by Naomi Niles
“Be ready in twenty minutes,” said Zack in a low growl as we reached the front yard. “I’ll have Darren take you to the airport.”
I tried to imagine Darren sitting silently beside me in the front seat of his pickup, refusing to speak to me and turning up the music to full volume when I tried to talk. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just call a cab.”
Zack shrugged and continued on his way toward the barn.
***
But those last moments in the house weren’t as awkward as I had feared they would be. His mother could sense that there was discord between us and kept trying to ask him why he seemed so upset, but he just stalked past her without offering a response. When I told her I was leaving, she must have known then that we had fought while out riding, but rather than choosing sides she poured me a glass of her famous blue lemonade and played a video of Zack rocking out to Nirvana when he was all of about six years old. I pretended to be entertained, grateful for the distraction.
I called Renee in the cab on the way to the airport and told her I was coming home. “What?” she balked. “Already?”
“Zach and I had a pretty nasty fight,” I explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when you pick me up.”
As much as Renee and I had been fighting lately, and as moody as she had been ever since it became clear Max was about to break up with her, there was no one else in the world I would rather have seen waiting for me when I stepped off the plane at JFK at around sundown. The moment she spotted me in baggage claim, she ran up and threw her arms around me, and we stood together like that for a long moment, neither one wanting to be the first to break away.
“So,” she said as I followed her through the parking garage, “what happened?”
“Can we, like, not talk about it just yet?” I replied. “I just want to go home and get into my pajamas and sit on the couch with you watching every Colin Firth movie in chronological order.”
“Fair enough,” said Renee. “But you know Pride and Prejudice alone is going to take, like, six hours.”
“I don’t care; I’m supposed to be out of town for the next week, and as long as we don’t tell my boss I’m back early, I don’t think he’ll mind. I’m supposed to be putting in some hours while I’m gone, but I just want to watch every movie.”
“Okay,” said Renee, “but after we finish Kingsman you’ll have to tell me what happened between you and Zack. You can’t keep me in suspense like this indefinitely.”
“Fine,” I replied. “But not until then.”
As we sat on the couch that night watching Dutch Girls, I checked my phone periodically, half-expecting to find Zack had texted me and apologized for the way he had behaved that morning in throwing me out of the house and humiliating me in front of his family. But he never texted, and I went to bed still waiting.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Zack
It was my dad’s birthday, the reason I had gone home in the first place. And Kelli wasn’t even here.
I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. It’s hard to explain the sense of betrayal I felt when she offered to help me write an exposé on the Navy. She wanted to turn me against my own buddies. I wondered if her boss had put her up to this or if she was driven by some longstanding grudge against the military because of what had happened to her in Somalia. Maybe she had been planning her revenge for the last twenty years and she saw in me, finally, a chance to get even.
It wasn’t how I had expected this relationship to end. She had played her role so convincingly, had almost made me believe she really loved me. But then there at the end she had finally tipped her hand. Dad always used to say you could pretend to be someone else for a while, but in the end the truth would come out, so it was better to be who you were. Kelli had proven the truth of that. If she had really believed she could keep up the charade all the way to the altar, she was a bigger fool than I thought.
When I woke up the next morning, I found Dad seated at the dining-room table wearing one of them red pointed hats looking slightly embarrassed. Curtis and Darren sat on either side of him, dressed in their Sunday finest, and even Gandalf the dog wore a red bow. Mama was making French toast, maple-roasted bacon, smoked sausages and banana pudding, and had brewed a fresh pitcher of orange juice to replace the one we had drunk yesterday.
I’d known since before I got up that Mama was getting ready to give me a lecture, and she did not disappoint.
“It’s a shame Kelli couldn’t have stayed longer,” she said as she set the gravy boat down on the table. “Of all the girls you’ve brought home, I think I liked her the best.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a shame things didn’t work out.”
“What happened, exactly?” asked Curtis, reaching for the pitcher.
It didn’t seem fair to talk about what she had done when she wasn’t here to defend herself. “I’d rather not get into it,” I said curtly. “Sometimes things just don’t work out.”
“You’ve just gotta keep looking until you find the right one,” said Darren. “She’s out there somewhere, but you’ll never find her unless you go after her.”
“Darren,” I said, “you’re the last person in the world who ought to be lecturing me about ‘finding the right one.’”
“When’s the last time you even went on a date, Darren?” asked Curtis.
“Doesn’t count if they were drugged,” I added.
“Y’all need to be stopping so mean to poor Darren,” said Mama. “Give him enough time, and he’ll find the right girl”—which was the funniest thing anyone had said so far.
I had thought that would be the end of the lectures, but after breakfast, Dad asked me to come outside and help him with the fence post. We’d been working on that fence post for about a year now, and it wasn’t any closer to being fixed. I’d figured out a while ago that Dad only used the fence as a pretext to have conversations he couldn’t have around the rest of the family. Reluctantly, I grabbed my shovel and followed him outside into the bright August sun.
