One Less Problem Without You

by Beth Harbison

  “Actually,” he said, pinching her side, “I do, because somebody wouldn’t let me out of bed last night to go remove them.”

  She made a who, me? face. For one more minute, she relaxed on his chest. His heat enveloped her and was almost enough to make her press snooze again.

  But she couldn’t—there was too much to do today. Brunch, primping, practice. Then tonight.

  She did a quick drumroll on his chest, “Okay, let’s go, I’ll put coffee on.”

  “Make it so strong that you’re pretty sure it’ll be undrinkable.”

  “Will do!” she shouted over her shoulder, heading into his kitchen. Stainless steel, wood, marble, and clean. She loved waking up here.

  “Hey, babe?” he called to her.

  “Yep?”

  “Do we have any of that what’s-it-called spiky energy tea of Di’s left?”

  She smiled yet again. She loved when he asked if “we” had any left, she loved that he called her friend Di, she loved that he liked her teas as much as she did.

  “Spike. I brought some back from work yesterday,” she said, and waited for the response.

  He was walking into the kitchen. “You’re literally the greatest thing to ever happen to me.” He walked up behind her, tilting her head with his own so that he could reach her neck to kiss it. “You, and then that tea is second. A very close second.”

  * * *

  AFTER MAKING JUST enough time for a tussle in the sheets, getting ready for the day, and hopping on the Metro (where they were totally that couple, her with her legs slung over his, as if they weren’t on the grimy earthworm version of transportation), they arrived at Medicini’s, her favorite place in town for brunch.

  Prinny, Alex, and Di were already there, and they waved at her from the best table in the place. Courtyard view, never any weird ice-cold drafts from the ceiling.

  They all said their hellos, and a few minutes later, Alex and Jeff were talking about the Redskins’ chances at the playoffs this year, and Prinny, Di, and Chelsea were on their own conversational island.

  Prinny’s arm was extended a little away from her body, still maintaining subtle contact with Alex’s hand. They were always like this. Even when they “fought.” This being said, their fights were somehow even more adorable than the times they got along. She was the wild-minded one with her head a bit in the clouds, and he was the logical one with his feet solidly on the ground. So their arguments usually sounded something like:

  P: “What on earth is so ridiculous about having a goat farm?”

  A: “Everything.”

  P: “You love goat cheese. Plus, we could make soaps and infuse them with things!”

  A: “Do you know how to care for goats?”

  P: “Don’t they eat … trash? I mean, how hard can it be to keep something alive if it’ll settle for garbage?”

  Alex would then give her a look, and she would nod. That’s about as rough as it got between them. They also threw extremely fun barbecues that tended to go late into the night and always ended in raucous laughter. Jeff had—affectionately—called the women the Three Witches on more than one occasion. Hearing themselves cackling together over mulled wine on a stove, even they could kind of see it. Which, of course, only made them laugh more.

  Chelsea hadn’t known Diana before the end of her saga with Leif, so she didn’t know how she was before. Regardless, she could tell Diana was doing extremely well. She seemed happy. Content. The picture of independence. In fact, that had been part of what had helped to heal Chelsea after what had happened to her.

  After the night at Gin Bar, when Chelsea had awoken hungover, sore, naked, and alone, she had realized she had a choice to make. The night before, she’d had plenty to make as well, until one was made for her. But now she had to decide.

  Sink or swim.

  She’d let a breakup with the wrong guy bring her down for far too long. And now she had to decide if she wanted to stay down and fall further into the pit of misery she’d been digging, or if she wanted to get herself together against the odds and climb out.

  Chelsea lay there, head spinning for a few minutes, and then got up and checked the room. There was definitely no one there. Then she locked the manual lock on the door and climbed back into bed. And she cried. She cried hard. Because she was completely entitled to hate herself but hate that man more, and the crying felt like doing something.

  Once she was empty, she decided that she would never give her power away again. She resolved it to herself, knowing that intention and declarations meant nothing until they were followed through on. She would find out the guy’s name if she could, and if not, she would move on.

  She called down to the front desk and asked the name of the man staying in the room, and they wouldn’t give it. Against policy to release. Chelsea, though not psychic like Prinny, had a feeling that it had more to do with his frequent stays at this hotel and less to do with hotel policy. If she could, later, she would figure out what her legal rights were.

  In the meantime, she was ordering breakfast on his room charge.

  She ordered pancakes and waffles, because she could never decide, bacon, sausage, hash browns—pretty much everything on the menu. She ate everything she never ate for breakfast. And she enjoyed every bite. With every chomp, she thought: Fuck. You.

  She even ordered a bottle of champagne, and requested to pop it herself. She put the bottle in her purse, after taking a hot shower, and walked out of the room. She knew she would have to deal in a very real way with what had happened to her. She knew that vindictive pancakes could go only so far, but she also knew that it was a good start. She was going to be strong now. She was going to stop feeling sorry for herself. Because the only place that had gotten her was rock bottom.

