by Diane Barnes
The door at the end of the hall clicks open. At first, I think it’s the cleaning crew, but there is only one set of footsteps. They are moving much too quickly for anybody to be doing any cleaning. Whoever it is turns into my aisle. I roll my chair backward to the opening of my cube and peek out. Ben walks toward me with a determined expression. “You’re not working late again tonight,” he says. “You’re leaving now. We’re going to dinner.”
* * *
We each drive our own cars to a steak place on the other side of town. The setting is much more romantic than the sports bars where Nico and I usually eat. The restaurant is dark, and each of the tables, including ours, is covered in a white linen tablecloth and has a lit candle in a hurricane-glass holder placed in the center.
“I feel like we’re on a date,” I say.
Ben looks up from the wine menu he’s been studying and smiles. “Is it a first date, or have we been together for a while?”
“We’re an old married couple going to get something to eat because neither of us feels like cooking,” I say.
“Where are the kids?”
I grin, stupidly happy that he’s playing along with me. “Amanda’s away at school and Trevor is at friend’s.”
“I must really love you if I let you name our son Trevor,” he says. “That’s a dog’s name.”
“You wanted to name him Ben junior, and call him BJ, but I wanted no part of that.”
Ben laughs. “It’s a good thing you talked me out of it because he’s at the age now when he might get teased for having a nickname like that.” He gives me a suggestive smile that causes me to blush.
Our waiter arrives and introduces himself as Ian. We each order a glass of cabernet that Ben suggests. Nico never drank wine because he didn’t think it was a manly drink.
A few tables away, there’s a man in his fifties sitting with a woman half his age. Their clasped hands lie on the table, and they lean toward each other with big grins. “Wife number two,” I say. It’s a game I’ve been playing with Rachel since we were kids. We guess the stories of random people we see in public places. I tried it with Nico a few times, but he refused to go along with it.
“Nope,” Ben says. “Wife number one thinks he’s working late. She’s the nanny.” He points out a table where a young man of about twenty, wearing a baseball cap, is sitting with an older gentleman.
“Father visiting his son at school. The kid goes to Brandeis,” I say because the college is not too far from where we are.
Ben shakes his head. “The kid’s dating his daughter. He wants the old man’s permission to marry her.”
I smile, enjoying Ben’s romanticism.
“The father’s going to say no,” he adds.
I frown. “What? Why?”
Nico never asked my dad. You’re thirty-four. We don’t need your daddy’s permission, he argued.
“He thinks they’re too young,” Ben answers. “And he knows his daughter is much too good for that slob. Punk kid doesn’t have enough respect to take off his hat at the table.”
“I hope you’ll go easier on the young man who eventually asks for Amanda’s hand,” I say.
“Amanda’s smart enough not to date a guy who’s always hiding under a baseball cap.”
I think about Nico’s collection of hats that used to hang on the outside of our closet door. He must have close to one hundred. I stare at Ben, wondering if he’s passing some sort of judgment on me.
The waiter returns with our drinks and to take our order. “We haven’t even looked at the menu yet,” Ben says.
The waiter leaves. I open my menu, expecting Ben to do the same. Instead he points to two middle-aged women. “Sisters reunited fifty years after being given up for adoption by their birth mother,” he says.
The waiter has to return two more times before we’re finally shamed into stopping our game and choosing our dinners. Ben gets the bone-in rib eye, while I order the filet.
“Wasn’t that much better than the cereal you were going to eat?” Ben asks when I finish.
“How do you know that’s what I was going to have?”
He gives me a challenging look. “Are you going to tell me it’s not?”
“Rice Krispies,” I admit.
“Well, I’m sure Snap, Crackle, and Pop missed you tonight, but I enjoyed your company.”
In the parking lot, he hugs me good-night. Although he’s hugged me plenty of times through the years, tonight feels different.
I drive home singing to the radio. When I pull into the driveway, the motion lights snap on. Mr. O’Brien must have knocked the icicles down today because they no longer hang from the roof and the house looks less ominous. As I walk across the porch, I see him sitting in his recliner watching the hockey game. He checks his watch as I pass, making me feel like I missed curfew. It’s just past ten o’clock. Ben and I were at the restaurant for more than three hours. I had no idea so much time went by.
Not until I get inside and see Nico’s jacket hanging over the back of the kitchen chair do I realize that tonight is the first time I’ve had fun since he left. I place my hand on the coat’s soft worn leather, wondering what Nico did this evening. “You’d be mad if you knew who I went out with,” I say.
On the other side of the wall, Mr. O’Brien claps and cheers. The Bruins must have scored.
Chapter 8
Rachel still lives in the town where we grew up. To get to her house, I have to pass my childhood home, a brown split-level ranch. When my parents first moved away, my eyes would well up each time I drove by, and I wondered if I was the only person who felt homesick in the town where they were raised.
As I ride by on this mid-February evening, I see the new owners still have their Christmas lights up—red, green, and blue bulbs, a colorful contrast compared to the white lights my mother insisted upon. She would go crazy if she saw the house now because she firmly believes the Christmas tree should be down and the decorations packed away by New Year’s.
