. reflecting backing on the last year allows me to understand that your magical 88th year led to my magical 23rd year. although from the outside looking in, one would never guess that. you took a year of devastation and heartbreak for me and turned it into one of the most transformative, romantic years of my life. you got me to the other side. you got me to peace and happiness. it was also the year that i finally got to come home and visit you. something that seemed to take an eternity in this lifetime. how i yearned for you at graceland and how i yearn to go back home to you very soon.
but aside from me, let’s focus on you. after all it is your special day. i imagine it is one of the best birthdays you’ve had in a long time. getting to spend it with your mama, daddy, yisa, and beautiful ben. i’m sure your celebration in the clouds could never compete to our collective best efforts to celebrate you here on earth. but i do hope we’ve made you burst with all that beautiful energy you possess. lighting up your face with that precious smile. holding your stomach with the precious pains your contagious laughter brings. embracing all those around you with the magnitude of love you blessed us all with during your lifetime.
most of all, this 89th year, i hope you continue to understand how earth shattering you truly are. there wasn’t anyone like you and there never will be. you were a forced to be reckoned with from the start. a life too grand and precious for this world. you changed music. you changed lives. you changed america. you changed me. something i will always be grateful for, from the bottom of my heart. you’ll never know the impact you’ve had on me. on all of us.
i love you e. i love you more today than i did yesterday. i love you less today than i will tomorrow. i promise you make you proud. to make your 89th year all the more special than the last. forever entwined, you and i ♥️
🥀🥀"He could light up a room just by walking in it, and he had a knack for putting people at ease and making them feel good about themselves. That's what made him so special." -Anita Wood ✨✨
Elvis Presley and Sammy Davis, Jr. backstage in Elvis' dressing room. This was on opening night at the Showroom International Hotel on
Ik you’re not writing Elvis as much but PLEASE TELL ME HIM AND LANEY HAVE A HAPPY ENDING
Hello sweetheart! You’re right, I’m not writing much anymore but I did work on their happy ending for the first time in years just a few weeks ago. Due to my writing process I have these out of order scenes written out in drafts that need bridges to connect them. But as I’m unsure if I’ll finish it, since there’s still shockingly some interest, and chiefly as it seems cruel to leave it be without any happy conclusion, I provide this- my literal rough draft. It has some more satisfactory apologies etc. I’ve been reluctant to share these drafts as they seemed to me to be lazy and opting out, and I’m a bit shy with sharing my writing in its rudimentary stage, but why not? You asked and I’m so appreciative of your interest- so here’s a little something. I hope in times to come I can come back and revisit this and add far more to it. 🩷
| Picking up the Pieces
—SCENE ONE—
|| VEGAS, DECEMBER 1977 ||
Joe Esposito thinks there’s something eerily familiar about the gait of the figure in black leather and denim stalking down the hall at him. Something kinda ghostly, nostalgic if it weren’t so unnervingly reminiscent of a dead icon. That if his stove up, all but dead, coked-up boss.
Elvis doesn’t possess the limber ability to move with such fluidity anymore. Not in the year 1977.
And he hasn’t got the stamina to shimmer with divine rage like he once could.
His voice has gone so thin on the other end of the penthouse line when ordering more toast, Joe half forgot how loud his bellow could get.
Jesse reminds him as he approaches, of all these things. And how he is his father’s son still, at the end of the day. For all that he looks more like his mama in the face every passing hour.
The rage, the panther-like stride, the way Joe ain’t ever had it in him to stand up to an angry Presley- it might as well be the boss back and alive.
“Where is he?”
Jesse might have an inch on Elvis, he seems skinnier than last time Joe saw him at the courthouse when the divorce got finalized and he thinks it adds to his length. Joe wonders if it’s impacting his football. Maybe the kid has given it up and taken to drugs. Or booze, with his daddy not there to bark at him for it. Joe would have taken to it too, stuck in Memphis with his bitch of a mother and all the world laughing at the family.
Joe is glad he ain’t in Memphis anymore. The bitch can keep Graceland.
“He’s up there.” Joe answers him, it comes out easy, years of practice pacifying the big man. “Strict orders not to let anyone up.”
“He let Rosalee up.” Jesse points out, hasn’t taken his shades off yet. The marble corridor that houses the penthouse elevator is much too dim for those. Maybe he’s stoned.
“He wasn’t so bad then.”
There’s something derisive yet incredibly elegant about the snort Jesse lets out. “It’s been months. How you know he ain’t dead?”
“That what ya want? Tired of waitin’ on that will, boy?” Joe can’t help himself, he hates these goddamn kids, their goddamn superiority they inherited from their mama.
The glasses come off. The blue eyes are creepily still. Jesse don’t look much like a kid anymore, not in the gait, not in the face. “You lemme on up before I sue ya for manslaughter. If the man’s alive, I’ve got business with him.”
