Do Over

by Serena Bell

  “Have a little faith.”

  He doesn’t really inspire it, not looking like a hung-over college student, half-naked and scruffy, but his newfound dad bravado is pretty amusing, and part of me just wants to see if he can pull it off. “Okay. Just—text me if you need me.”

  He nods. “And…um…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I might need you to leave me a few instructions.”

  I try really hard to hide my smile.

  And fail.

  “Wipe that smirk off your face.”

  I stop just short of inviting him to do it.

  —

  The first apartment I see is awful.

  It’s far from the Seattle hospital where I work. It’s shabby, the kitchen circa 1960, the linoleum and paint peeling. It’s tiny—just the galley kitchen, a living room, and a single bedroom. I’d have to give Gabe the bedroom and sleep on a futon or foldout in the living room. And on top of that, it’s a hundred dollars more per month than I was planning to spend.

  Still, after spending the rest of the day seeing some really trashed apartments in some really down-on-their-luck neighborhoods, and a few semi-decent apartments that are closer to a thousand dollars out of my monthly price range, I decide that I judged that first apartment prematurely. So I park my car and call the landlord back.

  “Sorry, sweetheart. Just rented it. Had five applications after you saw it this morning. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot.”

  I squeak my distress.

  “Welcome to Seattle.”

  I don’t tell him I’ve lived in the Seattle area my whole life. I know this isn’t the Seattle I grew up with, the one that was still recovering from an economic crash, where a billboard only twenty years before had once famously joked, “Last one to leave Seattle, turn out the lights.” Now it’s more like trying to stuff clowns into a car, there are so many people flooding to the city to work in technology.

  I sit behind the wheel of my car, sheltered from an increasingly penetrating rain, and let myself indulge in despair.

  My phone buzzes.

  Jack.

  It’s a photo of Gabe. Tucked into bed. Surrounded by his stuffed animals. Asleep. My heart goes all melty. He looks so peaceful and cozy.

  Jack has been sending photos all day.

  This morning, in response to my text, Everything okay there? he sent one of Gabe on the playground, at the top of the little-kid rock wall, holding on for dear life and grinning like a fiend.

  Guess it’s okay, I texted back.

  Ye of little faith.

  Early in the afternoon, unprovoked, he sent me one of Gabe with his face more or less planted in a ridiculously huge ice-cream cone, ice cream in his eyebrows. Shortly after that, my phone buzzed again. Gabe in the old-fashioned Revere Lake five-and-dime, holding aloft a small model car.

  That place is still there?! I tapped back.

  Jack and I had loved that store as kids. Because it was always full of treasures, and you never knew what you’d find. Christmas ornaments, cloth slippers, coloring books, Buddha statues, colorful plastic water guns, balloons, key chains. You could spend hours deciding how to spend a dollar. Best bang-for-the-buck around.

  Still here. Not sure how, but still here.

  An hour later, he sent a video of Gabe throwing a football, with the header, Spiral!!!!!­!!!!!­!!!!!­!

  Um, what’s a spiral?

  Heathen. A spiral is how a real man throws a football.

  Next came the photo of Gabe sleeping, and I take one more peek at it, admiring his long lashes against his fat little cheeks. Of course, I’m bummed I missed bedtime, but the photo makes me smile. Partly because photos and videos of Gabe always make me smile. But also because Jack took those photos. Gabe’s daddy took those photos. Not his grandma or his auntie.

  Don’t you dare feel—

  Not sure what to call it. Joyful. Hopeful. All sorts of stupid set-yourself-up-for-failure emotions. All the things I’ve promised myself never to feel about Jack again.

  Just don’t.

  My phone buzzes. I snatch it off the seat. It’s Jack.

  Mia’s here. Parked out front. I told her I’d call the police, and she called my bluff. I think she’s going to camp out till you show up.

  Face, meet palm.

  —

  I think about driving around until Mia gives up and goes home, but I’m just so damn tired.