On the day the moving truck drove off with all my parents’ belongings, my father and I stood on the front landing watching it roll down the street. He draped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “I wouldn’t be able to leave you behind if I didn’t know you had Nico to lean on,” he said.
Tonight, I briefly imagine that after our weekly call tomorrow, when I tell my parents that Nico and I split, my father will sit my mother down in the living room of their English Tudor. It’s not right that she’s there by herself, he’ll say. She needs us. We have to move back.
* * *
Smoke billows from Rachel’s chimney, and the smell of the fire permeates into her yard. She rarely uses her fireplace because she worries the kids will get hurt, but she’s pulling out all the stops tonight in an effort to cheer me up, making my favorite roast beef dinner with crème brûlée for dessert. I take my time walking up her driveway, breathing in the smoky smell, my favorite scent of winter. When I reach the front door, I rap on it once before entering the house. “Hello,” I call out.
I sit on the bench in the foyer and pull off my boots because I don’t want to drip water on her hardwood floors.
Sophie is the first to greet me. She climbs up next to me and hugs me. I’m surprised to see that she’s already dressed in her pink footie pajamas. Usually Rachel has to battle with her to change. “Auntie Jillian, Mommy said I’m not allowed to ask about Uncle Nico,” she says.
The mention of Nico’s name pierces my heart. It’s strange to be at Rachel’s for dinner without him, but I guess I will have to get used to doing everything without him now.
“Sophie!” Mark yells. He’s coming down the stairs. Jacob, the baby, is cradled in his arms. Laurence trails behind, sucking his thumb and carrying a toy minion. There is also a picture of the little creature on his pajama top.
“What did she do?” Rachel hollers from the kitchen.
“Nothing,” I say.
Mark trades me my coat for Jacob, who immediately
starts crying when handed off. I place him over my shoulder and rub his back, wishing someone would do the same to me.
“Auntie, do you want to play Connect Four?” Sophie asks.
“Auntie came to talk to me tonight,” Rachel says. She’s standing in the hallway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Mark, bring all the kids into the living room and keep them there until supper.”
He takes Jacob from me.
“Don’t let them too close to the fire,” Rachel calls out as I follow her into the kitchen. She checks on the roast before pouring me a glass of wine.
In the other room, Mark and the kids break out into belly laughs. I peek in and see him crawling on all fours with both Laurence and Sophie on his back. Rachel and I both grew up in the same sort of family, with loving parents and brothers who teased us in good fun. We wanted the same things out of life, a husband and a household filled with kids. She got that. Today, her home is filled with love and laughter, a stark comparison to my quiet, lonely apartment. I wonder if I had never met Nico, would I have met someone else and have what she does?
She interrupts my thoughts. “I can’t believe Nico blindsided you by announcing your breakup on air.”
“I think he tried to tell me about the contest, but I hung up on him.” I get up from my stool to finish setting the table while Rachel makes gravy.
“Don’t defend him. It was unacceptable for them to talk about you like that.”
“It really was,” I agree.
“You should do something to get back at him,” Rachel says. Vengeful should be her middle name. In high school she dumped ten cans of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs over the hood of a Ford Mustang belonging to a boy who had the nerve to break up with her. His car was parked in the school lot at the time, and she got detention for a week.
“Believe me, I’d love to. Any ideas?”
“What did you do with the ring?”
Instinctively I touch the finger I used to wear it on. “It’s in my bureau drawer.”
“He paid a lot of money for it,” she says in a way that makes me think she knows exactly how much it cost him.
“How do you know?”
She sighs. “Who do you think picked it out?”
“Nico told me he picked it out by himself.” I point a knife at her. “You never told me you helped.”
There I was, thinking how well he knew me because he selected my dream ring. I am such a fool.
She sighs. “He made me promise not to tell. The point is, you should sell it.”
I can’t do that. I’m going to wear it again someday. The thought pops into my head with no warning. I imagine striking it with a mallet to send it back to the crevice of my brain it crawled out of. “Why do you think he hasn’t asked for it back?”
Rachel’s spoon clanks off the side of the pan as she stirs the gravy. “Don’t even go there,” she says as if she’s reading my thoughts. “I can see you waiting around for another six years because you think if he really didn’t want to marry you, he would ask for it back.”
No one knows me better than Rachel. Maybe she’s my soul mate.
“After he humiliated you like that, you can never take him back,” she says.
“I know that.” Even to me though, my words don’t sound convincing. She gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe me.
* * *
After dinner, Rachel and I are sitting by the fire in the living room. Mark is upstairs, putting the kids to bed. “I’m going to show you something, but you have to promise not to be mad,” she says. She empties the remaining pinot noir into my glass. “Do you promise?”
I swear her expression is the same as when we were seventeen and she was trying to convince me to steal a bottle of vodka from my parents’ liquor cabinet. “They’ll never know,” she promised. Meanwhile, the very next day they noticed the alcohol was missing; I got grounded for a month.