Not even Joe can find a reasonable reason to turn the son away. If Elvis kicks him out, or if Jesse murders Elvis while up there, it can hardly make things worse than they are now. With Elvis not performing for months, Joe’s paycheck is in jeopardy either way. “He’s a goddamn mess, and that was weeks ago.” Joe warns, while stepping aside.
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” he hears before the doors slide shut and the lights indicate the ascending bastard.
It’s Elaine’s fault, honestly, Joe thinks. It would probably do for Jesse to hear it. But Joe might not live through the telling. He sees the last number illuminate and abandons his useless post to tell Ronny the development.
—————————————————————
Elvis could not hear the ding of the long abandoned elevator arrive, nor the click of latches long unused being turned, nor even the sound of bootfalls along the carpeted floor. The clinking survey of the untouched bar, the clatter of records being flipped through on the coffee table, the glaring light from the bedroom lamp being turned on. Didn’t hear a gruff call of “daddy” get muffled in the decadent amounts of drapery and bedding.
He was in the tub, as he was often these days, nights, weeks, sweating it out, trying to not rip his skin from his bones with the itch it brought, trying to keep himself from blowing his aching brains out. The inconvenience of stepping out of the deep soak was a decent deterrence at times. The imagined headlines were another. The thought of poor Marie’s little face in line at his casket was the best, though.
He had been here before. Once. When Elaine had joined him in Germany. She had just had the first set of twins but she’d sat by the tub every night as he sweated out his recent reliance on sleeping pills, mopping his clammy forehead and massaging his temples and wiping the sick from the corner of his mouth.
He could see her young, wane face swim before his fractured vision even now, a composite of cherry red lips and dark curls, “remember this feelin’ Mopey,” she’d say, “anytime someone offers ya a quick fix again” and she’d push his hair back and sing to him, dark curls and a kaleidoscope of blue irises and—
-that weren’t right.
Laney had brown eyes. Back when they was kind and gentle and almost amber in the right light.
“Jesse.” the words were gutted out of Elvis in recognition.
No one wants to be caught with their pants down. Least a father. Worse yet, ain’t nobody wants to be caught in a tub by their son, tryin’ to get over twenty some odd little pills they once sounded on. And the stinging rejection of their mother besides.
Elvis made to scramble up, nimble toes trying to turn down the roar of the faucet, once topping off the cooling bath water.
“You’re sure draggin’ this out, ain’t ya?” Jesse says over the pattering of the stream left. Elvis tries to grab the damn bar but between the shakes and his aching joints, there’s no momentum behind his desire to rise. In response to his inquiring glower, Jesse adds helpfully- “Dyin’ -or whatever you’re doing in here for months on end.”
“I’m not dyin.” Elvis grunts, and the anger he feels at the cruel and beautiful face that is his first born, gives him enough strength to pull himself to stand. It’s microscopic, almost didn’t happen, but he swears he sees Jesse’s reflex extend to lend a helping hand, only to catch himself. He is disinterested, with listless hands and bitter eyes by the time Elvis manages to turn and grab the towel on the rack by his head.
“No?” Jesse asks, having enough of the shame of Shem and Japheth not to mock Elvis’ newly withered nakedness. He didn’t teach his children that poorly. At least he ain’t as fat as last time they met. But Jesse’s a damn skeleton.
“No.” Elvis asserts, “But you look like you’re close. Those little tight ends gotta be running’ you over, weighin’ all of birds’ weight. The hell you not been eatin’ for?” He tries to poke at the flat, almost concave belly under the pretentious, leather biker jacket. It’s his little boy’s belly after all, it ain’t too much of an assumption, but Jesse about levitates out of reach- bitter that one.
Scared too.
His son half acts like he can’t trust not to be shot up by his own father in this lonely hell up here, hundred some odd feet above real life.
“I ain’t gonna hurt you.” Elvis hears his voice crack, the very need to reassure him of that is a knife to the heart. What’s their mama been telling them kids that have got them so turned against him? What’s she been doin’ to his good name with his own damn kids?
“It’s so far past that, daddy.” Jesse says the word like a damn slur, “We all been so hurt. And I know you are too, and I look at you and don’t know you’re right at all that you ain’t dyin, you look like you are. And I half wish you would. But it wouldn’t do no good, we already are hurt. Ain’t gonna- daddy I done… the things I’ve done, had to do since you weren’t there. Rosalee’s been here, she’d have told ya-“
“Son I’m so sorry-“
“She got hurt bad at that party! And she’d have not even been there at all if it t’weren't for Daisy. And Daisy goes everywhere she ain’t supposed to be and she learned that from you. Sam and Jack and I- well, well I dragged that bastard behind my bike-“
“I know-“
“-and she still can’t sleep through the night! I dragged him behind my bike and they all think I’ve lost it without you, but I did it ‘cause you weren’t there. And Daisy’s as hooked as you. And you done put Ella’s man through the drywall, now he’s off, deployed. Marie ain’t even missin’ you she’s so mixed up about where home is. Hurt? You don’t wanna fuckin’ hurt us, huh?”
