The Ex

by Freida McFadden

  As casually as I can, I get on the Starbucks line. I don’t look in Joel’s direction and pretend I don’t even know he exists. When it’s my turn, I order my usual: a vanilla latte. Then I take out my phone as I wait for my drink to be made.

  Don’t look in his direction. Pretend he isn’t even here. He will come to you if he wants to talk to you.

  “Hey…”

  I glance up from my phone, and sure enough, he’s gotten up from his seat and he’s standing in front of me. And God, he looks so good. He didn’t engineer this meeting—how does he manage to look so great? I lower my phone and throw my shoulders back, reminding myself he saw the photo of me dressed to the nines last night and “liked” what he saw. And as his eyes sweep over me briefly, I can tell he likes what he sees yet again.

  “Hey!” I flash an easy smile. Easy, breezy. “How are you? It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “I’m good.” He rakes a hand through his dark hair. Are those slight purple circles under his blue eyes? Maybe he’s not doing as well as I’d thought. “But you… you look great.”

  I check his tone for pity, and there’s none. He means it. “Thanks. I’ve been… pretty busy. You know, work… life…” Television… ice cream… alcohol…

  “I can see that…” He manages a crooked smile. “Actually, I’m really glad I ran into you.”

  My heart speeds up in my chest. This is the third time we’ve “accidentally” run into each other since the breakup five months ago, but this is the first time he’s been interested in anything more than an awkward hello.

  “What’s up?” I say.

  “Well, listen…” He shifts between his feet. “I know your situation and all that, but… I really… I can’t…”

  “Yes?” I can’t live without you. I want you back.

  “I can’t afford to keep paying two rents,” he finishes. The second the words are out of his mouth, he drops his eyes. “I know your financial situation, but… between that and my loan payments, I’m digging into my savings. I can’t… I mean, it’s been almost six months.” He takes a deep breath. “This is the last month I can pay. I’m sorry.”

  My stomach sinks. He doesn’t want me back. He’s just sick of bankrolling our old apartment.

  To be fair, I can’t blame him. Our apartment wasn’t cheap—nothing in Manhattan is—but it’s hard for me to give it up. Everything about it reminds me of Joel, and giving it up would be like admitting we’ll never get back together. That it’s finally over for good.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. He’s looking at his sneakers, which are a shade on the grayscale, with one dark splotch that may or may not be blood. “I didn’t want to yank the rug out from under you, but… well, like I said, it’s been almost six months.”

  I swallow a large lump in my throat. Joel has no idea how bad my financial situation really is, although even if he did, he still wouldn’t agree to keep paying indefinitely. “No, of course. It’s understandable. I… I’ve actually found a new place.”

  I don’t know how I got to be such a liar. I always considered myself an extremely truthful person.

  “Really?” For the first time since I walked in here, a genuine smile lights Joel’s face. “That’s great!”

  I nod. “It’s downtown, in the village. Really cute and bohemian.”

  “Well, congratulations.” He looks like he’s about to reach out and touch my shoulder, but at the last moment pulls back. “I’ll have to… well, if you have a housewarming party, maybe I’ll…”

  I lift my chin. “Yeah, maybe I’ll send out a Facebook invite. You’re welcome to come.”

  Fantastic. Now I’m inviting him to a housewarming party for an apartment I don’t have.

  “It’s really great seeing you,” Joel says, glancing back at his seat with his Caffe Mocha growing cold on the table. “So… uh, I guess… I’ll see you around?”

  It takes all my willpower to force a smile onto my lips. “Absolutely. Great seeing you too.”

  I watch him hurry back to his seat. I stand there in his wake, taking deep, calming breaths. It’s not over. Just because I’m giving up the apartment, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost. I can still save this.

  Chapter 3: The Ex

  “Micro-studios are very trendy right now, Ms. Mascolo.”

  I am standing in the tiniest apartment I’ve ever seen. My real estate broker, Cindy, has now shown me three apartments, each smaller than the last. This one is only seventy square feet. Yes, that’s right. Seven-zero. I need to suck in my breath to fit into the room. There are coffins larger than this apartment.

