Consolation (Consolation Duet #1)

by Corinne Michaels

  They say the best way to move on is to let go. As if letting go is the easy part. As if trying to dim or erase three years of memories, good and bad, is something you can do in one day. I know it’s not, because in a couple of weeks, it will be one year, and the memory of him is as potent as if he was still here. His San Francisco Giants sandals are still in front of the sink, right where he left them. The smell of him lingers on some of his shirts—the ones I still haven’t gotten around to wearing to bed. His presence is powerful even in his absence. As I walk around the house making sure everything is out of sight, I know that for me, this is a huge step in the letting go process.

  I’m in the kitchen taping up the last of the boxes, when I hear the jingle of keys followed by heels on the hardwood. Another sound I’ll miss, I’m sure, once I leave this place.

  “Estelle?” she calls out in a soft melodic voice.

  “Kitchen!” I wipe my hands over my jeans and make my way over to her.

  “Hey. You got a lot done last night,” she says, smiling sadly, her eyes glistening as she looks around the nearly empty space. She has the same wild curly hair and expressive caramel eyes her son had. Seeing her makes my heart hurt all over again.

  I shrug and bite the inside of my cheek so that I won’t cry. Anything not to cry over this again, especially since I haven’t in so long. When Felicia pulls me into her arms, I let out a slow breath and try not to completely lose it. I try to be strong for her and Phillip. Wyatt was their only child and, as hard as his loss is on me, I can only imagine the emptiness they must feel. We usually don’t cry when we get together—not even when she comes over here—but selling this place is more than just saying goodbye to a house. It’s leaving Christmas mornings and Thanksgiving dinners behind. It’s saying, “Wyatt, we love you, but life goes on.” And it does, which is one of the reasons I feel guilty. Life goes on, but why does it have to go on without him?

  “It’s going to be fine,” I say, wiping my wet cheeks as I pull away from her.

  “It is. It is. Wyatt wouldn’t want us to break down over a house.”

  “No, he would definitely think we’re dumb for mourning a structure,” I say with a small laugh. If it were up to Wyatt, people would live in tents and bathe in rainwater.

  “Yeah, and he would have cut the electricity on this place two months ago since you’ve been eating takeout anyway,” she adds.

  We shake our heads, new tears forming as the laughter dies and silence settles around us.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with Phillip and me?” she asks, as we walk from room to room, making sure nothing is left out. The realtor is going to start showing the house tomorrow, and it needs to be perfect for potential buyers.

  “No. Victor would be highly offended if I didn’t take him up on his offer. He would probably start bringing up my not wanting to go to the same college as him, not liking the same football team, and the fact that I never paid up and did his laundry for a year that time in high school. I think that’s why he’s so eager to have me move in with him, actually.”

  Felicia’s shoulders shake as she laughs. “Well, tell him I said hello, and invite him to dinner with us on Sunday. We’d love to have him over!”

  “Sure,” I say, my smile disappearing as I notice the sandals on the floor.

  “You want me to take those, or do you want to keep them?”

  “I . . .” I pause to take a shaky breath. “Will you take them?”

  I don’t think I can bear to look at them every day in a new place. I’m already keeping all of Wyatt’s t-shirts, and it’s not like the sandals fit me—they’re like five sizes too big for my feet—but they’re his favorite. Were. They were his favorite. That’s something my therapist had me work on—speaking of Wyatt in the past tense. Sometimes I cringe when I do it, but I’ve gotten better. For a while, I was living this false reality where Wyatt was away on a business trip or something. He loved to travel alone and let the different cultures inspire his paintings. After a month, I started accepting that he wasn’t coming back. After three, at the request of my therapist, I started putting his things in boxes so that I wouldn’t have the constant reminder.

  Putting them away didn’t do much. The house was a reminder, and our art studio couldn’t be packed up either. It was something I had to learn to live with . . . being without him. After six months, I was able to walk in and out of both places without having my heart squeeze in my chest every time. And now, a year later, I think I’m ready to move on. If Wyatt’s sudden death taught me anything, it was that life is short, and we need to live it to the fullest. It’s something I understand, but still struggle to follow through with some days.