He’s beautiful like this, so angry and so right. Jesse, his first boy, his eldest child. He has his mother’s face. Maturity has made that plain. It’s like being lectured by Elaine’s vengeful, reincarnated, hermaphroditic spirit. It’s glorious, it makes Elvis’ chest ache from missing her.
“And how is your mother?” Elvis asks because he cannot help himself, there is not a full minute goes by but he thinks of her. And alone up here with his withdrawals and his ghosts and his regrets, she has become more tangible than the furniture he glides through every day on the well worn routine of collecting his room service, filing his water glass, running the tub.
He tried to play the piano once since shutting himself up here in the holy act of getting off an abominable amount of narcotics. The colonel had told him to keep up practice but even he had left off bothering him awhile back, once he realized Elvis was as likely to die as to pull out this slump. There have been money issues, he is sure, and a breach of contract.
Elvis tried to play the piano once since he shut himself up here.
He had wept. She was in every cord, she was outlined in the skyline below, she was the waft of curtains and the thick curdle of regret in his throat.
“And how is your mother?”
Oddly enough, another flash of grief and rage flit across his boy’s face, along with some distrust between the eyebrows and annoyance in the curl of the plump top lip. Elvis cannot figure out why, but he’s sure, since Jesse is in such a loquacious mood, he’ll learn soon enough. He can’t seem to make a right move, there is no right move to make, he supposes. When he’s fucked up this badly.
Jesse just hands him his robe and offers a hand for once, to help him step out of the bath. “How the fuck are you still tremoring? Ain’t you been soakin’ up here for two months?”
Elvis has asked his body the same question. “They said six months for rehab.” That would have been far more gentle but less regimented than the cold turkey, pills down the sewer line, locking all his friends out method that he’d taken. He’d preferred this way.
“Coulda gone.”
“Been before.” Elvis grouched, limping his way to the bed and sitting down with a great sigh. He half hoped Jesse would take the open seat beside him on the plus comforter.
He does not.
“Well Daisy needs to go.” Jesse runs his hands along the smooth wood of the tv cabinet, some forceful ennui being maintained in his tense posture. Elvis feels tired just looking at him.
“Im sorry about that.” Elvis murmurs, that must be his fault too.
“Should be.” Jesse agrees.
“Can I help?”
“I dunno, can ya?”
“She at Graceland?” Elvis asks, almost timid.
“On a flight back. Mama is angry as hell at her.”
“Well I can’t quite go there, can I?” Elvis points out.
Jesse smacks his lips once, a cursory acknowledgment of the odious restraining order. “I think you could. It’s- ya gave it some time. Mama could use help persuadin’ her. It’s been enough time. Not that you were in a condition to come by sooner.” His son adds to withering effect, glancing up and down at the sallow and gaunt figure Elvis makes before him, half swallowed by the gaudy robe he once filled so well.
“If she don’t mind I’d like to-“ Elvis trips over himself and screeches to a halt, wishing what he wants and what Jesse will tolerate him admitting. He might not be able to win in this court of opinion, and that’s a cryin’ shame, but he sure can try to make things a little more exonerating, “-anythin’ to make amends.”
It’s not even a lie. He’d also like to get out of this godforsaken top floor suite. And see his Tink.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Elvis breathes.
Looks like it costs him a lot but Jesse gives a very wretched “ok” at last.
“I don’t wanna upset her-“ he insists, and it’s true really. At heart he don’t. Never did.
“-much too late for that.” Jesse cuts in, “Again.”
Elvis sends up a prayer for patience, it’s like arguing with himself while starin’ at an angry Laney’s cold bitch face. He don’t like it one bit. Makes him feel cold as hell inside. “-or make her uncomfortable but-“
“You care about any of that when you forced yourself on her one last time?” His son hissed at him, suddenly close as striking distance for a rattle snake. “You think Jack and I don’t know? And at the courthouse even, all those times you cornered her like she weren’t nothin’ but goddamn prey. You ever think about imposin’ on her then? You ever think for one goddamn moment of your sorry ass existence that she might’ve wanted things different? And even when you finally get the hell outta our lives you leave yourself behind! You ruin even that! You make it so we gotta come back and let you in to ruin it all again!”
Jesse is screaming by then, and it ain’t a man’s scream, it’s a boy’s -cracked and scared and soul crushed.
“The hell you on about boy.” Elvis rises to meet him, a heavy hand on his shoulder, half fatherly, half to push away one man from another if a manly altercation ensues. Better leverage for a punch. How has it come to this? He could never punch Laney’s pretty face, not even on his boy.
He places his hand on his son's shoulder so as to steady himself when he himself is struck.
“You done made a baby with her, daddy!” Jesse cries out, like it’s been eating him alive every minute up here that he’s kept it inside.