  “And it’s furnished,” Cindy adds, gesturing at the small sofa pushed against the wall, and the tiny desk smashed into a corner. There’s even a mini-fridge on the side of the sofa, doubling as an end table. “You’ll just need a microwave and maybe some sort of hot pot.”

  “What about a closet?” I ask around the bile rising in my throat.

  Cindy pushes aside a faded yellow curtain and there it is: what may be my new closet. It’s roughly one-sixth the size of my current clothing space. I’ll have to get rid of most of what I own if I move in here.

  I glance around again, sure I’ve missed something. “What about sleeping?”

  I’m certain Cindy’s going to inform me that sleeping standing up is all the rage right now, but instead, she gestures at a set of stairs leading to a nook just above our heads. No wonder the ceiling is so low.

  “You’ve got an upstairs bedroom,” Cindy says, without cracking the smile that I feel such a statement clearly deserves.

  I climb the stairs, which is really more of a ladder than a staircase. It leads to a tiny nook above the apartment where I can put a mattress. When I’m lying there, I will have about a foot of space between my nose and the ceiling. The coffin metaphor is becoming more and more apt.

  “What about a bathroom?” I ask.

  “There’s one in the hallway. You’ll share it with four other residents.”

  I climb back down the ladder carefully, landing unsteadily on my feet. I don’t want to live here. I really, really don’t want to live here. But my options are horrible. I’m too old to deal with a strange roommate, and even renting out a room in Manhattan is pricy.

  I tried Queens. I looked at three apartments there that were at least somewhat larger than this place, but the easiest commute would involve two busses and a subway, totaling three hours of daily commuting time. At least this place is in a good neighborhood—right near Lincoln Center and Central Park.

  “You don’t have anything bigger?” I ask hopefully.

  Cindy arches an eyebrow. “Ms. Mascolo, this apartment is in the upper limit of your price range.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And it will be snatched up by the end of the week. Believe me.”

  I run my hand along the top of the mini-fridge. I get a jolt of electricity and yank my hand away.

  “Oh, you don’t want to touch that,” Cindy says.

  I shut my eyes. This can’t be my life.

  “So do you want the place or not?” Cindy glances down at her gold watch. “I’ve got another client in twenty minutes.”

  “I…” I look around at the tiny living space. My knees feel like Jell-O. I recognize I’m on the brink of being homeless, but I can’t live here. I’ve been here less than fifteen minutes and I’m about to have a panic attack. “I need to think about it.”

  Cindy shrugs. She’s not giving me the hard sell, because she knows someone really will snap up this apartment by the end of the week. But it won’t be me. I’ve still got two weeks left before I have to move out of my current place. I can wait a little longer.

  After we leave the apartment building, Cindy rushes off to another appointment. She’s a busy woman, and I need a place to live more than she needs the commission she’ll get from whatever apartment I choose. I watch her hurry down the block, her cell phone pressed to her ear. She laughs at something the person on the other line says
to her.

  I wonder if she’s laughing about me. About the woman who thinks she’s too good to live in an apartment the size of a walk-in closet. But no, that’s self-obsessed. She’s probably already forgotten me.

  I walk down the street, my eyes peeled for signs hung up to advertise apartments. Every wall in the city is a potential billboard where I could discover my next place to live. Maybe there’s a gem out there that nobody else knows about. Two bedrooms, one bath, located on the upper west side—only five hundred dollars a month!

  God, I’m becoming delusional.

  My eyes drop to the cardboard sign on the street. Homeless. Anything helps. Next to the sign is a woman not much older than I am. She’s sitting on the ground, wearing dirty blue jeans, neon yellow sneakers, and a gray coat with a fur lining on the hood. It’s not coat weather, but she’s got the coat on anyway. Her hair is disheveled—too long and a peppery mix of gray and the same shade of dark brown as my own. She peers up at me with watery chocolate-colored eyes. Her right hand shakes as she extends the Styrofoam cup she’s holding. There is dirt caked into her fingernails.

