We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “Don’t worry,” Tarek says. “She was just leaving.”

  And as Julia and I are ushered outside, I finally know exactly how I feel about him.

  Brokenhearted.

  * * *

  “I won’t ask if you’re okay,” Julia says. We’re sitting on top of the big hill at Gas Works Park, watching the boats on Lake Union.

  “Appreciate that. Appreciate you.” I grab a fistful of fries, swipe them through ketchup, and stuff them into my mouth.

  After we left Capitol Hill, Julia rushed us around to pick up what she declared were all the best breakup foods: fries and chocolate milkshakes from Dick’s Drive-In, sloppy slices from Ballard Pizza Company, and nachos from a nearby taco truck. We haven’t said anything in a good twenty minutes, and that’s one of the things I love about this friendship. We’ve known each other so long that our silences aren’t uncomfortable.

  “I know it’s hard,” she says after a while. “I’m sorry.”

  She doesn’t just mean what happened with Tarek, but with my parents, too, and everything this summer that’s made me both more and less uncertain about who I am, about what I want. Tarek, who loved me. Who doesn’t anymore.

  “I’ve felt so lost this summer.” I try to laugh because it sounds so melodramatic, but nothing comes out. I take a slurp of milkshake.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone I know has found their passion so easily. You with painting, my parents and Asher with weddings.” Tarek with baking. “And it doesn’t have to just be one thing, either. Even now, I love what I’m doing with Maxine, but maybe I want to keep it as a hobby. I’m not sure.”

  “You have time,” she says, and I’m trying so hard to believe that. She rests her head on my shoulder. “Maxine came to you when you were least expecting her. Maybe this will too.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been invisible these past couple weeks,” I say, and she lifts her head. “I just… shut down. I didn’t know how to process it except to, well, not process it, apparently.”

  Julia’s quiet for a moment, then: “Yeah. About that. I need to say something.” She rakes a hand through her long hair, pulling it over one shoulder. “I needed you. When you were being invisible.”

  Her words shock me into sitting up straight. “Shit. Oh my god, Julia, I am so sorry. What happened?”

  “Nothing major,” she says, holding up a hand. “I’m fine. Mostly fine. It was just, Noelle left. For an early-summer start. And even though we’re doing long-distance, I had some doubts, I guess. About whether it was the right thing to do. I needed to talk, and I couldn’t get ahold of you. We’re okay, and I’m okay now, but I had a few rough days, if I’m being honest.”

  I should have been there for her. She was here for me, and I’ve been an idiot.

  “I’m a trash best friend. I am so sorry, Julia.”

  “You can spend the next few weeks making it up to me.”

  “Done.” I reach over and hug her. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?”

  And she does. We talk and we eat and we laugh until her phone chirps on the grass next to her. “It’s Noelle,” she says. “We had plans to FaceTime. I can stay a little longer, though, if you need it…?”

  I shake my head. “Go. I’ll be okay here.”

  And maybe I will be.

  But I also don’t think I’m done fighting quite yet.

  28

  I’ve graduated to drilling holes. Seventy-two holes on the neck, three different sizes. This piece requires more work than anything else on the harp, and I love seeing it come together little by little.

  Maxine is in the spray booth, but she trusts me enough to leave me alone out here with the drill press, which is significantly more powerful and more precise than the handheld power drill I’ve seen my parents wield during wedding disasters. Operating heavy machinery requires all my focus, and I can’t let my mind slip without risking losing a finger. The way this work anchors me—I’ve never felt that before.

  What I’ve learned, among many things, is that the harp is a living instrument. Over time, wood warps. Maxine has clients who bought harps from her a decade ago who still come back for adjustments. I like that, too: this instrument’s ability to change. I used to think the harp was stuck in time, a relic of the past. And that’s just not true. It can innovate. It can evolve.

  Maybe I can too.

  “This might be a weird question,” I say when Maxine emerges from the spray booth, leaving behind the outfit that looks more like something a beekeeper or an astronaut would wear than a harp maker. She gives me this look, like she’s come to not just anticipate weird questions from me but to enjoy them. “But why did you take me on? You didn’t know me. You didn’t have to do that.”

  At first I don’t think I’ll get a real answer, but she leans against the counter, drawing a fingertip along the smooth wood of a half-finished harp. “It had been a while since I’d had anyone else in the studio, I suppose. It can get pretty quiet in here, which may sound strange because it’s usually so noisy. I love living alone, I do—but that’s part of the problem when you live where you work. I missed having a coworker.”

  “I think I’m touched.” I read her so wrong during our first meeting, when I thought she was lonely because her kids had moved out and moved on. She wanted someone in the studio with her, and it fills me with a sense of belonging I never felt with B+B to realize I am that someone.

  That earns me a smile. “You know,” she says, “one of my regular conferences is going to be down in Portland in December. You wouldn’t be interested in tagging along, would you?”

  I just stare at her. “Are you serious? Yes, one-hundred-percent yes. Thank you. Thank you!”

  “It might be boring,” she warns. “A lot of old people, a lot of old instruments.”

  “I’m sold.”