I get up to throw more wood on the fire, wondering what she’s up to. “No, I don’t promise.”
“Well, remember that I’m trying to help you.” She reaches for the iPad that’s sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch and swipes at the screen. As I watch her fiddle with it, I figure out she had the same thought that I did to create a fake entry for the BS Morning Sports Talk win-a-date-with-Nico contest. Great minds think alike.
She hands me the tablet. My own face stares back at me. The words 30-Something-Love appear above my picture. “What is this?” It can’t be what I think it is.
“I created an online dating profile for you.” It’s exactly what I think it is. Rachel sounds pleased with herself, like she’s giving me her kidney instead of soliciting dates for me on the Internet.
“Why would you do that?” I scroll though the page searching for a way to delete my profile.
“How else are you going to meet someone?”
“I don’t want to meet anyone.”
A bang comes from the fireplace as a log falls against the glass door. I get up to reposition it.
“Do I have to remind you that you’re going to be thirty-five in April? Ticktock. Ticktock.”
“Screw you!” I jab at the log repeatedly with the poker. Embers shoot out of the fire onto the hearth. “I’m not doing Internet dating.”
“It’s how single people our age meet people these days.”
I give her a look that means How the hell would you know? You’ve been happily married for eight years.
She reads my expression accurately. “Mark’s sister met her boyfriend on this site and Sophie’s preschool teacher met her husband.” She’s listing other people who work with Mark who do online dating, but I’m not paying attention because I’m reading the description she wrote of me. She called me “hopelessly optimistic”; no doubt that’s a reference to my waiting six years for a proposal that lasted three weeks.
“There are other sites too,” she says. “I think you should be on them all to increase the odds of meeting someone you like. It’s a numbers game after all.”
“I’m not doing any!”
“Shh, you’ll wake the kids,” Rachel whispers.
I search all over the dating site for a delete button. Finally, I found it in the Account Settings tab. I click on it. A message instantly appears: Are you sure you want to delete your profile?
Damn straight I am. I click on yes.
Another message: We hope you’re leaving because you found someone. We hope it works out, but because love’s unpredictable, your profile will remain in an archive and can be reactivated at any time.
I won’t be reactivating it. That’s for sure. Then, just to be sure Rachel doesn’t either, I ask her for the password she used to create the account and change it.
* * *
The hardwood feels cold on my bare feet as I pace up and down the hallway listening to my mother. I was up all night, worrying about how I’m going to break the news to her that Nico and I broke up. I meant to do it as soon as I answered, but she began the conversation by telling me she stopped into a bridal shop to look at dresses. She found one she thinks will be perfect on me.
“It’s an empire silhouette with a sweetheart neck,” she says, making me feel like a disappointment as a daughter because I have no idea what either of those things means—not to mention that I have no use for the dress anymore but can’t bring myself to say it.
“Mom,” I interrupt.
She keeps talking. “The one I saw has short sleeves—”
“Mom, I have to—”
“But they can alter them to cap—”
“Mom!”
To my surprise, she stops speaking. The line goes quiet. Here’s my chance. I’m going to tell her now before she starts up again. I take a deep breath. “Nico and I broke up. There’s not going to be a wedding.” I exhale loudly, feeling better now that it’s out there. I wait for her response. She says nothing. I give her a few seconds to digest the news. One. Two. Three. Nothing but silence from the other end. Four. Five. Six. “Mom?”
Seven. Eight. Nine. “Are you still there?”
The other line clicks in. I glance at caller ID. It’s my mother. Un-freakinbelievable!
“I must have lost you,” she says.
“Did you hear anything I said?”
“No. I was telling you about the dress.”
I take a deep breath and prepare to say it again. Keep your voice calm.
“They’re getting more in next week. I’m—”
“Nico and I broke up,” I blurt out in a shaky voice.
“Going back—What did you say?”
“I don’t need a dress. Nico and I broke up.” I repeat it without a trace of emotion this time, like I’m telling her about our horrible winter weather.
“Are you arguing about wedding plans? Because all couples do. You’ll work it out.”
“We won’t. It’s over.”
“Did you fight today?” she asks.
“He moved out almost a month ago.” Not sleeping last night catches up to me all at once. All I want to do is go back to bed and pull the covers up over my head. Instead, I fall onto the couch.
“That can’t be,” my mother says. “We’ve spoken every week. You never said a word about it.”
“I thought we would work things out, so I didn’t want to worry you with it.”
“Oh, honey,” she says.
I can’t fight back my tears, because really all I want right now is my mother to hug me, but she’s a thousand miles away because she’d rather live near my brother than me.
“Did he meet someone else?” she asks.
“What? No! It was nothing like that.”
“Men don’t leave unless they have someone to move on to.”
Except Nico did. “Well, he did.”
“Don’t be so sure,” my mother says like she knows something I don’t, and I briefly wonder about her life before she met my father. “Are you able to afford your rent on your own?” she asks. “Didn’t your landlord raise it when Nico moved in?”