There is a moment when the truth of it is simultaneously the most surreal absurdity and also, the most natural culmination of everything he wants. How many times have they done this? He couldn’t die in that bath tub for all that he wanted to because he and his Tink had made another life.
Something in him bubbled so happy at the joyous thought that their bond couldn’t be truly broken if they were able to still do this- this that they did so well.
That joy must’ve shown on his face. It was relief sent by God. It was peace, it was purpose.
He didn’t even see Jesse’s fist before it collided with his left eye socket.
It rocked him and his hand clenched down on Jesse’s shoulder.
It served to clear his head. He had forced Elaine to carry another pregnancy, unwanted, possibly dangerous to her health, a crowning embarrassment after so many humiliations, a detriment to her ever moving on. He had truly played an ace, and it was a most dishonorable one.
“I may have deserved that.” He rasped, grip on his son’s heaving shoulder tightening with caution.
“She don’t even know it!” Jesse went on. “Marlon had to tell me and I- I don’t know how I didn’t notice the signs before—“
“Now wait!” Elvis halted him, “How can you know.”
Jesse’s eyes were welled up with tears. “It’s so damn obvious now I see it, daddy. What she can’t eat and how she sleeps all the time and, hell she’s even puttin on a little weight and I’d not have noticed that so much but-“
“-Marlon did.” Elvis supplies, mouth twisted, truth sour as a lemon.
“He’s been tryin’ to help with Daisy.” Jesse scolds his burgeoning pity party.
But oh- how Elvis does hate that man. And what that man may or may not have helped himself to.
“You’ve defended her honor,” Elvis concedes, just in time to notice Jesse’s unequivocable flash of guilt as his father prods his bruised cheek, its brief but it’s there, a glimmer of his sweet boy, “now pull yourself together and remember who's who in this. I might be half strung out but I’m still your father.” the punch must’ve drained the last of the fight out of Jesse, his shoulders sag, his pinched face droops, “And I need to get myself to Graceland.”
They took the jet. Only after Jesse had grumpily ridden his bike up the damn jetway and parked it in the dining compartment. Elvis tried to take the scuff marks on the linoleum benignly, along with Jesse’s adamant refusals to allow any of the old entourage to return with them. It really wasn’t the time to push his rights and privileges, Elvis knew, and his throbbing cheek reminded him every time he felt like taking his wrathful son down a notch.
“Bad enough you ain’t fired those sonsuvbitches.” Jesse scolded him as they took off, sans mafia, the boy could really rub it in, “She’d outright refuse ya if you showed up with them. They’re awful. All of ‘em. But I guess you like that about ‘em.”
Elvis couldn’t quite remember what he liked about any of them actually. They kept him fed while he squirreled away like a hermit. They also tried to bring pill bottles in with the eggs, under the shiny metal dome of the room service platters. He supposed they were still getting paychecks from Vernon still, otherwise he’d be surprised to find any of them stayed. Honestly, the colonel had been the only one of his old compatriots to lend a sympathetic ear during his darkest days, through the divorce and his ensuing overdose and withdrawal. Not that he’d seen the man recently but, he’d never forget the way he’d let him weep on his shoulder in the courtroom after Laney signed those wicked papers.
“I’m gonna take a leak.” He’d told Jesse when he went to the jet’s bedroom to use the phone to inform Parker he’d had a change of plans and scene. No reason to aggravate Jesse by mentioning the manager, it was purely business. The boy needed to come to terms with that. Much like his mother had needed to- and failed.
Colonel Parker didn’t pick up. His secretary did. Miss Cherry, chipper and with hair as stiff as a helmet, made odd nasal noises when giving head.
“Cherry darlin’,” he greeted, “The ole admiral out?”
“Oh haven’t you heard, Elvis?” Cherry sounded downright distraught, “He’s under investigation and has had to seek sanctuary at his island to avoid a subpoena. Been gone over three weeks now. No contact1, for safety reasons. You’ll understand.”
“I beg pardon?” Elvis muttered, passing a hand over his forehead. Today had involved too many things for a dehydrated man who’d woken up without a single hope.
“Something to do with the evidence Mrs Presley has put forward regarding his citizenship-“ Cherry went on as the air around him got a little too buzzy for Elvis’ comfort, “I’m very sorry sir. I can pass on a message when he returns.”
From his private Island. Wherever the fuck that was. Abandoned him! That bastard. Not an ally in the world-
“Yes, I’m sorry sir-“
Elvis let the receiver drop. He went back to his seat across from Jesse in a daze.
His boy was asleep. And the colonel was under investigation. Something filled Elvis with a dire premonition that far more than a pregnant wife awaited him at Graceland.