We hadn’t been out there for more than a few minutes before he asked me, “So what really happened between you and Kelli?”
I knew he was going to keep asking me until I gave him a straight answer. Reluctantly, I told him about how she had learned I was writing a book and how she had offered to help me expose the “evils” of the military.
“And you know I hate that shit,” I told him. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s liberal do-gooders who think they’re single-handedly going to bring down the world’s most powerful military, who think they’re better than us because they’ve never had to kill nobody, when the only reason they’re not dead or enslaved is because we defend them.” I was so worked up I wanted to hit something, but I settled for ramming the shovel into the dirt.
“Well, I don’t know all the details of what happened, but from what you told me, it sounds like she had a pretty traumatic experience with the Navy when she was little.”
“She did, and I don’t blame her for that, but look, it was one bad apple. The entire Navy isn’t like that, and she ought to know that better than anyone.”
Dad stood silently for a moment, staring down into the hole we were digging as though lost in thought. “This just feels like the sort of thing that you could have worked through with a bit more communication,” he said finally. “When your mother and I was first dating, she walked by the malt shop one Thursday night and saw me sitting at the bar with a pretty girl. She called me that night and broke up with me. It wasn’t until a few days later, I figured out why she had done it; right away I went over and explained to her that the woman had been my therapist. I hadn’t wanted to tell nobody I was seeing a therapist because I didn’t want to embarrass myself. But I made things a lot worse by not talking about it.”
“Dad, that was a completely different situation,” I said, feeling irritated. “You know I respect you and Mom, but things were a lot different when you and her was coming up.”
“Well, I just think you ought to talk to her before doing anything rash,” Dad said. “If I was her, I’d be panicking right now, wondering what I had done and why you had thrown me out of the house.”
“I thought I made it pretty clear,” I replied.
“Maybe so, and maybe you’ll talk to her and realize you did the right thing by making her leave. But I don’t want you to look back in a month or a year and wonder if you did the right thing, and not be able to take it back.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Kelli
On the next morning, I finally came clean to Renee about what had happened between me and Zack.
We were sitting in the corner booth of a boutique coffee shop on Tenth Avenue, eating soft scrambled eggs and cinnamon-glazed bagels—she had all but given up on her diet in the last couple days since breaking up with Max. Rain lashed the windows, and outside a howling wind tore umbrellas from pedestrians’ hands. Overhead the pale amber bulbs in their brass fixtures did little to illuminate the midday gloom.
“I’d never seen him that angry before,” I told her. “It wasn’t the kind of anger where he yells and threatens you. That kind of anger is scary, but it has a way of diminishing the one doing the yelling, making them look smaller. He got really quiet and told me to pack my bags. Somehow it was way scarier.”
Renee took a sip of her macchiato. “I remember Dad used to do that when we were little. That’s how I would know I had crossed a line, not when he yelled when he whispered.” She shivered.
“Yeah, so those were the last words he ever spoke to me.” I glanced sadly at our reflections in the dim window. “I’ve never had a relationship end so abruptly, like a balloon that someone punctured with a needle. If you’d told me twenty minutes before that I would be on a plane back to New York within the hour, I’d have thought you were joking.”
“I can’t imagine being that impulsive,” said Renee. “He probably regretted sending you away the moment you were gone.”
“If he was that worried about that, then surely he would have called or answered my texts by now. I have to assume he was being serious, and he really doesn’t want me in his life. But I’m still not even sure what was so bad about what I said.”
Renee shrugged. The rain was getting louder, and she had to raise her voice to be heard over the gale. “I mean, who knows with some people? I’ve known women get mad at me because they didn’t like the kind of pants I was wearing. Some folks are just easily offended and irrationally angry, and it’s got nothing to do with you; it’s just how they are. Honestly it’s probably best that you figured it out now.”
“I guess,” I said with a shrug. “But there’s always a part of me that blames myself, even when I know in my head I did nothing wrong. If someone I really cared about me is mad at me, then there has to be a reason, right? But that’s not always the case. Sometimes they’re just mad.”
There was a shelf full of old board games standing in a corner of the shop. Renee grabbed Trouble and brought it over while I finished the last of my cream cheese.
“I haven’t played this game since we were in Mogadishu,” she said, opening the box like it was some sacred relic. “And if I’m not mistaken, it was raining then, too.”
“So anyway,” I said, shoving my plate away. “Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
“Are you still going to write that article?”
I watched as she took the board out of the box. “I don’t really see the point anymore. Zack’s response was so hurtful that I sort of lost interest. I know at some point I’ll have to explain to Evan that I don’t want to write it, and then he’ll be pissed. It just feels like men are impossible to please.”
Renee frowned, a pained look on her face. “I know Zack’s opinion was important to you, but you can’t let it control you. If you really wanted to write this article, then you should write it.”
