Save the Secret Date

by Ellie Cahill

  A new text alert pulled me out of the group chat to find an individual message from Jake: There’s no one I’d rather be stuck in passport control with.

  Heat rushed through my entire body. The man could reduce me to goo faster than anyone on earth. Did he know that? Could he sense that a single, casual response could turn me into a puddle? Since I could barely think straight, much less form an intelligent response, I just sent a smiley face.

  Jake: Prepare yourself, woman. I am going to hug the crap out of you.

  I made a pathetic little sound and dropped my head back against the car seat. That sounded both amazing and like torture. Jake’s actual physical body touching mine would be heaven. But after Mexico, he’d be gone again. Back across the country and I would be alone again. That was going to be hell.

  Alone and stuck. Stuck in the same town where I’d grown up. Stuck in my parents’ house. Stuck longing to be with someone who didn’t turn to liquid at the mere thought of me. Stuck at 24 years old and just waiting for something to happen.

  I typed, I’m terrified. But I deleted it, and wrote, Why did you leave me? But I deleted that, too. Finally I took a page from Brady’s book and sent a gif of some cartoons hugging each other.

  The little gray dots of an impending reply danced while I waited. I really shouldn’t have been sitting in front of this client’s house for so long, but it was impossible to tear myself away from this chat.

  Finally his reply came: Sorry I gotta run. I’ll catch you later.

  Oh. Guess I didn’t really need to wait around for that scintillating response after all, did I? I sighed. If it could be assumed that Jake didn’t know he was liquifying me every time he texted, it could probably also be assumed that he didn’t know he was crushing me with disappointment when he had other things to do with his life 2000 miles away.

  The Rationality Department of my brain knew that, and it was sending out memos to that effect, but the much larger and better-staffed Jake Crush Department was too busy having an office pity party to read such reasonable advice.

  A final haptic bubble from my phone got all the brain departments’ attention. I looked eagerly at the phone, but it was just a text from my mom.

  Mom: Will you be home for dinner?

  Of course I would. I lived there. With my parents.

  This was not exactly how I pictured being twenty-four.

  3

  Sunday Spaghetti

  I saw two more patients—a woman with a migraine, and a super chatty man in his 70s who was in the middle of a chemo treatment that just needed a little extra hydration on the weekend—and that was it for my work day. So I was finished early, but somehow I was still the last person in my family to arrive for dinner.

  When my entire family is at my parents’ house, it’s basically chaos. My older brother, Joe and his wife have two little boys, who are two and four. My sister Rachael, who is a year younger than me, but already married just had her first baby adds another three people to the mix. Then there’s me, and my youngest sisters who are 18 and 15, respectively. And on Sundays, there are almost always spare family members around, too.

  Today, it was my Aunt Jenny and Uncle Keith and their three kids. My 15 year-old sister, Sarah, had her best friend over. And my 18 year-old sister, Colleen, was with her boyfriend. That brought the total to nineteen.

  Sunday was like that at our house. A standing invitation to anyone who was related, or a friend, or just hungry to be honest. My parents served the same thing every Sunday: spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad. You’d think we were Italian instead of Irish through-and-through. But it fed a crowd, and no one complained. Sometimes the adults drank wine, and sometimes someone would bring a dessert.

  It’s loud, and it’s crowded, and it’s hot, but I love it. It’s family. And I’m obviously not the only person who feels this way or there wouldn’t be a houseful every Sunday. My brother and sister wouldn’t bring their kids back every week. My parents wouldn’t buy meatballs in 6 lb bags.

  We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, and I’m not sick of it yet.

  As I walked through the front door, my nephew Isaac rushed at me, screaming, “Auntie Mary help!” It didn’t take long to see why. His two year-old brother Malcolm was toddling after him with a DustBuster. The handheld vacuum swung wildly and turned on and off at intervals with Malcolm’s uneven steps.

  “Help!” Isaac repeated.