  “Honey, everything he left behind is yours, you know that,” Felicia says. I don’t even realize that I’m still crying, until I taste the salt of tears on my lips. I try to thank her, but the words stay lodged in my throat under the boulder that’s settled there.

  After one last look around, we hug, and I promise to see her on Sunday. I glance over a shoulder as I walk to the car, letting my heart squeeze one last time before I get in and drive away. The memories . . . the comfort . . . the past . . . all become a distant picture in the rearview mirror as I head to my brother’s house. I’m running through a mental checklist of things I have to do, when a ringing phone cuts into my thoughts.

  “Hey, how’d it go?” Mia asks in greeting.

  “It was okay. A little sad, but not terrible.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be there. Did Felicia come to pick up some of his things? How is she doing these days?”

  “Good. She looks good.”

  “Are we still going out tomorrow night?” Mia asks slowly, treading water.

  “As long as we stick to one bar, I’ll go. I’m not in the mood for bar hopping and doing the college girl thing you like to do.”

  Mia never shed her wild side persona when we graduated and started living our “grown-up lives.” As much as I love hanging out with her, replenishing my liver with an insane amount of water after drowning it in alcohol the night before isn’t something I can do every week, like she does.

  “Okay, no bar hopping. I have a brunch date on Saturday morning anyway and can’t afford to look like crap, so we’ll take it easy.”

  “A date?” I ask with a frown, as I pull into my brother’s driveway.

  “Blind date. His name is Todd. He’s a curator at The Pelican. Maria seems to think we’d be perrrfect together,” she says, rolling her R’s exaggeratedly to imitate her Italian author friend.

  “Hmm . . . I don’t think I’ve heard of a Todd,” I say.

  Mia and I have known each other for as long as I can remember. Our mothers were best friends growing up and later, married men who were also best friends. Much to our mothers’ dismay, we realized early on that history wouldn’t repeat itself when Mia kept going for the bad boys, while I stuck to the quiet types.

  “Damn. I was hoping you had. Don’t you know everybody in the art world? Todd Stern?” she says, a hopeful note on her voice.

  I laugh because it’s not far from the truth. Wyatt and I opened up Paint it Back—a gallery-slash-art studio—a couple of years ago, and between our artist and gallery owner friends, and Mia’s connections in the photography world, we pretty much did know everybody. Well, obviously not everybody.

  “Nope. Rob doesn’t know him?”

  “I’m not going to ask him! You know my brother has a big mouth. He’ll go and tell my mom, and they’ll start planning a wedding over a guy I haven’t even seen yet.”

  I laugh, knowing she’s right. “Well, I’ve never heard of the guy.”

  “Maria said he just moved here from San Fran, so I figured you would know him. New guy in town and all that jazz.”

  “This isn’t really like high school, Mia.”

  “Actually, it’s exactly like high school, which leads me to believe that if we haven’t heard anything about him thus far, he’s probably ugly.”

  “
You’re probably right,” I agree with a laugh.

  “Shit. Stefano is here for his shoot. Let me know if you need me to come by Vic’s later. Love you!”

  She hangs up in the midst of my goodbye, so I put my phone away and switch of the ignition. I do a quick face check in the rearview mirror to make sure my mascara is still intact and run a couple fingers through my wavy brown hair, picking it up into a quick ponytail. The only sound, as I walk up to the house with the last of my clothes in the bag in my hand, is that of the gravel crunching below my flats, and the waves from the beach just steps away.

  Anticipation buzzes through me as I crouch down and flip the welcome mat to get the spare key out and open the door. I call out my brother’s name as I walk through the door and past the living room, assuming that his car is parked in the garage. I get no response. I head upstairs toward the spare rooms. His master bedroom is downstairs, which is convenient for a twenty-eight year old single male, since the kitchen and living room (complete with a ginormous television) are only a few feet away from his door. When I step into the room, I’m taken aback by what I see. Not only did he make my bed with the new sheets I bought and left here the other day, but he also painted my room a soft shade of gray that I love.