“I guess.” I watched as she removed the totems and arranged them on the starting square. “What are you going to do now that you and Max are finished?”
“Well,” she said, “now that I have all this free time on my hands, I’ve been thinking about maybe starting my own yoga studio. How would you like to be my partner and co-manager?”
I had to laugh at the earnestness on Renee’s face. “That sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” I replied.
Renee shrugged in defeat. “Well, it was worth a shot.”
By the time we had finished our first round of Trouble, it was almost 11:00am. I tried texting Evan a couple times to let him know I was stranded and wouldn’t be able to come in until later. But when he didn’t respond, I was forced to hail a cab.
I spent the next twenty minutes in traffic while the rain fell miserably down around us. I knew it was best if I didn’t put off telling him I had given up on his pet project; I’d have to let him know when I reached the office. I had no idea how he was going to react. He had been dangling the lure of a promotion in front of me, and at this point, I would almost certainly never get it. I gazed sadly out the window at a girl in a pleated skirt and neon-pink rain boots who was skipping up the street, heedless of puddles. I had never seen anyone enjoying herself so much. I hadn’t even known it was possible.
I descended into the basement at noon to find Dennis half-buried under a blanket with a space heater at his feet while Evan sat at his desk under the drain pipe looking increasingly harassed by the constant drip-drip of water from overhead.
“My kingdom for a DeliWorld sandwich and a pair of headphones,” he muttered in irritation. “I understand this was how the Chinese used to torture people, and it was arguably more effective than waterboarding.”
“If it rains anymore, this basement is going to be under three feet of water.” I pulled up the one empty chair in the room and sat down. “Maybe we ought to consider going home for the day.”
Evan ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of agitation. “You know when you come in an hour late and immediately ask to go home, it doesn’t exactly reflect well on you.”
“If you think that’s bad, wait till you hear what I have to tell you.” Evan raised an inquisitive brow. “I’ve thought long and hard about the offer you made me—”
“Don’t say it—”
“And I’m afraid I can’t accept for personal reasons. I’m already sort of notorious in the military community for being a ‘traitor’ and whistleblower, and I don’t want to sink my reputation any further.”
Evan buried his face in his hands. “Do you know how much I was counting on this?”
“I do, and I’m sorry. I realize my previous experience made me seem like the perfect person to write this exposé, and in theory that’s true. But I have to take my own feelings into account. I’m not just a machine that spits out essays, but a woman with a life of her own to look after. Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s how it is.”
By the time I’d finished speaking, my hands were shaking. I sank back into the chair, feeling exhausted, and coolly waited for his response.
“You really haven’t been helping yourself out lately,” said Evan with a shake of his head.
“Well,” I said quietly. “I can’t please everyone.”
“No, but you could try to put in some actual work, sometime.” He waved me away. “Go on, go back to your desk. I have a lot to get done today, and you’re not making my job any easier.”
I stood up and returned to my desk. Dennis lifted his blanket just long enough to flash shocked eyes at me, then promptly lowered it again. I pulled the last of my bagel out of my purse and finished eating it thoughtfully, feeling simultaneously proud of myself for defending myself and worried about losing my job.
My one consolation was that at least I didn’t have kids, or a husband, or even a boyfriend to look after. I could find another position pretty easily if I needed to, and I would probably have to. I remembered something Zack had once told me back when we were still dating: “This job is beneath y
ou,” he had said, and before I could get angry, he added, “You deserve so much better than this.” Looking back on it now, I realized he was probably right: it would be a mercy when Evan finally let me go.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Zack
As much as I enjoyed my last few days at home, I was eager to get back to Manhattan. I missed the bustle of the city, the live bands, the rooftop bars, the parks and art museums. But somehow, Kelli had gotten tangled up in all that. When I thought of the city now, I thought of her. When I smelled the barbecue wafting down Harlem Street on my first night back, I was viscerally reminded of her.
I guess it sometimes happens that you meet a person in a certain place, and the two become linked in your mind ever afterward. Kelli was New York to me now. I couldn’t walk down the street without thinking about her. If I had wanted to get away from her, I would have had to leave the city entirely. And that wasn’t the sort of thing I was prepared to do just yet.
On that first night back in my apartment, I lay in bed for a couple hours listening to the steady drip of a drain pipe coming from behind the wall. More than once I was tempted to reach for my phone, but then I remembered Mama saying how much time I had been spending on my phone since Kelli left. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who hides in the Internet because the world is too much. So I lay there trying not to think about her, trying to ignore how alone I felt, and trying not to let my feelings sink me.
The next morning, I didn’t even bother making breakfast. Instead, as soon as I got up, I went over to Carson’s apartment.
“Get up,” I said, charging through the door without knocking. Carson, who was once again lying naked on the couch, scrambled to throw a blanket over his legs. “You and me have got things to do today.”
