by Phoebe Fox
He opened the back door to let Jake back inside, and I bent to ruffle the dog’s fur and kiss him goodbye on top of his nose. I managed to control my giddy impulse to do the same for Ben, but after we said goodbye I waltzed out to my car with an undeniable bounce.
Ben had asked me to watch his dog while he was out of town. He’d welcomed me inside tonight, purposefully made conversation, seemed reluctant to let me go, and now he was asking me to take more responsibility for Jake. Well, agreeing, anyway. Granted, his mom was out of town and Perfect Pamela was probably too busy doing brain surgery on sick kids to worry about taking care of his dog for him, but still…
This was what we in the mental health field called inroads. For the first time since our breakup, I thought there might actually be a crack in the door I thought had closed for good.
Perfect Pamela aside.
(Details, details…)
nine
“I loved your article.”
I could tell as soon as I answered his call that Michael knew my column that had run in this morning’s paper was about him. About us. No surprise—once upon a time I thought he’d known me better than anyone.
Lisa had ended up running it verbatim—a startling testament to the new Lisa, I thought; the one who heard other people’s points of view and actually considered them instead of bulling through with an autocratic dictate. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually like Lisa, but I was coming to respect her.
“Thanks,” I said, balancing the phone in the crook of my neck as I swiped on mascara. “And also…thanks. I’m glad you came back and we finally talked.”
“Me too. I didn’t actually think you’d let me within throwing distance.” I knew him well enough to hear the smile in his voice, and an answering smile stretched my face.
“Neither did I.”
There was a moment’s silence, not uncomfortable, and then: “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Michael said, serious now.
I froze. “Yeah?” I said lightly. “I’m surprised there’s anything we missed in our marathon conversation.” My heart had sped up and I put a hand on it, not liking my reaction. I didn’t want Michael to want anything from me. Did I? I finally had peace from everything that had happened, and I’d moved forward. If Michael was hoping to renew something between us…wasn’t that moving backward?
Maybe it’s just going home, an unwelcome voice whispered in my head.
“Are you free later today? Tonight?”
“I’m working all day,” I hedged. “And I have my radio show later.” I’d deliberately arranged my twice-weekly radio schedule for Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, because callers tended to need to talk to someone about their breakups most either right before a lonely weekend, or right after one.
“Okay. Tonight, then. Oh…Unless you have plans…” He deliberately left that hanging. Friday night—of course a single woman had plans.
Except that I didn’t. And Dating 101 said that you never, ever accepted a last-minute date—especially on a weekend.
But this was not a date.
“Brook?”
I realized I’d let a lengthy silence fall. “I can’t do tonight, actually.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Right.”
“But I can meet for a drink or coffee right after my radio show,” I found myself saying. “Just for an hour.”
As Michael’s tone brightened and we planned where and when to meet, I hoped my change of heart was motivated only by curiosity.
My last caller on the Kelly Garrett show took up more time than the perky, pretty deejay and I usually allotted, but the woman’s situation was complicated—and one I thought a lot of listeners might relate to. Nina had been with her boyfriend, Greg, for more than five years when she finally laid down the line: He came up with a ring or she was gone.
No ring was forthcoming, and Nina literally walked her talk and left him, moving out of their St. Pete apartment and relocating to Fort Myers to start over. But she was still deeply grieving the loss of her lover, best friend, and partner, and worried that she’d taken a perfectly healthy, happy relationship and thrown it away. She was working a mindless new job in retail that she hated, had made no friends here, and was still living in the barren furnished apartment she’d rented, surrounded by unpacked boxes.
This was a lot more than we could tackle in a three- to five-minute phone call—the radio call-in sweet spot, I’d learned in the last year on air.
“That’s a hard situation, Nina,” I said into the mike. “How long since things ended and you moved here?”
“Four months.”
“That’s a long time.”
“A long time,” she said, and her voice started to wobble.
“Without knowing more, it’s hard to get to the bottom of what happened, how you might address things as far as you and Greg and your relationship. It sounds like it might help you to talk to someone to work through that. But meanwhile it’s important that you not live in limbo because your relationship ended.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were a ‘we’ for a long time, and you created a life as a couple, it sounds like. But since then it seems you’ve been living in a vacuum—not seeking out meaningful work or friends or even making a home for yourself. Regardless of what may happen between the two of you—or not—you still exist, and you have to treat yourself with the importance you gave to the two of you as a couple. It sounds like although you backed up your ultimatum to Greg and moved away, you’re still waiting for him to recant—not creating anything you wouldn’t want to walk away from here because you’re still hoping he’ll change his mind and call.”
“Well, of course that’s what I’m hoping for!” Nina exploded. “We’ve been together so long, and we shared everything—even bank accounts. For all intents and purposes it was a marriage, so how does a piece of paper change anything? If I stay gone long enough, he’s going to see that.”