  Chelsea told Andrew everything when she arrived at his place later that night to get her phone. He had fumed at the idea of “that asshole,” yelled at her for leaving the bar (apparently he had never left—she had just been too drunk to realize he was there still, right where she’d left him), and then brought her in for a hug that was so hard she thought she couldn’t breathe for a moment. Then he talked a bunch of legal talk and said he knew a friend he could ask advice from for her, and then he made her stay over. Which she didn’t quite mind. She might have wanted to be stronger on her own, but sometimes you need a crutch, even just for a little bit.

  Later that morning, she got the call that Diana’s husband, Leif, died. At first she was shocked, horrified, but then she wondered what she was supposed to feel for her. Diana hadn’t seemed happy, of course, and he’d seemed abusive and horrible. And Prinny didn’t sound like they were midcrisis over there. Still, she sent her best wishes.

  It wasn’t until she volunteered to help Prinny and Diana clean out Diana and Leif’s house that she knew exactly what to feel.

  They’d been mostly packing up kitchen stuff, makeup, clothes, things that Diana wanted to take with her. She wasn’t messing around with junk drawers or old Halloween decorations. She was having a sale, letting people pick through her things for anything they might want; besides that, she was hiring someone else to deal with “all that crap.”

  And if Chelsea hadn’t glanced at the mantel and unflipped a facedown photo, she would never have known.

  Leif. She knew Leif. Well, no.

  She knew “Lee.”

  There was no mistaking that face. The smile lines, the tan skin, the nice eyes with devilish cruelty hiding extremely well within them.

  No wonder Diana had always seemed so haunted. No wonder she’d been such a mess, so cynical, the night Chelsea had first met her. Look at who she’d been dealing with.

  Living with!

  An extremely illogical part of her heart felt sadness that the man she thought she’d met was dead now. The guy who had sat next to her laughing and eating tacos was … completely gone.

  Of course, that man hadn’t really existed.

  Everything made sense. Poor Diana. Chelsea had seen, even jus
t in her one night, a slice of the spectrum she’d had to deal with. She saw the charm, and she saw the brutality. No wonder Diana was so completely conflicted.

  Over the coming months, it was hard not to tell Diana or Prinny what had happened to her, and who the guy had turned out to be. The last thing either of them needed was to have Leif’s actions stay alive with one more revelation. She didn’t need to lead to even one more pang of betrayal, heartache, or anger on behalf of him. He might have wanted everyone in his life to be miserable, but she didn’t.

  She told Andrew, so that he called off the dogs. And after she and Jeff became friends, and then started dating, she had eventually told him. Both men had responded with kindness and an appropriate measure of sympathy. Neither had judged her for her own part in it—and they didn’t need to. Like any other woman who has been through it, she did enough beating up of herself for her foolish actions that night. She didn’t need anyone else to mention it, and the only two people she told weren’t going to condemn her.

  Diana and her fierce independence since the loss of her husband had been a huge inspiration to Chelsea. Not only was she happy and capable on her own, but she showed that the biggest mistake was in allowing the misery to run your life. Whether misery was tangible enough to be a human being or remained a green, toxic mental ether, it needed to be cut out of your life. Once you did that, you could be okay.

  And now, Chelsea could look around the table at the other four people there with her and think how, whether that jerk liked it or not, he had finally done something good for every single one of them.

  He had died.

  * * *

  THEY LEFT BRUNCH almost two chatty hours later. She hugged each of them good-bye, and they said they’d see her later on.

  Jeff insisted on walking her home, so they held hands and talked all the way there.

  “You nervous at all?”

  “Not really. It never really bothers me to be in front of people when it’s a stage. Put me in a party where I don’t know anyone, and I might be freaking out on the inside, but you know. It’s different.”

  He smiled. “Good. That’s not totally what I meant, though.”

  Jeff looked at her. He knew her so well already. He knew how to communicate with her and when.

  “I think it’ll be okay.”

  “I know it’ll be okay. But that doesn’t mean you might not be having a couple of nerves about reliving some of this stuff.”

  “It’s not a direct translation, you know that.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “But yeah, a little, anyway.” She confessed. “I know it’s cathartic. And I mean, I’ve felt pretty disassociated with it during rehearsals. It’s just going to be a bit different with everyone there tonight. I think it might be a little hard for everyone … but in a good way, you know?”

  “I do.”

  She knew that it would even be hard for Jeff. As she said, the play wasn’t completely based on her own life. It was mostly about a terrible man and the effect he can have on so many different lives. Chelsea played the wife.

  When Andrew had become so vigorously, angrily inspired by everything Chelsea had told him, she had talked to Diana. She hadn’t revealed her own secret about the situation, but she had asked if it was okay if a bit of reality was used in a play.

  Di had told her to go ahead. In fact, Di had said, The more times that sonofabitch dies, the better.

  She’d even let Diana read the script beforehand. All she’d had was extra details to toss in. No cuts. No offense taken.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT WHEN she was onstage, she had given a performance that felt emotionally sapping and got glowing reviews from every critic in town.

  Andrew, the play, and Chelsea, were a hit.

  Which meant that, against all the odds, and despite all the genuine hardships Chelsea, Diana, and Prinny had been through, their lives were, in fact, a hit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Diana

  I don’t like the designation “widow” much.