  I see her car as soon as I pull onto Jack’s street. There’s a faint light inside the car—her phone. As I pass the car, I see her face, and I’m flooded with a deep, real grief.

  Mia and I have been friends since college; we met one night at a coffee shop, bonding over a shared frustration with the fact that they were out of the chocolate syrup for mochas. She convinced me to follow her to another coffee shop, and then, when there was only one table, to share it with her.

  “Thanks, but—I’ll just wait for a table.”

  I was pretty shy in those days, and she wasn’t my friend “type”—she was small and sharp—her nose, her words, her voice—and she had a frantic energy about her that made me nervous. The idea of having to make small talk with someone like that—it made me want to pull the brim of my baseball cap down and hide.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re commitment phobic, right? I can tell. You think if you sit at my table and it’s awkward you won’t know how to get out of it.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t lie. I can see it all over your face. But it’s not a big deal. You can just get up and go. Hell, you can say, ‘This is awkward as fuck, I’m outta here,’ and you won’t hurt my feelings. Nothing hurts my feelings.”

  That was so foreign to me that my immediate impulse was to demand that she explain how that was even possible. How could you not get your feelings hurt by people? Would she teach me?

  So I sat.

  That was Mia—funny, frank, resilient—the friend I hadn’t known I needed. By the end of the evening, we were laughing so hard we couldn’t catch our breath. The next fall, we moved out of the dorms and into an apartment together and remained nearly inseparable through college and after.

  Over time, some of Mia rubbed off on me. I learned to let things slide off me in a way I’d never guessed I’d be able to. She had a way of reframing things so they just didn’t hurt so much. That girl, the one who’d ignored me in the mess hall—it wasn’t that she didn’t like me. It was that she was stuck in her own head and she hadn’t even seen me. That guy, the one who I flirted with every Friday for a semester without ever coaxing him into asking me out? He was so busy trying to impress his football friends that he’d let love walk right by him if it didn’t look like a blond cheerleader.

  It wasn’t usually about me. Mia could see that, somehow.

  Except this time, Mia is the one who has hurt me, and there is no one who can explain how her betrayal isn’t about me.

  And my feelings hurt so bad right now, it’s all I can do not to turn the car around and drive away, anywhere. Instead, I park in the driveway and get out. She does the same.

  “You should have called.”

  “You wouldn’t have answered.”

  “There’s a reason for that.” I glare at her, at her short, choppy black hair and her red lipstick, her compact body in a sweater and another of her stupid long skirts.

  I hated the skirts even before Harris put his head under one.

  “I know what I did is the worst thing anyone can do. Ever. I know I deserve to have my pubic hairs plucked out one by one—”

  I’m not even tempted to laugh. I’ve never been good at getting or staying angry at Mia. But this is different from any of the other fights we’ve ever had, like the one we had over her refusal to ever throw away food in the refrigerator until it was visibly unsafe, or over my tendency to crawl into my own head and ignore her when I was stressed out, instead of talking about it. This isn’t a fight, really. It’s—

  The heavy weight in my chest is because this is th
e end of the line. If the coffee shop was the beginning, her skirt in my kitchen was The End.

  “Please,” she says, seeing, I guess, the hardness on my face. “I’m so, so sorry. And I know—I know you must be so angry, and maybe you can’t ever forgive me, but you should know that if you can, ever, I am still your friend.”

  Her voice is shaking. I can tell she means it, every word she says.

  I want to ask her so many questions. How she can have the nerve to show up here and even ask my forgiveness. Whether she’s in love with Harris. If they’ve exchanged I-love-yous or made promises to each other. If they’re going to get married. If she’ll live in that condo with him, sleep in my spot in the bed.

  If it creeps her out.

  How she could have chosen him over me.

  If I’d had the choice, I wouldn’t have chosen him over her.

  The thought startles me.

  He wasn’t worth it.

  I didn’t love him like that.

  I meet her eyes, really, for the first time. They are bleak and dead serious.