Kelly looked up from the mixing board and caught my gaze, and her usually smiling brown eyes were drawn down in a mix of sympathy and disapproval.
Nina hadn’t truly backed up her bluff—she was just playing the long game. There was clearly a lot of backstory here that couldn’t be neatly tied up in our quick and very public phone call, but I wanted to leave her with at least something to work on in the short term.
“Maybe so, Nina. But maybe not. I don’t want to counsel you on what to do about Greg without knowing more, but I can tell you this: If you don’t figure out who you are on your own, then you’re going to live the rest of your life as a satellite, orbiting around Greg or someone else and your couplehood with them, and you’re never going to truly feel at home in your own skin.”
There was a beat of silence and then: “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”
“You gave Greg an ultimatum—”
“I hate that word. What a stupid cliché.”
“Call it what you want—you drew your line in the sand, and Greg didn’t step over it. Okay, there are a lot of ways to address that—but meanwhile you’re still living Greg’s life, not your own. You’re on hold while you try to force his hand into doing what you want. Four months have gone by, and you say you’re trying to move on, but are you? You’re working a job that requires nothing of you, you’ve created no attachments of your own, and you haven’t even unpacked your own things into the place you’re living. You’re not living your life—you’re still trying to make Greg live the life you think you want. You want to work things out with him, and maybe you can, but right now what is it you think he’ll be drawn back to?”
“What do you…I mean, us. What we had,” she said heatedly.
“That’s gone. Live in the present.”
In the pause that followed I heard a shaky breath and a sniffle. “I don’
t…I don’t know how to do that.”
For the first time she sounded vulnerable instead of defensive, and now we could do some productive work. “Start small. Unpack a box. Then another one. This is your home—at least for now. Live in it. Find a job that fits your experience, that fulfills you on some level if this one doesn’t. Talk to people. Make a friend. Treat yourself as though you matter—until you do, neither Greg nor anyone else is going to think so.”
“That sounds so…permanent. I don’t know if I want to settle in here. St. Pete is home—I had all that there.”
“Then stop playing games and go back—and do all those things on your own in St. Pete. You’re more than Greg’s girlfriend, Nina—but that doesn’t necessarily mean becoming Greg’s wife. Be Nina first. You won’t know what you really want until you do.”
Michael was waiting in a corner booth at the Hot Pot when I got there after the show. He was leaning against the wall, one leg bent up onto the banquette, reading a newspaper, and for one second time moved backward. I’d seen him exactly like this dozens of times on lazy Sunday afternoons when we rolled out of bed late because of his Saturday-night gigs and took our rumpled, unshowered selves to brunch at some nearby restaurant.
He looked up and time caught up with itself. A pressed button-down replaced his usual wrinkled concert t-shirt, and his hair was combed and neat, threads of gray reminding me that he wasn’t the same Michael from my memories.
But I couldn’t help a smile. It was still good to see him without having to hate him. I slid into the booth.
“Am I late?” I asked.
He sat up, lowering his leg back under the table so quickly it slammed into the edge, and he winced before loosing his familiar crooked smile on me. “I’m early. How about that?”
One of our ongoing spats while we’d been together was Michael’s chronic inability to arrive anywhere at an appointed time, as if structure were for other people, but didn’t apply to him. It was what precipitated our final argument, in fact.
“That is unexpected,” I said. “I debated telling you we were meeting at six, just to get you here on time.”
“I didn’t want to keep you waiting.” He tapped his fingers in an erratic drumbeat on the menu on the table. “I was going to order you a dirty martini, but I didn’t know if that was still your drink.”
“I’ll just have a beer, actually.” Partly I wanted to make sure I kept my wits about me, and dirty martinis went down far too easily. But some perverse part of me ordered something different because I didn’t want Michael to still think he knew me so well. Or that I hadn’t changed.
He raised his eyebrows and smirked, and I knew he’d understood my motivation as clearly as if I’d said it aloud. “Let’s get the lady a beer, then. PBR?”
“God, no. Busch, please.”
He laughed and caught our server’s eye, motioning her over. The girl, leaning against a counter, arms crossed, stared uninterestedly at us for a moment before pushing herself upright with visible effort and trudging over. “You need something?”
Michael eyed our empty table, then me, and I could read his expression like a headline: You think? I smothered a chuckle.
“We’ll have two Anchor Steams, please. No mugs.”
“Yeah.” She ambled off.
Michael was a beer snob, and had turned me into one while we’d been together. He knew there was no question that any brew found at a NASCAR race would cross my lips.
It was so easy to fall back into our usual banter. Too easy. I schooled the smile off my face. “So…you had something you wanted to talk about?”
He straightened. “Oh. Yeah, I do. It’s about your work. The Breakup Doctor.”
“My…work?” Of all the scenarios I’d pictured for Michael’s return, having him retain my services wasn’t even on the map. Did he want to hire me to get him past a breakup?
