“I’ve been looking at programs—”
He cut himself off but I knew he’d been about to say online. I let it go.
“There’s nothing around here that looks decent. I’d have to go away and I can’t do that right now.”
“Why?”
“I just started in a new position.”
“You were going to take time to go on a honeymoon,” I said.
Seth stared at me. “Thanks, Tar. Thanks for making me feel worse than I already do.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel worse. I’m just trying to tell you there’s no reason for us to have a conversation if it’s going to be you saying you want to change and me asking how you’re going to do that and you saying you don’t know. What’s the point?”
I tried to get out of the beanbag, but Seth put the palm of his hand on the front of my shoulder. “I’m afraid to go away,” he said.
His mouth trembled enough for me to stay where I was.
“I’m afraid you’ll move on while I’m gone. I’m afraid you won’t wait for me. I’m afraid you’ll stop loving me.”
I closed my eyes. “Really, Seth? Really? Do you think I’m that shallow?”
“What?”
“Do you think I could really just go on without you, like nothing ever happened? I have loved you for ten years. I want you to get out of this thing you’re trapped in. I want things to be like they were before. But just because I want it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. You have to make it happen.”
“You’ll wait, then?”
“Yes,” I said.
“For as long as it takes?”
“Yes.”
Seth let out air as if he’d been holding it in for days. “As long as I know that, I can do this. It could mean being away for two weeks.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Do it.”
“And when I come back, then—”
“Stop,” I said. “Just—one thing at a time.”
Seth put his arms behind him and leaned on the heels of his hands. “What aren’t you saying?”
Why did everyone want to know what I didn’t want to say? Like, How will I know it’s gone? What will the signs be that I can trust you? Will I ever be able to get those images out of my head—the ones that shoved my visions for us completely out of the picture?
“Tar?” Seth said.
I had to say something. Everybody wanted me to say something.
“You go and do this,” I said. “And then we’ll take it from there.”
“That’s it? That’s all the reassurance I get to take with me?”
“I can’t predict the entire future!” I struggled out of the beanbag and stood over him. “I had a vision, Seth, and it got shattered, so excuse me if I can’t construct a new one yet. Okay? I love you. I’ll wait while you go get help. What more do you want me to do?”
Seth got to his feet but he didn’t reach for me. He clenched and unclenched his hands at his sides. “So—a porn addict is all I am to you now.”
“What?”
“You can’t see past that to anything else that I am.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“Then you aren’t hearing me,” I said. “And that is why it’s pointless for us to talk about this anymore.”
I was right. Seth had been raking his hands through his hair. He did it now, leaving the spikes at rakish angles that mirrored everything I was feeling.
“I’m sorry, Tar,” he said. His chin quivered like a small boy’s.
“Me too,” I said. “Let’s just leave it like that for now, okay?”
He nodded, and I left.
I was glad the night air was bracing, because my face was so hot I was sure it would blister. When I got halfway to the main house, mere steps away, Kellen caught up with me, and I was surprised when he grabbed my arm.
“How do you expect to work this out if you won’t even talk to him?” he said.
The light on the walkway was dim, but I could see Kellen’s eyes glinting.
I pulled away. “What did he tell you about why we’re postponing the wedding?”
“That you aren’t sure you’re ready to marry him,” he said, as if that was the single lamest excuse he’d ever heard.
“That’s all he said?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t get all up in my face until he tells you the real reason.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Because I promised him I wouldn’t. So if you want to yell at somebody, yell at him.”
“I’m not yelling!”
“Yes, you are!”
In fact, we both were, in voices raw and shrill and dangerously close to rage. It was the first time ever.
One more thread pulled out of the tapestry. Pretty soon there wasn’t going to be anything left of our rich, perfect, former lives at all.
The other thing that became apparent to me was that I had to find something to do. And that wasn’t going to be hanging out with the Bridesmaids. Their texts and voice mails ranged from Alyssa’s R U trapped under something heavy? to Jacqueline’s pleading with me to let her tell me how miserable she was being single and how I was making a big mistake. Et cetera. The only one I actually answered was Lexi. Just give me some time, I texted her. Her answer: Sure. The hurt stung right off the screen, but I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even help me.
By Monday I was bordering on hopeless, another first for me, and I had to get out of the house. The day was bright and sunny and cloudless—the complete antithesis to my mood—and I walked aimlessly around the historic district, shivering. Only a slight breeze nipped the air but I was still chilled, just like I’d been for fifteen days. Those were the ones I was counting now—the days since I found out, not the days until I was supposed to marry Seth.
At one point I found myself on East Charlton Street, a block from Flannery O’Connor’s birthplace and childhood home. I’d done my master’s thesis on Flannery and had spent most of my Christmas and spring breaks in there my last year of grad school doing research with the docent. I wandered down the block and stood in front of the narrow, unpretentious house and for about five seconds considered going in to see if he needed an assistant. I could tell people more than they really wanted to know about her strange little childhood—so different from my classically happy one.