  She does.

  Maybe it’s not really about me.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suddenly flooded with benevolence and forgiveness. I don’t throw my arms around Mia and tell her she can have him.

  What I feel is more like indifference. But it’s a huge relief, the indifference. It feels like a big breath of fresh air after you’ve been in a toxic place.

  When Harris took me aside in his condo, when I went to pick up my stuff, this is what he said:

  “I know you hate me. And I deserve it. And I’m not even going to bother asking you not to hate me. But if you could find it in yourself not to hate Mia—”

  Mia’s expression pleads with me, now.

  “I don’t hate you,” I say.

  She makes a sound of unmistakable relief.

  “I don’t know if I forgive you, exactly, but I don’t hate you.”

  “Then—are we—still friends?”

  Someone snorts with laughter. It’s not me, and it’s definitely not Mia. I turn toward the house and discover that at some point, Jack has slipped outside and is standing in the shadows, arms crossed, like my silent bodyguard. I’m oddly touched—and pissed.

  “Go inside,” I tell him.

  Surprisingly, he obeys. Or—at least, he turns and walks back toward the front door. At the last minute, though, he turns back toward us.

  “You idiot,” he says to Mia. “It doesn’t matter if she forgives you. She’ll never trust you again.”

  He says it so fiercely that I know—know—he’s not just talking to her. He’s talking to himself.

  His eyes meet mine, and they are dark and—sad. An expression that I don’t think I’ve seen in Jack’s eyes since he was a child, since he gained the ability to hide his emotions from everyone, even me.

  Does that mean he regrets it? Losing my trust?

  He drops his gaze and turns back to the door.

  I’m so intent on watching him as he slips back inside that it’s almost a surprise to me when Mia speaks again. Like I’ve forgotten she’s there.

  “He’s right, isn’t he?”

  Her eyes are sorrowful, and locked on mine.

  I’m so tired.

  “Probably,” I say, and then I turn and follow him inside.

  Chapter 11

  I’m sitting on the couch when Maddie comes inside.

  “What was that about?” she demands.

  “What was what about?”

  I should have kept my mouth shut. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, It doesn’t matter if she forgives you. She’ll never trust you again, I knew she’d find a way to twist them around.

  “What you said to Mia.”

  “Just the truth. She’s an idiot to think she can steal your boyfriend and ever be your friend again.”

  Maddie looks like she wants to say something else, but instead she rolls her eyes at me and sits on the couch across from me. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “You want a beer?”

  She hesitates, then nods.

  I go and collect two bottles from the fridge, pop the tops, and hand her one. She takes a long swallow, and my mouth goes dry at the sight of hers wrapped around the bottle. At the long column of her throat. At the expanse of bare skin visible where her jacket and her sweater part to reveal the vee of the shirt underneath.

  “Harris is right, you know,” she says abruptly.

  “About?”

  “Pot calling the kettle black. With him, and now with Mia, too.”

  See, now, this, this is exactly why I should have kept my mouth shut in both cases. Because I should have known it would lead back here, back to Maddie’s and my history. And that is not a place either of us needs to revisit.

  “They both needed to be called out on their bullshit,” I say, shrugging.

  “And you don’t?”

  I shrug again. “Everyone does.”

  She raises her eyebrows and I wonder if she’s about to call me out, but she just takes another drink of beer.

  I am a tiny bit disappointed that she’s going to let it go at that. Like part of me is hoping she’ll light into me so I can—

  So I can what?

  Sometimes I think about bringing it up with her. Talking it through with her. But then I think, the past is past, and it wouldn’t change the fundamentals of the situation. Even if I could go back and make a different decision that night, it wouldn’t make me a family man. It wouldn’t suddenly deliver us a happily-ever-after, because I’m not a happily-ever-after guy. It’s not in the genes.

  Time for a change of subject. “Did you see anything good tonight?”

  She gives me this confused look, like the thing with Mia and this conversation between us made her forget completely how she spent her evening. I remind her. “Apartments?”