  “Hey there, Mal, why don’t I take that?” I swooped in to extract the vacuum, which instantly made Malcolm start crying. In a fluid motion, I put the vacuum behind my back and waggled it for Isaac to take while squatting down to Malcolm’s level. “That’s not for you, buddy. Let’s go find something better.”

  My little nephew tried to wriggle away, but I managed to catch him with my free hand. Then after Isaac got the DustBuster, I was able to scoop up the two year-old and put him on my hip.

  Together we went toward the kitchen. I called out, “Hello?” as I entered.

  Malcolm’s crying intensified, and my sister-in-law Mina came in from another room with a worried look.

  “You’re home!” my sister Sarah was the first to acknowledge me. She and her best friend had been put on salad duty, slicing a large container of cherry tomatoes in half to add to the gigantic metal salad bowl stationed nearby on the island.

  “What happened?” Mina held out her hands to take Malcolm who was happy to launch himself at his mother and collapse into more dramatic sobs.

  “I wouldn’t let him chase his brother with the hand vac.”

  Mina shook her head in mock admonition. “You monster.”

  “I know.”

  “Somebody woke up too early from his nap.” Mina pointed at Malcolm’s back.

  “Hi sweetie, how was work?” My mom called from her typical spot near the stove.

  “Steady, but manageable.”

  “There’s wine,” my aunt Jenny announced. She was seated at the island, buttering a loaf of bread in preparation for the oven.

  A sudden, muffled ruckus drew my attention to the backyard where my brother and brother-in-law had drawn a crowd of other family members to watch them face off with their drones. One had an X-Wing, and the other had a Tie Fighter.

  “How can I help?” I asked.

  “You can cut the tomatoes,” Sarah volunteered immediately.

  “Looks like you’ve got that covered,” I said.

  “You can totally do it if you want to,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t want to deprive you of the fun.”

  Sarah made a face.

  “I’m gonna get changed,” I announced. “Then I can do whatever you need, mom.” I emphasized the last word to make sure my sister knew I wasn’t volunteering to take over her task.

  “We’re good. Go ahead.” My mom dismissed me with an absent wave.

  When I got to my room, I was startled to walk in on my sister. She was propped against the headboard of what used to be her bed, back when we shared this room. She had one of those privacy slings around her neck and I could tell from the position of her body that she was in the middle of feeding her baby.

  “Hey,” I said softly, immediately going into a cautious posture to avoid making unnecessary noise.

  “Don’t worry, she’s in the zone,” Rachael said, but her voice was a little subdued, even as she dismissed my hesitancy.

  “How is she?” I crept closer and took a peek down the gap made by the shield. Kinsley’s tiny eyes were shut as if she were sleeping, but eager movement of her mouth and the small sounds she made proved she was just deep in concentration.

  As always, my heart leapt at the sight of her. As far as I was concerned, my niece was the most perfect creature to have ever graced the planet. At five months old, she was pure joy.

  Rachael, thankfully, knew I was basically in love with the baby, and she didn’t seem to care that I was staring at her boob at the same time.

  “We’re on outfit number three tod
ay,” Rachael said. “I think I’m gonna have to start buying bigger diapers soon. She is the queen of blowouts lately.”

  “Aww, don’t listen to her Kins, you’re still perfect,” I told my niece.

  “Remind me to call you when she’s destroyed her pajamas, and all the bedding at three o’clock in the morning.”

  I stopped staring at the baby long enough to change out of my scrubs. I started to put on my favorite shorts, but remembered I wanted to take them to Mexico in a couple days. So I traded them for shorts I had no intention of taking instead and tossed my favorites onto the end of Rachael’s bed with the rest of my to-pack pile.

  “What’s that?” Rachael asked.

  “My packing.”

  “You cannot only take baggy t-shirts to Mexico,” she said sternly.

  “I’m not!”