—SCENE TWO—
||MEMPHIS, SAME DAY||
(Recap of plot missing here: Elvis goes to the front door, someone answers it, he and Elaine reunite, they’re diffident but yearning. He notices the physical change immediately and with a pang in his heart. She’s both gaunt and swollen at the same time. And so unsuspecting of her condition. One of her conditions for letting him back into the house is that he actually take time to review the legal documents that won her the court case for his Label and music rights. He’d refused during the hearing out of spite and surety she was doing it for vengeance. He reads them now. Here on the dining room table. She leaves him to it, that kids have scattered around the property to give them peace.)
————————————————————-
When she returns sometime later, she finds Elvis sitting at the table, staring out the window with the pages laid back down on the table, but his reading glasses on. It must make for a blurry kaleidoscope of that late afternoon landscape he’s so lost in. The creak of the table under her hands as she leans against it draws his attention, slowly he pulls his eyes away and looks up at her, that old defeated look. It’s not at all what she wanted but she’s too lost in gratitude that he curbed his temper enough to even peruse the evidence. That’s all she could hope for in that way.
“Is there a goddamn soul alive I can trust?” he asked softly at last, and her stomach flipped in anguish for him.
“All I ever wanted was to be somebody you could trust.“ She muttered aloud and was surprised by the bitterness in her tone, like it was some entity lurking inside of her in regards to him.
He had the gall to give her a look of gentle reproof for her moderate outburst, pulling his glasses down his nose and looking out over them with grave blue eyes that she had learned to obey compulsively. They still had that effect and she settled herself in a opposite chair with the demureness of years gone by, finding something oddly comforting at being restrained by him again. God knows if it was a prisoner's sort of comfort, or a lover’s, or if they were all the same, she didn’t know but she knew that she missed those reproving looks.
“Hearin’ a ‘told ya so’ right now i-i-it’s not exactly servin’ your cause, right now, Laney.” he informed her and she swallowed hard, defiance flickering over an old contention, the way she was right over and over and yet he drug them down to learn it the hard way each time then never an acknowledgment of what could have been avoided, never. Just a warning when they were at rock bottom of “don’t you go sayin’ I told ya so, Tink, bout at my limit and gonna blow as it is.”
“Why’s it so infuriating when I’m right?” Elaine asked now at last, the long buried complaint bubbling up.
“Why? ‘Cause you get this stupid look of pride on your face when I fuck up.” he shot back without a single pause and it took them both aback, the way these grievances were so easily accessible, as if a couple months of seperation had unearthed every bit of repressed feeling they’d been smashing down for the last two decades.
“Never bothered you when the colonel was right.” she seethed and felt a cord of energy grow between them from this tension, like a phantom limb of burning, fiery, illuminating want licking at them both, trying to find a place to anchor, to tether them. For now it felt like a string of gasoline keeping their insides burning angry and offended. Anything was better than the dismal sort of apathy that had led them to such straights.
Fighting with Elvis had always seemed like the worst thing imaginable to Elaine, of course it had still happened anyway but she’d dressed to prevent it, she’d cooked with the aim to soothe, declined invitations and opportunities at the mere possibility they might rile him, made children to pacify them both, most of all -she’d admitted very little to how she felt during it all.
Since, after all, this boiling anger that she sometimes felt was only one emotion amongst thousands and somehow, admitting it she feared would nullify all the good ones, as if a splash of anger diluted the vats of joy and the gallons of gratitude she felt towards him.
The unburdened feeling of connection she was feeling right now for Elvis, all laid out and ugly as it may be, she wondered when exactly she had gone wrong with pacifying him. Gladys would have never, but then again, as much as he said that he was fashioning Elaine to be his next Bestest Girl, nothing in that education firmed her up to be Gladys’ sort of metal.
“I got angry with that sonuvabitch plenty.” Elvis mumbled and flicked his slender fingers back through the pages. He’d been gnawing on his nails recently and her heart clenched at the sight of bloody cuticles. “Y’supposed to be my wife, not-not someone driven a man to anger for stickin’ their nose in business.”
“Like there’d have been any business left without me stickin’ my nose in.” Elaine spit, “And there it is Elvis -I don’t think your mama would recognize your definition of a wife, and sure as I am by God Almighty I’m not raising our daughters to resemble whatever door mat fuckdoll you’re envisioning for domestic tranquility. Just -just no!”
There was that old look of reproof for her slip of foul language and Elaine’s belly clenched unhelpfully. “Why’re we hashin’ this out?” He asked in the reasonable tone of the long suffering, offended party, “This is old shit, you’ve divorced me i-i-i-it’s done.” he put on an effective display of boyish bewilderment at her table pounding rage.
“Is it?” she whimpered suddenly, rage bleeding right into the deepest melancholy that had been filling her up with nauseas bile each morning she woke up without him.
“Isn’t it?“ He stuttered out with great trepidation, hands laying flat and nervously picking at the edges of the case file.
“Why do we keep calling *us* it? Like it’s-like we are-like -like…“ She wailed, feeling entirely estranged from herself by the flood of tears coming on.