But the house was only open on Saturdays and Sundays for three hours each, and Flannery’s story was enough to make you reach for the Prozac. I was close enough to that as it was.
So I moved on down Charlton, and the more I walked, the more bleak I became. I was as melancholy as the Spanish moss, which, I thought randomly, was neither Spanish nor a moss. Maybe nothing was as it seemed.
When the bells in the St. John’s Church tower pealed out “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” I had to get away from them. I hadn’t taken GrandMary’s advice and gone to God with this whole thing, and it sure didn’t seem as if God was coming to me. In any form.
My flight landed me at Bull and Perry, where the corner doors of Piebald Espresso opened to let someone out. Piebald. Like the splotchy black-and-white horses. A metaphor for being composed of incongruous parts.
I went in.
Mercifully, inside, I couldn’t hear the bells anymore. I stood there for a minute, trying to decide whether to get a coffee or just hide in a corner. I hadn’t been in there before, actually. People talked about it, but I wasn’t a hang-out-in-a-coffee-shop kinda gal, even in grad school. I liked a latte as well as the next person, but I’d only indulged when somebody was making a Starbucks run. Maybe there was something too trendy about it. I couldn’t even remember my reasons now. That seemed like another lifetime. Somebody else’s lifetime.
A glass case displaying teapots and cups and wineglasses divided the Piebald into two parts: one with small tables for two and four, the other with a mishmash of used upholstered couches and armchairs and donated dining room chairs, some of which w
ere too high for the tables. Fans spun on the rustic, open-beamed ceilings. Some of the walls were brick, some stucco in a dark brown, and all boasted the work of local artists, probably SCAD students. But the entire front of the place was made up of large windows that gave it light and brought in the bustle of Bull Street. The place was alive and I wasn’t. I decided to stay.
I crossed the wood floor to a ramp bordered with a wrought-iron railing that went up to the counter. I ordered a latte from a girl with the tiniest of gold rings in her nose whose name tag read Wendy and found an armchair amid the friendly chaos. Around me people talked as openly as if they were in their own living rooms, chatting across me and then going back to their books and their iPads. On the other side the tables were occupied by business types on laptops, each working alone with coffee and a scone. As I sat there, a steady stream of people came through the corner doors headed for takeout, looking like they had someplace to go and knew how to get there. My anxiety pulsed so hard in my chest I let the latte go unfinished.
A station that announced itself as Christmas Traditions was playing everything from Dean Martin singing “It’s a Marshmallow World” to the Boston Pops Orchestra doing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” When Neil Diamond started in on “The First Noel,” I said out loud, “Isn’t he Jewish?”
A guy with a thready goatee and John Lennon glasses looked up at me and said, “Yeah. That’s just wrong.”
For some reason, I could breathe again. The latte was lukewarm so I decided a tea might go good.
I headed back to the counter, where this time a skinny kid waited on me. He looked to be about twelve and was wearing a vest over a white T-shirt and had a bandana inexplicably tied around the ankle of his left boot. His name tag was on upside down but I thought it said Zoo-Loo.
“I’ll brew that Earl Grey Creme for ya,” he said. And then wandered off into a kitchen that, frankly, looked a little scary to me.
While I waited, I couldn’t help noticing the guy who was obviously in charge. He was maybe the owner but at least the manager. Good-looking in a raw, Italian kind of way, he wore a fedora and a name tag that said Ike. Even while he was exchanging quips with the customers like a New Yorker who had taken a wrong turn and ended up south of the Mason–Dixon Line, he was apparently not pleased about something because his smile didn’t reach his eyes, and judging from the crinkles around them I had the feeling usually it did.
When the girl who waited on me first—Wendy—finished ringing up someone’s hummus and pita, Ike leaned his head close to hers. His deep whisper just reached me.
“Jason quit on me,” he said.
“The afternoon guy?” Wendy said.
“Yeah. He gave me two days’ notice and acted like that was doing me a favor.”
“Jerk,” Wendy said.
Ike stepped back so the skinny kid could hand me my tea. “You having anything to eat with that?” he said to me. He motioned toward the chalkboard on the wall behind him, which was crowded with offerings in someone’s whimsical printing. “We have a nice cheeseboard.”
“I’m good,” I said.
I paid Zoo-Loo, but I lingered as if I were admiring the pastries. Ike continued his conversation with Wendy.
“I’m gonna have to find somebody to replace him. We’re about to hit the height of the Christmas visitor season, and I need more than one barista in the afternoon.”
Wendy smiled at me. She had perfect teeth. “Did you find something?”
“Still looking,” I said.
She turned back to Ike. “It’s not like you don’t have an entire folder full of applications.”
“I don’t have time to go through all of them and do interviews—” “Excuse me.”
They both looked up at me, which indicated that I had indeed spoken. I wasn’t sure until then.
“I need a job,” I said, “and I’d love to work here.”