  “Then what’s that?” she nodded toward the bright yellow shirt what was just below the shorts I’d added to the small pile.

  “This?” I picked up the shirt and held it to my body, showing off the cartoonish outline of UC-Irvine’s mascot Peter the Anteater on the chest. “That’s just what I sleep in.”

  Rachael wrinkled her nose. “Don’t you have some cute pajamas or something?”

  I curled my hands together protectively, clutching the shirt. “I’m sharing a room with Ashley. Who cares if my pajamas are cute?”

  “Okay, at least a cuter t-shirt.”

  “I love this shirt.” It was one of my most prized possessions.

  Rachael looked at me critically for a moment. “Wait. Is that the one Jake gave you?”

  I moved the shirt a bit further away from her. As if she were going to leap up in the middle of breastfeeding to snatch it from me. “Maybe.”

  Rachael nodded with her lips slightly pursed in concentration. “So, what’s the plan here? Are you going to give it back to him or something?”

  “No,” I laughed in what I hoped was a breezy way. “It’s mine. I just wear it for sleeping, that’s all.”

  “Mmm,” was all my sister had to say about that. Then her expression brightened. “Did I tell you there’s a new guy at Travis’s base? His name is Lance, and you have to meet him.”

  My brother-in-law was a Marine currently stationed at Camp Pendleton. My sister was on a mission to get me hooked up with a fellow Marine so we could be military wives together. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind for myself.

  To be honest, I didn’t know what I had in mind for myself. My entire love life seemed to consist of having a long-distance secret crush on a friend. He lived far away, I had no idea if he ever planned to come back to California, and I was so darn good at keeping secrets I couldn’t really imagine telling him how I felt. As far as relationships went, it was your basic non-starter.

  “I don’t know, Rach. I’m not sure I’m looking for a relationship right now.”

  “You just won’t admit you’re still hung up on Jake.”

  I had never told Rachael about my crush on Jake. But my sister knew me better than most people, and she was also quite fond of running with whatever her assumptions were.

  “I’m not hung up on anyone.” That was a lie, but only I knew it.

  “Maybe this trip will be good for you. You can see him again and get him out of your system.”

  “I don’t need to get him out of my system,” I said. Besides, I didn’t really want to, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I think you do.”

  “You think a lot of things.”

  My sister scowled at me for a second, then brightened. “Okay, how about this? When you get back from Mexico, unless you fall madly in love with the man of your dreams at the wedding, you let me set you up with Lance.”

  “That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”

  “It’s fair it was it is. You either do it on your own, or you let me set you up with someone. No excuses.”

  All I wanted in life was to be someone who loved me and have a family of my own. Pining over Jake in Chicago was about as far from a step one toward accomplishing my goals as I could get.

  I sighed.

  “Come on, Mary, you’ve got to get out there sometime. You don’t want to live with mom and dad forever do you?”

  No, I did not. In a few weeks, Colleen would be leaving for college, and then it would be just me and my baby sister in the house. The youngest, and the second oldest.

  It wasn’t like I had to live at home. I had a full-time job, and a second part-time gig for extra money. I’d lived on-campus with my friends during college, even though my family lived about 20 minutes away. But housing in California was crazy expensive. And I didn’t care if it made me immature, or a softie, or whatever you want to call me—I love my family. I love the comfort of my parents’ house, and never missing a Sunday Spaghetti Night.

  “I’m saving money,” I told Rachael. “I’m planning for the future.”

  Rachael rolled her eyes. “Maybe it would do you some good to try something a little less planned once in a while.”

  “Like Kinsley?” I teased. Rachael and Travis were definitely not planning for her to get pregnant right after their wedding.

  My sister looked down at her tiny daughter. “Like Kinsley,” she said in a a soft, admiring tone that made my chest tight.

  “Are you finished feeding her yet? I need my fix!” I did grabby hands.

  “Just about. Hold your horses.” Rachael rearranged everything under the nursing shield and suddenly Kinsley’s tiny head appeared on her shoulder for burping.