  “Spare change, lady?”

  Joel always used to tease me that I was far too generous with homeless people on the street. You could go through a whole paycheck walking through the Bowery. He was right. Whenever I see someone down on their luck enough to be living on the street, I feel a rush of sympathy for them. It always gets me to open up my wallet.

  But today, when I look down at this woman who has made this tiny outdoor corner her home, I feel something else:

  Fear.

  I always thought there was a distinct line between me and The Homeless. They did drugs. They were alcoholics. They had mental illness. I was safe from that life because I drank responsibly, said no to drugs, and was sane (more or less). But now, with my rent due in two weeks and absolutely no way to pay it, I realize the line isn’t as distinct as I’d once thought. In two weeks, I’ll be able to take a seat next to this woman on the pavement.

  “Spare change?” the woman asks again, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time.

  I swallow hard, but a lump sticks in my throat. I think about the money in my purse. It’s not enough to pay the rent on a halfway decent apartment, but it’s enough to help this woman out. I dig out five dollars.

  “Here,” I say as I try stuff it in her cup.

  Some of the dullness in her eyes fades. “Thanks.” She hesitates, frowning for a moment, then glances at the 7-11 one store down. “Hey, would you buy me a sandwich?”

  I blink a few times, surprised by the request. I’ve given money to plenty of homeless people over the years, but this is a first.

  “They won’t let me in,” the woman explains.

  “Oh.” That makes sense. “Well, what would you like?”

  “Let me look through the window.”

  She gets to her feet faster than I would have thought, abandoning her sign on the ground. The smell of urine and dirty socks emanates from her coat, and I have to breathe through my mouth. She walks close to me, as if she’s scared she might need my support. This can’t be my future. It can’t be.

  She follows me to the entrance of the 7-11, and together, we peer through the glass door of the shop. I don’t know how she can make out anything, but she squints at the sandwich display and finally says, “Chicken salad.”

  I walk into the 7-11, feeling slightly indignant that they won’t even let that poor woman make a purchase. I squint in the fluorescent lights as I browse the sandwiches, finding two with chicken salad—one with white bread and one with wheat. I debate over which one to buy for far too long, but then realize it doesn’t matter. If she’s hungry, she won’t care if it’s white or wheat. It’s not like she’ll throw the wrong sandwich in my face.

  I take the sandwich to the counter, not bothering to purchase anything for myself. I realize the woman never gave me back my five dollars to buy the sandwich, but that’s fine. I can afford it. For now.

  “Four twenty-seven,” the clerk says without glancing up at me.

  I reach into my purse to pull out my wallet and…

  Wait, where is it?

  I just had it out a minute ago, when I was getting out the money to give to the woman. Did I drop it during the walk here? Is that possible?

  “Just a moment,” I mumble to the clerk.

  I abandon the chicken salad sandwich and hurry outside. I don’t see my wallet lying on the street—and I’d certainly notice it, because it’s red. I walk all the way back to where the woman was sitting on the ground with her sign and… she’s gone.

  Well, the sign is still there. And the cardboard. But the woman and all her belongings are gone.

  That bitch stole my wallet! No wonder she was walking so close to me.

  I stand on the sidewalk, blinking back tears. I can’t believe that just happened to me. As if my day couldn’t be any worse, now I’ve had my wallet stolen by someone I was trying to help.

  I’m not sure how much more I can take.

  Chapter 4: The New Girl

  The only reason Beatrice Muller met Marvin Donovan is that someone nearly pushed her into the train tracks.

  Bea was in the subway station, waiting for the train that would take her uptown to her job as a salesgirl at Gimbels. As was a habit with her, Bea had been carrying a novel within her overstuffed purse that she’d gotten from the Gimbels bargain rack at the beginning of the summer. When the train showed no signs of arriving, Bea pulled the dog-eared paperback from her handbag and started to read, squinting in the dim light of the underground station.