  In fact, I never understood why the Merry Widow was a cocktail. I suppose if you drank enough of them you might become merry. Mostly “widow” is a downer, though. You’d be surprised how many forms have that box to check. Most people check “single” or “divorced” and never even noticed “widowed” there.

  I never used to.

  But for a little more than a year it’s been a very real part of my life. In fact, being Leif Tiesman’s widow was a full-time job for a while. There was so much paperwork, so many administrative loose ends to tie up. Fortunately, he had a good lawyer who helped guide me through the whole process, but still … once the worst of it was over, I had to take time off to go away and just be alone for a couple of weeks.

  I chose a place in a corner of Fiji that I’d seen on some terrible reality show. And, believe it or not, it did the trick. I don’t know how other tourists enjoyed it with a film crew there, but it was almost completely private when I was there, and the solitude was as healing as a medical treatment for an illness.

  Now my life back in D.C. again is filled with work, and I couldn’t be happier. I still have plenty of solitude, but I also have enough company in my friends and co-workers to keep me from going bonkers.

  Every once in awhile I do miss that companionship I once imagined I had with Leif. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t miss Leif himself; he burned that bridge so well that even once he was dead and gone I was hard-pressed to have a kind or tender thought about him. But I well remembered the feeling I had when I first met him and all the things I imagined my life was about to become.

  I missed that optimism.

  I missed believing in love.

  Now? Forget dating. The prospect of going online, posting my smiling pictures as an advertisement to come try me out … well, I would rather be alone. And so I will remain alone, at least for now. I don’t see a crazy “meet cute”—like Chelsea and Prinny each got—in my future.

  The last relationship was still just a little too fresh.

  Would it always be?

  When the doctor came to tell us that Leif had passed, it was sincerely the worst moment of my life. I had so many feelings, and none of them felt appropriate. Plus, I was sitting there with Prinny, who seemed genuinely sad, and her husband (well, not her husband then), whom I’d only just met. Some stubborn, polite part of me felt like I had to be, I don’t know, the hostess or something. Like I had to keep it together so as not to make Alex and the doctor feel awkward.

  So I did keep it together.

  I believe everyone saw that as odd.

  The funeral was huge, though I recognized at least fifteen men there as guys Leif had vowed to take down in business, so I’m not sure they were there to pay their last respects so much as to make sure he was dead. No one took a mirror out and held it under his nose, as in the movie Charade, but I would wager more than one wanted to.

  The will? Well, for a guy who spent so much time and energy—and money—trying to take Prinny’s inheritance away, I’m sorry to say he didn’t have a will. That meant the state got to take a bit of his estate for “administration,” but who cares? Like I said, it took a long time and a lot of effort, but we worked through probate and got everything in order.

  I would like to say that I distributed many of the funds to causes he cared about so that his energy could go to something good, but there were no causes I could think of that he cared about as much as himself, so I decided there was no harm in picking a few myself: Children’s Hospital, the Red Cross, the American Humane Association, and a few more that have come to my attention as I’ve gone along.

  I didn’t move back into the house we shared. It was too big for two of us, so it was definitely far too big just for me. Besides, I had always felt it was haunted in some way. With Leif gone, it could only feel more so.

  Instead I just kept the apartment in Georgetown, and I pay Prinny a good rent. She didn’t want me to pay her anything, but I know sh
e donates the proceeds, so it all works out. And I like being in that little place. It feels much more like me than the big McMansion ever did.

  Plus, it’s right there where I work. Within two months of starting Cosmos Medicinal Tea Co., we designated the expanded second half of the store entirely for that purpose and hired two new employees. I make the teas upstairs, and the downstairs is retail. It’s doing so well that it looks like we might hire a third employee, someone to apprentice with me and learn the craft. The demand has been high from walk-ins, but our online business is booming, too.

  The key for finding someone to work with and to teach is that I have to find someone very, very responsible. It’s extremely tricky and dangerous dealing with herbs. They are not candy, to be consumed without regard for safety. Even one leaf of a particularly potent herb—say, digitalis (aka foxglove, a beautiful purple flower you can find growing on roadsides all over)—can create symptoms of arrhythmia or worse. Someone who is hospitalized with those symptoms and given the standard course of treatment—digoxin, a derivative of digitalis—might well end up suffering from digoxin toxicity, which leads to cardiac arrest and death.

  Yes, one must be very, very careful.

  DIANA’S DRINKS

  30 Recipes to Make You Feel Superb

  Kava Tranquili-Tea

  A very relaxing, magical tisane blend sure to bring peace of mind to even the most troubled soul.

  1 ounce chamomile leaves

  1 ounce kava

  ½ ounce lemon balm

  ½ ounce rose petals

  ½ ounce lavender

  4 cups boiling water

  Place all herbs in a teapot, cup, or jar and carefully pour the water over them. Steep for fifteen minutes, then strain and serve hot or cold.

  FOUR DRINKS

  Let Him Eat Humble Pie

  A spiked soda with a boozy layer of orange on the bottom. Make the blood orange reduction by simmering blood orange juice down to a thick syrup. Alternatively, use orange vodka, like Amsterdam or Skyy blood orange.

  1 ounce vodka