  As soon as they were done, I swooped in and took the baby. I could have made an excuse about letting Rachael put herself back together, but it would have been a lie. I just wanted the baby.

  I lifted her up to rest against my own shoulder and continued patting her back. She felt like heaven in my arms. Her soft skin and the pliable weight of her sleepy body was like a drug to me. I inhaled the sweet scent of her head, unconsciously beginning the bounce-and-sway movement that all women do when presented with a baby.

  Rachael, now redressed and organized, got up from her old bed. “I can take her back if you want,” she offered.

  “Nope! She’s mine.” I gave Kinsley a kiss on the head and headed for the door. “You can have her back if she poops.”

  “Three blow-outs!” my sister called after me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

  4

  And Then He Kissed Me

  Later that night, after all the extended family was gone, I went back to my room to finish packing for my trip. My flight wasn’t leaving for a couple days, but I didn’t like to leave things to the last minute.

  Inevitably, my eyes were drawn back to my Peter the Anteater shirt. It really was my favorite. Soft and broken in just perfectly to feel like butter when I put it on. But physical characteristics aside, I couldn’t help but remember the night I’d gotten it from Jake whenever I wore it.

  When I remember it, it seems like it should have been a more important night than it was. In a movie, it would have been the last night we were staying in our apartment. Or graduation. Or at least the night that everything changed.

  But it wasn’t. It was just a night. A bad night for Emmy and Beckett, for sure, but I don’t remember the world being much different by sunlight on the day after. Other than the shirt now in my possession and my blurry memories, I might have thought the whole thing was a dream.

  * * *

  TWO YEARS EARLIER…

  The world was spinning. It wasn’t just the walls or the room anymore. The entire planet was spinning like a tilt-a-whirl. My limit had passed at least three drinks ago. I was so tired, but every time I closed my eyes the tilt-a-whirl seemed to go faster and faster.

  There was still music playing downstairs, and I knew my friends expected me to come back down to join them, but I didn’t think I could get up off the floor, much less down the stairs. The tile floor was so cool, though. It wanted me to stay. It loved me even though I was sloppy drunk.

&nbs
p; A knock on the door made my eyelids flutter open. Had I fallen asleep?

  “Mary?” A voice through the door. Jake’s voice. I’d know it anywhere, anytime, through any door.

  “Here,” I said, like I was answering a teacher’s roll call.

  “You okay?”

  I considered that before answering honestly. “No.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  I had a brief instinct to protest based purely on the fact that I was in the bathroom, but I had a distinct memory of struggling back into my pants, so I figured he wouldn’t see anything. The door opened nearly all the way before it bumped into my ankles.

  Jake’s perfect face appeared. Two of them actually. I blinked, trying to resolve him into one image. He looked worried.

  “I got barf in my hair,” I told him.

  “I see that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He laughed. “Need a little help?”

  “Maybe.” I admitted.

  He stooped down to grab my upper arms, and in one heave I was one my feet. The world went mad, spinning and looping in every direction at once. My stomach tossed and surfed the waves, but apart from one terrifying hiccup I managed not to throw up. Again.

  “We good?” Jake asked.

  I nodded a tiny bit, and dropped my head on his shoulder.

  “Okay, let’s get you cleaned up.” He steered me to the sink and turned the water on for me. I slumped over it and scooped handfuls of water into my mouth to rinse and spit, letting my hair hang down to get splashed by the water as well.

  Suddenly my toothbrush appeared in view with a dab of paste on it.

  “Brush,” Jake instructed.

  I did, then went back to scooping water into my mouth for a while.

  “Better?” Jake asked when I turned off the tap.

  “Yeah, thanks.” I tried to stand up, and the world went all tippy again. I grabbed for Jake, who pulled me into a bear hug. He backed slowly out of the narrow bathroom. It was like we were slow dancing, but only in one direction.