  When someone jostled her, the paperback flew out of her skinny fingers. To hear Bea tell the story years later, that paperback traveled twenty feet into the air to land on the tracks below. (In reality, it was probably more like two or three feet—tops.)

  Nineteen-year-old Bea let out an anguished cry. The book was irretrievable on the train tracks. Not only that, but it was her favorite book. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. The greatest love story of all time, in Bea’s opinion.

  Bea stepped to the edge, hovering over the tracks, which were littered with food wrappers, coffee cups, and now her beloved paperback. She contemplated lowering herself down there to rescue it.

  Then she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up and saw a young man in a white dress shirt. She had always appreciated a well-dressed man, and she also appreciated the way his black hair was combed neatly on his scalp and his green tie matched the exact vivid shade of his eyes. “Excuse me, Miss,” the young man said to Bea. “I’d like to replace that book for you.”

  The man led Bea to a bookstore, which was a short two-block walk from the subway station. They chattered brightly as they walked, and Bea learned that the man’s name was Marvin Donovan and that his family owned a used bookstore, where he had worked since coming back from serving in the army.

  When Bea walked into Bookland, she fell instantly and hopelessly in love. With the store and with the young man who had brought her there. She gazed dazedly at the rows and rows of books, wanting to sweep them all into her arms. Marv plucked a copy of Wuthering Heights from the Classics section of the bookstore, which then filled an entire bookcase and was not nearly as dusty. Marv later told Bea he knew exactly where it was because it was his favorite book as well. She tried to pay him the ten-cent price of the book, but he refused.

  Bea was very late to work that day and it was her third tardy in as many weeks, so Gimbels told her not to come back. But it didn’t matter because when Bea and Marv got married six months later, she went to work at Bookland. It was her dream job. And Marv was her dream husband.

  They kept that bookstore going through thick and thin. There were times when the books were flying off the shelves and other times when they went a whole day without a sale. More than once, they had to do things they weren’t proud of to keep the doors from closing.

  But that’s a different story.

  Over fifty years after Marv gave Bea he
r copy of Wuthering Heights—the one she kept in her nightstand at all times—Marv was shelving books in the sports section of Bookland when he felt a crushing pain in his mid-sternum. He fell to the ground and was cold by the time Bea got back from having lunch with their daughter.

  Soon after, their granddaughter Cassie Donovan started working at the bookstore, to help Grandma Bea out. Of all the children and grandchildren, Cassie was the only one who loved Bookland the way Bea and Marv did. Cassie tried to comfort newly widowed Bea during her shifts at the store, but Bea didn’t need to be comforted.

  “Marv is still here,” she insisted. “His ghost is here with me. Just like Catherine’s ghost came back to be with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.”

  And so Bea continued to insist the ghost of Marvin Donovan haunted Bookland. Whenever a pen rolled to the ground, Bea would pipe up, “Stop making trouble, Marv!” On one occasion, Cassie saw with her own eyes a child’s backpack knock a book off the shelf, but Bea persisted in scolding Marv about “messing with the inventory” for a good five minutes.

  It was sweet. Bea thought Wuthering Heights was the greatest love story of all time, but Cassie knew the greatest love story of all time was between Beatrice Muller and Marvin Donovan. And when Bea suffered a cardiac arrest five years after Marv died, in nearly the exact same spot where they’d found him, it only cemented in Cassie’s head that there would never be a love as strong as the one between her grandparents.

  The romance between Bea and Marv is a lot to live up to. That’s why Cassie hasn’t been on a date in so damn long.

  But tonight she’s going out with Joel, and it’s going to be great. Except Cassie hasn’t been on a date in so long, she’s not sure what the conventions are anymore. Are jeans and a nice blouse appropriate? Must she wear a dress? How much makeup is the right amount of makeup? And why is she obsessing over this?

  “You need more makeup,” Zoe tells her in no uncertain terms when they’re getting close to the time when Joel will arrive to pick her up. Zoe has agreed to close the bookstore. It’s been a busy evening, for some reason, and they can’t afford to close early. She needs the money desperately if there’s any chance of the store not going under.