“Laney,” Elvis voice was warm yet careful, that gingerly sorta comforting he did when the children were hysterical with some childlike trouble, “Laney you, you were the one to walk away darlin’, to say you don’t love me no more a-a-and couldn’t do ‘it’ -you kept saying that god awful line over and over- baby I-I-I never wanted, Laney -this is what you wanted, I don’t get it.”
And overseeing her weeping across the table where they’d eaten a million lovingly made meals and prayed as many heartfelt prayers, some flare of panicked hope sprung in his chest and beat at his ribs to the rhythm of an anxious hummingbird. Maybe, staying here surrounded amongst all the homey things he had missed while in his palatial hell, maybe she’d been almost as miserable as him.
Elvis bit his lip savagely lest he give a tremulous smile of victory at that. He tasted salt on his own lip. Hell, they’d really gone soft, both of them.
“I never stopped loving you.” she moaned into her damp palms, seeing a sliver of paper through her webbed fingers and the edge of his sleeve -he had stretched out his arm across the wood table top to her while she cried. “And ‘it’ was all of this.” she stabbed the documents incriminating Parker and detailing crimes and fraud she had long known about, and suspected for even longer.
She heard the creak of the chair as Elvis sat bolt upright to attention at that vital piece of information.
“If you’d just listen to me once, in the courtroom or on the phone or -“ -or over his own deafening pleas for her to stay, she meant to say, but thought back instead to all the miserable babbling she’d done into his ear about love as he drove himself into her- “you’d have heard I never said I didn’t love you. I wouldn’t have bothered with it all if I hadn’t loved you. Goddmamn.” she let out a curse herself in an exhausted moan as she let her aching head down and rested it on the table top, registering how she’d finally said the thing she’d been hiding for two years from the man who knew her best.
“Y-you mean you legally divorced me for -for law-yer-ly purposes.” Elvis asked, staring with wary disbelief at her shiny bowed head, every fiber of his being having to fight the urge to lay his hand in that pretty little noggin and stroke that hair.
These days he was torn between hating her guts and wanting to gently pet her face. He hoped equilibrium would be reached between those two impulses, but for now he curled his hands into fists on top of his thighs lest he make some overly familiar move too soon.
“Yes.” she agreed with his summary, not a bit of elation left in her tone, just a smushed slur as she childishly kept her face to the table. Perhaps the baby was making her tired and she had been so godawfully busy lately which was entirely her goddamn fault for always being so snoopy and shit into things that didn’t concern her- “ hard as this is been on the children, and perhaps it was the worst thing I could’ve done, but I didn’t know what else to do. He was killing you. And -when I went to follow you, into the operating room after that last overdose in 75, I got told I didn’t have power of attorney over you. Do you even remember when I brought it up to you, when you’ve recovered? You told me it made sense for business, that the Colonel should have the right over your body! I’m your wife! You wrung seven children outta my body and I can’t even say which tube they put up your nose! There wasn’t a single thing about you in that minute that resembled the man I married, the man who promised me children, fidelity, protection.Three’s a crowd, and in a marriage three is unsupportable. It was either him or me Elvis, and if I loved you less I’d have let him have you.”
Elvis felt his head get fuzzy, great emotion and a pocket patting compulsion to ease his overstrung feelings rising up. He had to breathe, he had to remember to breath and so he twiddled his fingers in his lap and stared at the piles of papers with Laney’s red, tear stained face beyond them and did everything in his power not to faint like a little maiden at the prospect of his wife still loving him. It’s what he’d come here to try to accomplish, after all, but the scope of her craftiness was something that filled him with an old revulsion he wasn’t sure was entirely his own feelings towards it.
Years of hearing Vernon offhandedly speak on women and their stupif ass opinions and the years of his boys and their fraternity of masculine sense and the ages of trusting Parker like he was God on earth while tuning his own wife out, kissing her or buying her back to dormancy: it was an old habit to be revolted by her cleverness. But he wasn’t sure it was an impulse original to him. There had been a time when all he wanted was to be loved, and he’d never thought of himself as being on some unseen racetrack with the girl he shoulda been cherishing instead of competing with.
“I got tired of so many dreams not turnin’ out.” He decided as he stared at the one dimensional photograph of his manager’s face, pinned to one of the files, “And I hated him sometimes, you know I did, but I couldn’t take more rockin’ of the boat, nothin’ stayed steady since the International. Not -not our friends or the kids or the money or -the whole country went mad, man, I-I-I couldn’t trust nobody else. I’m shit at business, we’ve established that, reckon I jus’ wanted things to be quiet in between. S’gonna be real quiet now days.” he realized, “With him in jail and me about as wanted as moldy cheese.”
Except for this baby she was growing. That would make for some real loud noise and none of it applause. Elvis wanted to hide away until he was loved again, preferably with the woman opposite who looked torn herself between rage and curling up in his lap.