  I leave my bag on the bed and head to the balcony right outside the room. The balconies are one of my favorite features of this house, and what I went crazy over when he was thinking of buying it. There’s one in each upstairs bedroom, and they both face the beach behind the house. As I’m stepping out onto the balcony, the phone chimes with a text message from Vic, telling me he’ll be here in a couple of minutes. As I’m responding, I walk into the back of an easel that wasn’t there when I last visited. Walking around it, I read the huge letters in Vic’s handwriting that say: Welcome Home, Chicken and below, a drawing of a chicken that only a five-year-old would be proud of. I erupt in laughter and snap a picture of it, sending it to Mia and my mom, since they’re the only ones who would get it. My brother started calling me that when I was five and afraid of the dark—like most five-year-olds are—and for some reason, the name stuck. Probably because every time he called me that growing up, it was in the form of a challenge he knew I wouldn’t back down from.

  I turn the page of the large sketchbook and leave it on a blank page before turning my attention to the ocean. My eyes take in the different shades of blues that twinkle in the sunlight—the cerulean, aqua, and midnight blue. It’s a view that can’t be ignored. It’s one that reminds me of how small I am in the grand scheme of things. How small we all are. I’m not sure how long I stand there, just staring. Just breathing. Just enjoying the taste of salt on my tongue that I seem to get from the smell alone. A hand lands on my shoulder and I jump, snapping me out of my meditation.

  “Holy crap, Victor!” I say, pressing both hands to my heart.

  “You like your present?” he asks with a laugh as he pulls me into a hug.

  “Yeah, you asshole,” I say, smiling as I slap his chest playfully.

  “Asshole? I get you the best present ever, and you call me an asshole? It was the terrible drawing of the chicken, wasn’t it?”

  “You know I hate that nickname.” I groan and step into the house, trailing behind him as he walks downstairs. “Where’s the food? I’m starving.”

  “It should be here soon. Let me go change,” he says. “I have to go back to work soon.”

  “You’re going back?”

  “The case I’m working on is a fucking mess. The guy’s wife is trying to take everything he has in the divorce. I don’t know when these athletes will learn that they need a goddamn pre-nup.”

  “Oh,” I cringe slightly. It’s something Wyatt and I discussed when we got engaged—and had huge disagreements over—every time it was brought up. You would never think an artist would care about that, but Wyatt was successful and wealthy. By the time he turned thirty-three, he’d been selling to a very wealthy group of people for years. That same group of people talked him into thinking that marriage without a pre-nup was grounds for a messy separation.

  A knock on the door has me pivoting on my heel. I’m in a daze as I walk over to answer it, thinking, in hindsight, about how stupid the disagreement had been. We weren’t even married when Wyatt died, and his parents insist on me keeping everything. They’re older—much older than my parents will be when I reach Wyatt’s age of death—and they’re wealthy in their own right. The way they see it, they’re not going to do anything with that money, and it rightfully belongs to me since I was half-owner of Paint it Back when he died. But alas, that’s in the past. I don’t want to think about it more than I already have—this is my fresh start.

  The thought brings a smile to my face, which stays put as I swing the door open, quickly transforming into a full gape at the man standing there in a pair of green scrubs and a white doctor’s coat. He’s looking down, trying to wipe scum off his sneakers, his sandy brown hair covering most of his face. I can only make out his strong jaw and the bottom half of his full lips, but I recognize him immediately. When he finally looks up, his green eyes soak me in as they travel up my body until they reach my own. He smiles that slow, uneven grin that always made my breath fall short.

  “Bean,” I whisper, making his lips twist even higher, revealing twin dimples.

  “Hey, Elle,” he says. I clutch the doorknob a little tighter. I haven’t seen him for so long, I’d forgotten the sound of his voice. “Food’s here.”

  My eyes drop to the bags in his hands, and I step backward, opening the door a little wider. “Oh! Yeah. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “It’s been a while,” he says, stopping in front of me as he comes in. I back up to the door and stop breathing completely when he dips his face into mine and lets his lips brush lightly against my cheek. I do everything in my power not to breathe in the familiar scent of him that used to make my head swim. “It’s good to see you again,” he says as he pulls away. The way he says it and the twinkle in his eyes make my heart drop to my stomach. How is it possible that he still manages to do that to me? Even after Wyatt. I hate him for it.

  “It’s good to see you too,” I whisper and follow behind him after closing the door.

  It is so not good to see him, though. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about Oliver Hart, but the only one worth remembering, is that he’s bad for my health.

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