  She sighs, her shoulders slumping. “No. Everything was total crap.”

  She tells me about the one halfway-decent apartment she saw and how she ended up losing it because she didn’t jump on it fast enough.

  “Sounds like a dump anyway. No loss.”

  She looks away, biting her lip. “I just don’t want to be in your hair longer than I have to be. It’s gotta cramp your style.”

  I think of Henry and Clark giving me a hard time about bringing women back here, and feel a twinge of defensiveness. She’s not wrong. I have my share of one-nighters, and more than just Lani on speed dial for booty-call purposes. And since this is the twenty-first century, I’m on the end of a few speed dials myself.

  Though even before I turned Lani down the other night, there have been a few times the last month or two when I’ve had my phone out, ready to call in a favor-with-benefits, and just—stopped. Just stuffed the phone back in my pocket and taken care of business myself.

  Which is a whole different thing with Maddie asleep (or maybe lying awake) down the hall…The last two nights when I’ve given in to the urge to wrap my fist around myself, I’ve tried to keep my mind from straying into her room, from crawling under the covers with her—but I’m not having much luck.

  It’s not the lack of one-nights and booty calls that’s going to kill me. It’s the temptation under my own roof.

  As if to illustrate the point, she licks a drop of beer off the rim of her bottle, and I feel it like her tongue’s on me.

  Steady, Jack.

  What was the logic we arrived at yesterday for why we shouldn’t fuck each other into next week? It has officially fled my mind.

  “You’re not cramping my style.”

  If you’d like, I could show you a thing or two about my style…

  “Not yet.” She sighs again. “I’m going to look again tomorrow night. The sooner I find something, the sooner I can get out of your space.” She takes her phone out. “I have to figure out timing tomorrow. I think I need Janice at six a.m. She’s gonna hate me.”

  “At six, why?”

  “That’s when I have to leave
for work.”

  I grimace. She twists her mouth wryly and nods. “Seven to three thirty, Monday through Friday.”

  Plus every third weekend. That part I know by heart. This one coming up is her work weekend, my usual weekend with Gabe.

  Gabe’s usual weekend with his auntie and grandmother, that is. Gotta own that. Except it was really fun being with him today. I took him the same places my mom and Sienna take him—the playground, the ice-cream parlor, the five-and-ten—but it was different when it was just him and me. Like we were just pal-ing around, hanging out.

  He’s actually pretty easy, now. Like, almost a person.

  “I can watch Gabe in the morning until I have to leave. At seven forty-five,” I say.

  She looks like it’s on her mind to say something disbelieving, but we went through that drill yesterday when I offered to watch him today, and all she says is, “If you’re sure?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  I half expect her to refuse, but she doesn’t. She just says, “You can put a show on TV for him when you need to take a shower.”

  “Sure.”

  I watch as she texts Janice, her long, slim fingers tapping, her curved fingernails making a slightly hollow sound.

  “I’ll be back from work by four thirty, so I’ll take over from Janice then.”

  “I’m back around six,” I say.

  Then we sit for a minute, drinking our beers.

  She’s curled up on the couch now, tucked into the corner with the extra cushions Sienna insisted on buying for me, even though I can’t see the point. Maddie’s got one elbow draped over the back of the couch and her knees pulled up. As I watch, she sighs and sinks a little deeper down, like she’s letting go of the day’s stress—the failed apartment hunt and the confrontation with Mia. I feel some of the tension go out of me, too.

  It’s—oh, fuck, they’re going to revoke my man card—kind of cozy.

  —

  Monday morning, Maddie gets up, hustles herself out of the house, and leaves Gabe behind with me. I take him out to breakfast. Work is sucking hard right now and I need all the fuel I can get.

  I sit him next to me at the Blue Plate Special counter, where he dangles his legs and eats a gigantic waffle with syrup and butter. I have the farmer’s breakfast. Three eggs, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, toast, coffee, and OJ.