“I didn’t do this to spite you.” She whispered, countering his accusatory greeting this morning. “I haven’t got the energy for spite. He’s a criminal and my husband’s an officer.” she smiled softly, “I was just doing what you’d have done if you’d have been born with less heart.” The tension seemed to ease as he didn’t rile up in response, he gave her a sick little smile in his eyes that didn’t manage to so much as twitch his lips and she licked her own in desire to soothe. “Jesse told me that you’ve been busy, too.” she hinted, and watched as his eyes dropped to the table in an artifice of indifference for his recent, monumental struggle against the drugs. “I’m terribly proud of you, Mopey.” No response, just a pursing of those cherub lips and the fanning of golden tipped lashes, eyes still glued to wood. “Do you- do you feel any better?” she asked weakly.
“S’moments like these when I want them worse than air.” he admitted in a gravelly voice, jittery hand pattering out a rhythm against the table top.
Elaine didn’t even need to look under the wood to know his leg would be going like mad, too. “We used to have ways to make you forget.” she reminisced softly, not even thinking it suggestive in her retrospective state.
The finger clattering rhythm abruptly stopped and an odd look of horror flashed over Elvis’ face. He thought of her swelling belly she so heedlessly carried about and the cruel selfishness that had made a child at their lowest point. “I-I-I ain’t earned that.” he gasped as if she were offering and she startled at how seriously he took her quip, “I ain’t -not yet, anyways.”
And with that throwaway line of future intentions to indeed earn that privilege again, they lapsed into a bashful but companionable silence, both absent mindedly flicking through one paper the next, the distant hum of their waiting children filling up the background with noise.
“You -you can manage my estate.” he spoke up at last, so firmly and gravely she knew by his tone alone he was forbidding any outburst of surprise from her, “It’s fittin’ and there’s no one else I trust and -there ain’t much left. Add it to what you to- what you got, in settlement and uh, well i like the idea of it all bein’ back together. S’how it should be.”
“Alright.” Elaine tried to keep her voice steady. “If that’s what you want.”
“Yup.”
“Alright.”
He leaned back in his chair and stretched like she’d seen him do time and time again after a tedious board meeting. If times had been usual now would be when they’d hustle into the kitchen and either eat off the boredom of Presley Enterprises meetings or else go for a drive with the top down and make water slides for the kids to expend the bored energy with. Instead Elvis took to rocking the dining table chair back on its hind legs over and over, eyes flitting about the old room with wide eyed eagerness. She wondered just how much he had missed his Mama’s house.
“You’re going to spend the night.” she told him firmly and he didn’t even stop his rocking, just nodded in agreement. “I need your help with Daisy.” she reminded.
“S’why I’m here, mamas.” He reminded in turn the derailing effects of the Colonel’s indictment having blown Elaine off course momentarily.
“Right. Thanks.”
“Mhmm.” more rocking and his arms stretched back, pit stains visible beneath his arms from nervous perspiration. “Alright you-you may be be my financial officer now,” he suddenly sat his chair back and addressed her with such firmness her belly filled with dread at the anticipation of a relapse into the old bickering, “but I have final say and I-I-I- know I’m shit at money but it’s my money. It’s mine and I-I got one last thing I wanna do.”
“One last thing?” she balked at his morbid phrasing, not realizing he was not referencing death so much as the breaking news of their eminent child.
“Yeah just for now I-I-I need you not to fight me on this.” he insisted in what sounded closer to a beg than a demand and she was reminded of Jack, firm but oh so skittish, laying out his plans to go to California for his apprenticeship.
“It’s your money.” Using his own words always soothed him.
“Yeah, yeah it is.” Elvis agreed, heavy set of his brow clearing, “You know that motorcycle place, the dealership, corner of Orchard and ten? One we bought the boy’s bikes from? Their second ones or whatever?”
“Yes!”
“It’s goin’ out of business.”
“No!” Elaine mourned, so many places had been teetering into a decline with gas prices the way they were.
“Yeah. And I wanna -I-I-I know it’s shitty usage, don’t even say it but i-i-i wanna buy it out.”
Elaine sat a little stunned and carefully chose her reply. “You’d like to own a dealership?” she rephrased.
“N-n-no i-i wanna buy enough bikes so he’s back in business.” He admitted and his eyes were back down to the tabletop and Elaine wondered when she’d become such an ogre that he adopted the same beat-puppy aspect that he did in front of the Colonel. “I know it’s shit business but I wanna and it’s my money-“
“It IS your money!” she agreed warmly with the very case she’d been pressing to him for years and rose from the table in a rush of adoring enthusiasm, circling around it until she could wrap her arms around him neck. His warm face buried into her neckline with the heady scent of caramels and woodsmoke coming off her dress, Elvis could vaguely hear her cooing “-and it’s a darling idea. You precious man.”