Oh, good lord. Did he want to hire me to get him past our breakup? He’d told me at length what bad shape he’d been in after he jilted me. Was Michael still not over it?
Or was this just a way to try to get me back?
Not that long ago I’d sat here with another man—Chip Santana, a former client I’d been certain was about to ask me to go out with him. Instead he told me he wanted to hire my Breakup Doctor services, and I’d felt like a vain fool—at least, until Chip disastrously confessed that hiring me was indeed just a ruse to get close.
I wasn’t going to make either mistake again.
“Michael, I don’t have to tell you that working with me is a bad idea. You know better than that. And if this is just a way to try to start something between us, that’s not—”
“No, no—I don’t want to hire you, Brook. I want to help you.”
“You…What?”
Our ennui-filled server showed up with two bottles of Anchor Steam gripped in her left hand. In her right were a pair of cardboard coasters; she flung one down in front of each of us as if she were dealing cards. “Two Anchors, no mugs.” She set the beers in front of each of us. “You want food?”
“Can we have a few minutes?” Michael said.
She shrugged. “It’s your stomach.”
After she shuffled away, Michael put his arms on the table, leaning in and ignoring his beer. “Brook, what you’re doing…it’s so unique. Your column, the radio show, all your clients—you’re obviously good at this, and there’s obviously a market for it, judging by how fast you’ve turned this into a business. But you can reach, what, a handful of people you actually counsel one-on-one? Maybe you can do some group therapy or something, but outside of that and these local media outlets, it doesn’t scale up, am I right?”
He was startlingly right. My attempts to see more people than my office hours could allow had led to my starting group therapy sessions for the recently bereaved (of love) that I ran every Saturday. And it still bothered me when I was too busy to fit people in who needed acute help—like Nina Edelburg this morning, who’d called back after the show went off the air and asked about scheduling a series of sessions with me. My first available slot wasn’t until more than two weeks away—an eternity in the acute stages of a breakup. Michael’s quick insight into the limitations of my business model was impressive—and disconcerting.
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
He nodded once, fingers once again tapping out a complicated Morse code on the table. “And I know you—you’re probably working way too many hours and having trouble making sure you keep a work-life balance. And still feeling guilty that you aren’t able to do enough for people.”
I felt blood surge to my face. “Maybe,” I said, rather stiffly.
“I don’t think you have to push yourself so hard to reach all the people you probably want to reach. All you have to do is work smarter.”
I narrowed my gaze on him and framed my words carefully. “Look, I appreciate that you’ve obviously given a lot of thought to this, but this is my business. It’s not really any of yours.” I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but I was uncomfortable with his avid interest in my career. And, if I were honest, with how thoroughly my ex-fiancé still seemed to know me—and at how little I’d apparently changed.
He released that grin I knew so well, and I felt walls slam up into place. “Don’t get defensive. You’re right—it’s not my business. But promotion is. And I’m good at it, Brook—seriously good at it. No promoter gets a band signed the first time up at bat—no one. But I did—partly because I am good at this, but a lot of it had to do with them. They were damn talented. And so are you. That column in this morning’s paper? And I’ve read your other ones. It’s good advice—and you get a ton of comments posted every week, which tells me you know how to hit a cultural nerve. You’re a natural on the radio. You’re too good to be lost here in some rinky-dink beach town when you could be reaching a bigger audience. A
much bigger audience. I’m talking about newspaper syndication. Magazines. Radio syndication. TV.”
Something inside me leaped at the picture Michael was painting. I’d long been thinking how to expand my Breakup Doctor practice, but always ran up against the wall that it wasn’t exactly something I could hire help for, or farm out to others. My business could grow only to the point that I could sustain my current pace, and I had resigned myself to being maxed out where I was.
If I could do more, reach more people…The idea held massive appeal.
But any enthusiasm I felt was overshadowed by anger—and hurt. Michael hadn’t come back here to ask my forgiveness, or tie up our badly frayed loose ends, or even to try to get me back, as I’d narcissistically convinced myself.
He’d simply seen a business opportunity.
“No,” I said flatly, forcing myself to stay planted in my seat and take a casual swig of my beer. Leaving in a wounded huff would only show Michael that he could still affect me—and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
Michael blinked. “No? Just no?” He stared at me intently, eyebrows bunched together, and then shifted his gaze down to the table. “Oh. This is because of me, isn’t it,” he said quietly. “Because of what I did.”
I gave a humorless laugh. “Believe it or not, Michael, it isn’t. My practice is quite different from what I used to do as a therapist when you knew me. I don’t know how to explain it to you in a way you’ll understand. It’s about personal connections. Heart. It’s not something I’m willing to turn into a Jerry Springer sideshow or some reality-TV garbage. Yes, I’m sure you could pimp the idea out and reach more people—but minus the soul of what I do.”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a rueful grin. “I deserved that. I didn’t mean to come on like a bulldozer. I guess…I’m just nervous.”