  Maybe this won’t ever be more than a hobby. Maybe it won’t be my future career. Maybe I’ll look back on it when I’m older as something I did for a summer, a fun story to tell. Whatever it becomes, I don’t have to know yet what it means. I have time. Everyone’s been telling me I have time to fall in love, to discover who I want to spend the rest of my life with.

  But it’s not just a who. It’s a what, too.

  * * *

  No matter how much I love working at Maxine’s, the moment I leave, the ache in my heart returns, taunting me on my drive back home. It’s been a week since the blowup with my parents and with Tarek, and I thought the ache would have dulled by now, but it’s only deepened, a new hollowness that lives next to my heart.

  The first person I want to tell about everything that happened today, the conference and the drilling—which I’m sure one or both of us would make a dirty joke about—is Tarek. And I can’t.

  I’m expecting an empty house, the loneliness I’ve gotten so used to over the past week. I’m not prepared for my parents waiting for me in the living room, reminding me of the night they told us about their separation and all the talks we never had after that.

  “You’re not with a client?” I ask, slowly sliding my bag to the floor.

  “We were thinking it might be time for us to have a talk,” Mom says. She exchanges a glance with my dad. “A talk that’s probably very overdue.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly. Part of me wants to ask what happened to the whenever you’re ready she promised at Asher’s bachelorette party, but the truth is, I may never be ready. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too.”

  Dad motions to the couch, and I sit down next to Mom while he takes the armchair.

  “I feel like we need to start with the separation,” Mom says.

  Oh my god. “Is it happening again? Are you separating? Or—”

  “No,” she says emphatically, leaning forward to pat my knee. “We’re not. Sorry, I should have phrased that better. What I’m trying to say is that I think we may not have handled it the best the first time around.”

  “Or at all,” I say.

  M
om cringes. “We probably deserve that.”

  “We thought we were these progressive, empathetic parents,” Dad says. “We were in counseling, and then you were in therapy for your OCD, and we were all working together.… We really thought everything was okay. But we made a mistake.”

  “That’s… a relief to hear out loud,” I say. Adults acknowledging they fucked up: not something I’m used to hearing. “Because it was kind of a terrible time for me. If I’m being honest.”

  “Quinn.” Mom looks like she might cry. “I want to make this right. We both do.”

  “Can you just tell me why? I’ve been so anxious about it happening again because I never understood why it happened the first time. And then when you moved back in, everything was supposed to be back to normal, and I didn’t understand that, either.”

  Dad takes a deep breath. “When your personal life and your work life have that much overlap, it’s a challenge. And ‘overlap’ isn’t even the right word, really—our personal life was our work life, and vice versa. We kept nagging each other, sniping at each other, and then when we stopped working for the day, we’d be bitter with each other.”

  “But you’re still doing it. You’re still living and working in the same place.”

  “You may not remember, but we actually rented an office space for a while,” Mom says. “Later that year. And we preferred working out of the house so much more. With this job, you’re always on the move. It didn’t make sense to pay all that money for a space we weren’t going to be using all that often.”

  She’s right: I don’t remember that at all.

  “So what changed? When you came back, what was different? It’s still stressful—that much is clear.”

  “The thing is, we already knew how to make our marriage work,” Mom says. “We’d been doing that. What we didn’t know was how to make our business work alongside that. That was a lot of what we talked about in counseling. Learning to understand and work with each other’s communication styles.”

  “And we didn’t tell you because, well, it was painful for us, too, that time apart. We just wanted to move forward. It’s clear now that it wasn’t the right decision, and we’re very sorry about that.”

  I tuck my feet up on the couch. “All this time, I’ve been waiting for the last straw, every time you fight about something, no matter how small it is.”

  “It’s normal and okay for there to be conflict in a relationship,” Mom says, as everyone lately seems intent on making sure I know. “I think all of this actually made the two of us stronger as partners. Because we struggled through something together.”

  “And it still brings you joy?” I ask. “This kind of work?”

  They exchange a look. “When you love it,” Mom says, “it doesn’t always feel like work.”

  “This may seem like an odd thing to say, given what we do…” Dad trails off. “But if we were really that unhappy, it would have been better to have split up. That might have been what was best for the family. We’ve seen it with our friends, and we’ve seen it with couples we’ve worked with—sometimes divorce isn’t actually failure.”

  And that makes sense too.

  “I want to apologize too,” I say. “Again. Whatever I was going through, it wasn’t fair to let it affect my work this summer. For that, I’m sorry.”

  My parents are quiet for a few moments. “I wish you’d told us this sooner,” Mom says. “But I understand why you felt like you couldn’t. Why you felt like we pushed you into this. We’re sorry about that.”

  “And I thought if I told you I wasn’t interested in becoming a wedding planner, it would, I don’t know, divide us as a family. That I wouldn’t be welcome.”

  “Absolutely not,” Mom says. “We love Borrowed + Blue. But we love you more. Both you and Asher. You’re our daughter first, Quinn. You always have been. We hope you know that. And it doesn’t make us any less of a family if you decide to do something else.”

  There’s a strange lump in my throat that I struggle to swallow around. I’ve needed to hear that for a while.

  “So what happens now?” Dad says. “You’re done with B+B?”