They looked at each other. Wendy then gazed at me, a long, hard sort of appraisal, shrugged at Ike, and turned to another customer. Ike leaned on the counter.
“Have you ever worked as a barista?” he said.
“No,” I said. I didn’t add that I had barely worked as anything. “I’m a fast learner, though.”
Ike adjusted his fedora with one finger. “Ever done any food service?”
“No.”
He gave me half a smile. “Ever drink coffee?”
I smiled back. “Oh yeah.”
“Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”
“No!”
“Do you have any entanglements?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Child care issues? Transportation problems?”
“No. No kids. I live within walking distance. There’s nothing that would keep me from showing up at work whenever you need me.”
The words fell sadly between us. Whether that was what made him hire me—the fact that I clearly had no life and desperately needed one—I couldn’t tell.
“Four days a week, five hours a shift,” he said. “I’ll give you some paperwork to fill out and run a background check. If you don’t have a rap sheet or a bad work history, we’ll start training you Wednesday.”
“You won’t regret this,” I said.
Ike looked at me curiously from under a ridge of dark brows. “Don’t you want to know how much it pays?”
“Sure,” I said.
But I really didn’t care. I’d just taken the first step away from the vision that was never going to be. And that was what I cared about.
NINE
If I had worked up a scenario for the scene where I told my parents I got a job in a coffee shop, it wouldn’t have included my father stopping with a forkful of rib eye halfway to his lips and saying, “You did what?”
“I need something to do,” I said. “And I want to make a little money. I can’t keep sponging off you and Mama.”
“You’re not sponging,” Mama said. “This was our agreement.”
I looked down at the steak I’d carved into bite-size pieces on my plate so it would look like I was eating. “The agreement was that I would live here at home until the wedding. Now that there isn’t going to be a wedding . . . yet . . . I have to come up with a new plan.”
“So go to grad school like you were originally,” Daddy said.
“Seth was going to help me pay for that—”
“You know I’ll—”
“No. Daddy.”
I breathed in through my nose until it whistled and tried to remember the last time I raised my voice to my father. I came up with never.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen with Seth,” I said, tone more even. “I don’t want to get into a program until my life isn’t so up in the air.”
“That makes sense.” Mama glanced at Daddy. “Don’t you think?”
“Besides,” I said, “I still have to apply and all that. I couldn’t get in until summer anyway.”
“So just apply,” Daddy said. “Put your focus there.”
I pressed my fork tines into the baked potato I was also pretending to consume. “Do you have something against me working?”
“No. But in a coffee shop?”
“The Piebald is fun,” Mama said. “I’ve been in there several times. They make a nice mocha. And I love the name. I had to look it up.”
“Madeline,” Daddy said, without looking at her. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” I tried to laugh. “Are we being a little snobby here, maybe?”
He didn’t find that amusing. In fact, he pushed his chair back and tossed his napkin on the table. I expected my mother to pick it up and start folding it. Or maybe I would. This was so not what we did here at our house.
“You just spent two years getting a master’s degree at Duke, for Pete’s sake. I’m sure if you want to work you can get something better than . . . what’s this paying? Minimum wage plus tips?”
“To start,” I said.
Wrong thing to say, apparently
. Daddy’s scowl could have put Scrooge to shame.
“You planning on staying on there awhile?”
“What else am I going to do, really? With my degree I can either write a book about somebody’s work that hasn’t been dissected before, or I can teach college students how to do that—which was my plan, but I need a doctorate to compete.”
“Have you tried?”
I stared at him.
“Honey, I don’t think she has the energy to try right now,” Mama said.
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation,” I said. “I’m doing the best I can. That’s all I’ve got. Excuse me.”
The china jittered as I, too, pushed back from the table, knocking off the fork that had never made it to my mouth. It sounded like one more shard of my old dreams hitting the floor behind me.
I tried not to keep track of the people I couldn’t talk to anymore, or as in the case of my brother, who weren’t talking to me, but I spent the empty day before I was to start work at the Piebald missing all of them. Walking was the only thing that kept me from actually taking out pen and paper and making a list. I started to, but the notepad I found in my desk had Tara Grissom printed across the top in a burgundy font.
Yeah. I went out for a walk.
I was on East Liberty, digging my sunglasses out of my bag, when I literally ran into a girl coming out of the Book Lady with a burlap-and-bead shoulder bag that was almost bigger than she was.
I said, “I am so sorry—”
“No worries,” she said. “Oh—Tara.”
I found myself looking straight into the olive-green eyes of Evelyn Grissom. She stared back at me out of her pale face, what I could see of it between the two lank panels of hair the shade of toast. If I hadn’t gone to the hospital when she was born and stood on tiptoe to look at her in her bassinet through the nursery window, I would always have sworn she was adopted. And for more reasons than just that un-Grissom-like coloring that made her look as if she were recovering from a long bout with some mysterious illness.
“Evvy,” I said.
“Yeah, huh?”
One Last Thing Page 10