Gingerly he looped his left hand around her and placed it lightly on her back, feeling with sudden clarity the way her belly was pressed to his as she made free use of his lap to hug him. His child was in there and a cold feeling of horror crept over him at the way he just kept prolonging the inevitable, the way he was touching the babe even now without acknowledging it. It felt so very wrong and he stayed stiff beneath Laney’s generous embrace until she noticed and pulled away stiffly herself.
He tried his best to give her a reassuring smile but it wasn’t much good after his cold reception.
“Sorry.” she gasped.
“N-n-no, don’t you ever be sorry.” he begged, hoarse with listless hands that felt like they’d die if they touched her, “I’m the one who’s sorry. M’sorrier than anythin’, Laney.”
Elaine swallowed hard at the devasted look on his face and the unwelcoming set of his body, once so pliant and eager, he was stiff as a board beneath her and his face was a grave as death. The urge to cheer him, like a mother offering her saddened child candy, took over her. “C’mon Mopey, let’s go buy some motorcycles.” she poked his ribs encouragingly and felt how much bulk he’d lost in his withdrawls, it made her heart ache.
His smile was pitiful. “The children-“ he objected, “Daisy.”
“I think it would do us all good to get out of the house for a minute,” Elaine shrugged and rose from his lap, needing to be away from his stiff body and averted gaze, “nothing but meetings puts us all in a poor mood to be conciliatory.” she stared him down until he shrugged, “You’re restless, I can tell, and I’m starved and Jesse needs to see something besides court orders and reruns of last year's fumbles. Perfectionist, that boy.”
“Wonder where he gets that from.” Elvis joked
— PLOT SUMMARY:—
(They do buy the bike shop, Elvis does talk to Daisy and they get in a massive argument about her drug abuse and his drug abuse and his fatherly failings in general and due to this fraught tension and forgetting to eat in her unknown condition, Elaine collapses. They rush her to the hospital where she’s wakes up to the low sound of her husband thinking “O Danny Boy” to her belly and it all clicks into place— of course the universe would play a joke like this. She’s pregnant. Elvis makes some very satisfying statements to the press about what an ass of a family man he’s been and how he aims to improve. Also about the Colonel being an even bigger ass than him. The kids scatter, Ella takes Marie down to Texas with her, Jack goes out west, Rosalee mans Graceland with Vernon. Jesse takes Daisy out to rehab as we saw in canon. We also saw in the same how during that time Elvis took Elaine to Palm Springs to recoup and reconcile and grow the baby. She gives birth to Danny out there. They also get remarried out there.)
A/N: I've had an idea to share a new fic in mini moodboards and short blurbs. I hope you enjoy it!
Masterlist
It would be much easier if I were...you dropped your pen the moment you realized what you'd begun to confess in your diary, wondering if it were true. Did you truly wish to belong to this class of insufferable people who thought of nothing more than their next tennis lesson or what fish was being served at dinner?
You hadn't set out to be part of this lifestyle, but it became familiar to you through your work as a ladies' companion during the summer of 1925. It was the first job you'd found after unspeakable tragedy visited you one year ago. Your mother had died of influenza and your father just six months later of a broken heart, leaving you all alone.
Now you were the ward of Mrs. Fitzherbert, a pretentious woman who wore too much makeup and laughed loudly at her own jokes. She claimed she was doing you a favor by employing an unskilled girl of eighteen and taking it upon herself to educate you on fine dining and travel. You were grateful for the opportunity, but sometimes wondered if you wouldn't have been happier in a little shop somewhere, buried beneath stacks of books where you would go unnoticed.
The first morning you'd arrived at the seaside resort, you couldn't help fidgeting in your seat from discomfort. Everyone seemed to stare at your awkward gate and plain clothes. They knew you didn't belong and their sharp judgment cut into you with every pointed stare. That is until a pair of sympathetic blue eyes found yours across the room.
Respect the Silence: When Ignored, Let the Dead Rest
In the symphony of life, not every note will be acknowledged. Embrace the wisdom to respect the echoes of silence. If someone chooses not to hear you, learn the art of honoring the dead and never disturb them again.
Is anyone planning for Elvis week 2027? It's gonna be big and if I'm going to splurge on these expensive ass tickets, I'm starting my saving's account now. Photo for the toll
'Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley. You have to go through it point by point.' - C.S Lewis
'Til we meet again, may God bless you. Adios.' -Elvis Aaron Presley🕊️
There's so many things I want to say, so many words to describe this man. But when I go to say something, I can't think of anything to say. Why? Because it's hard to explain how great this man was. How kind he was.
Elvis, I miss you. I always will miss you. I always wanted to meet you, but I won't get that chance. I'm not over your death, I never will be, I remember visiting Graceland in 2024 of July, standing in the meditation garden where you are, I remember walking through Graceland, knowing I got a little piece of what your life looked like.
Nobody forgot about you. Nobody ever will.