  There’s a sense of finality in the way he says it. And as much as I’ve dreamed about severing myself from it, I’m not sure I can imagine a future without it, even in some small way.

  “Maybe not forever,” I say. “But for now, yes. I need a break. And I know I probably can’t switch out of all my fall classes at this point, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to study business. Whatever I study, I want it to be my decision. Even if I have to pay for it myself and even if I change my mind someday. And I fully intend to pay you all back. For any business you lost as a result of what happened at Victoria and Lincoln’s wedding.”

  “Well—we appreciate that,” Dad says. “But that isn’t necessary. Besides, now that the promos for the wedding special are running, we’ve been getting quite a lot of inquiries.”

  “And we don’t want it to be too stressful to balance a job with your freshman classes.”

  “I’ve actually been doing some other work this summer,” I say, and I take the chance to tell them all about Maxine.

  “You’ll have to play for us sometime,” Dad says. “When you’re ready.”

  Mom is nodding along, but the expression on her face is difficult to interpret. I’ve never seen her like this—and I realize she might be hurt. This business was her dream, and maybe it doesn’t feel like a family business anymore if the whole family isn’t involved.

  “I think it’ll take me a little more time to process everything,” she admits. “It’s tough to hear you were so unhappy for so long.”

  That tugs at my heart. “Mom, no,” I rush to say. “I didn’t hate all of it. I swear. Remember the groom who accidentally dragged the bride down with him into a fountain when they were posing for photos? And we all had to use hair dryers to dry their clothes?”

  “That poor couple,” Dad says. “I forgot about that.”

  “Or what about that time the bride tossed her bouquet on the roof, and we had to get a ladder to get it down?” Mom says, her voice less wobbly.

  “And everyone cheered when we finally rescued it,” I say.

  Mom laughs, and I remember how much I love that sound. “That was a good one, wasn’t it?”

  It was. It really was.

  I’ve been scared of losing this, and it’s true that I won’t get to keep all of it. But hopefully I’ll gain a lot more.

  I can’t wait to find out what that is.

  29

  Later that night, after a dinner with my parents during which we manage not to talk about B+B at all, I head up to the tower with Edith, who seems to have forgiven me for all the moping.

  I open my laptop and flex some muscles that have been dormant since May, when I was still regularly turning in homework. I’ve barely glanced at anything besides Wikipedia all summer. Inspired by my conversation with Tarek that now feels eons old, I search a few things: music majors, harp construction, jobs for harpists. I learn about the harp conferences Maxine mentioned.

  I have two weeks left of summer. Twenty days until Tarek goes back to UC Davis, until Julia goes to New York. Our schools have late-September starts, and I’m grateful for that, though on social media, I see that plenty of my classmates have already left. It’s an odd feeling, one I’m not sure I can name. If it’s nostalgia, I’m uncertain what I’m actually nostalgic for.

  I even double-tap a photo on Jonathan Gellner’s Instagram. He’s wearing aviators and leaning against a suitcase, staring moodily out the window of an airport as the sun rises. And it makes me feel worse for having ignored him all summer.

  With a jolt, I realize it’s not entirely unlike what Tarek did to me. Even if I didn’t want to have a capital-R Relationship with Jonathan, we had something. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but it was something. And I just brushed it off, because if I didn’t think about it, I wouldn’t have to feel any emotions about it.

&
nbsp; I have not been an excellent person.

  I pull up his name in my contacts, wincing at his earlier messages asking me to talk. Then I take a deep breath and write some difficult sentences I should have written a long time ago.

  I realize this is late. Too late, probably. I wouldn’t blame you if you despised me at this point. I don’t expect any kind of response. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for ignoring you. So incredibly sorry about how this ended.

  Good luck in college—I mean that. I hope you have the best freshman year.

  I wish I could make it more personal. I wish I knew more about him than the superficial, but I made sure I didn’t. I steeled myself, shut out the opportunity to feel something that came so naturally with Tarek.

  Something I was so scared to acknowledge the meaning of that I pushed him away.

  Last summer I sat in bed just like this, reading and rereading that email before sending it to him. I remember thinking it was the scariest thing I’d done in my life.

  This, I’m pretty sure, is scarier.

  * * *

  The summer can’t end without another wedding crisis, and this time it’s Asher’s.

  We’re all in the kitchen for August work brunch, which I don’t plan to stop even if I’m no longer part of Borrowed + Blue. Pancakes, pajamas, 00 DAYS WITHOUT A DAD JOKE—all of these things are so very Berkowitz without being attached to weddings.

  I don’t instantly have the kind of post–B+B relationship with my family that I want, but we’re working on it. I’ve made an appointment with my old therapist for next week, and my parents asked if I wanted to join them at one of their counseling sessions, which I might do.

  Progress. This is progress.

  Halfway through the meal, Asher’s phone buzzes on the table, and she snatches it up. “Bakery,” she explains before she says hello.

  Asher and I are evolving too. She asked if I’d be interested in monthly sister dates once she gets back from her Italy honeymoon, and I was so struck by her suggestion that I immediately opened my phone calendar to October so we could plan the first one: a Seattle Rock Orchestra concert.