After he leaves, we both kill a few minutes drowning our fries and the conversation in ketchup.
“So…” I begin.
“So. .” she repeats. Then: “How’s everyone. The rest of the band?”
“Good.”
“Where are they tonight?”
“London. Or on their way.”
Mia cocks her head to the side. “I thought you said you were going tomorrow.”
“Yeah, well, I had to tie up some loose ends. Logistics and all that. So I’m here an extra day.”
“Well that’s lucky.”
“What?”
“I mean. . fortunate, because otherwise we wouldn’t have bumped into each other.”
I look at her. Is she serious? Ten minutes ago she looked like she was about to have a coronary at the mere possibility of being my girlfriend, and now she’s saying it’s lucky I stalked her tonight. Or is this merely the polite small talk portion of the evening?
“And how’s Liz? Is she still with Sarah?”
Oh, it is the small talk interlude. “Oh yeah, going strong. They want to get married and have this big debate about whether to do it in a legal state like Iowa or wait for Oregon to legalize. All that trouble to tie the knot.” I shake my head in disbelief.
“What, you don’t want to get married?” she asks, a hint of challenge in her voice.
It’s actually kind of hard to return her stare, but I force myself. “Never,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, sounding almost relieved.
Don’t panic, Mia. I wasn’t gonna propose.
“And you? Still in Oregon?” she asks.
“Nope. I’m in L.A. now.”
“Another rain refugee flees south.”
“Yeah, something like that.” No need to tell her how the novelty of being able to eat dinner outside in February wore off quickly, and how now the lack of seasons seems fundamentally wrong. I’m like the opposite of those people who need to sit under sunlamps in the gloom of winter. In the middle of L.A.’s sunny nonwinter, I need to sit in a dark closet to feel right. “I moved my parents down, too. The heat’s better for my dad’s arthritis.”
“Yeah, Gramps’s arthritis is pretty bad, too. In his hip.”
Arthritis? Could this be any more like a Christmascard update: And Billy finished swimming lessons, and Todd knocked up his girlfriend, and Aunt Louise had her bunions removed.
“Oh, that sucks,” I say.
“You know how he is. He’s all stoic about it. In fact, he and Gran are gearing up to do a lot of traveling to visit me on the road, got themselves new passports.
Gran even found a horticulture student to look after her orchids when she’s away.”
“So how are your gran’s orchids?” I ask. Excellent.
We’ve moved on to flowers now.
“Still winning prizes, so I guess they must be doing well.” Mia looks down. “I haven’t seen her greenhouse in a while. I haven’t been back there since I came out here.”
I’m both surprised by this — and not. It’s like I knew it already, even though I thought that once I skipped town, Mia might return. Once again, I’ve overestimated my importance.
“You should look them up sometime,” she says.
“They’d be so happy to hear from you, to hear about how well you’re doing.”
“How well I’m doing?”
When I look up at her, she’s peering at me from under a waterfall of hair, shaking her head in wonder.
“Yeah, Adam, how amazing you’re doing. I mean, you did it. You’re a rock star!”
Rock star. The words are so full of smoke and mirrors that it’s impossible to find a real person behind them.
But I am a rock star. I have the bank account of a rock star and the platinum records of a rock star and the girlfriend of a rock star. But I fucking hate that term, and hearing Mia pin it on me ups the level of my loathing to a new stratosphere.
“Do you have any pictures of the rest of the band?” she asks. “On your phone or something?”
“Yeah, pictures. I have a ton on my phone, but it’s back at the hotel.” Total bullshit but she’ll never know.
And if it’s pictures she wants, I can just get her a copy of Spin at a corner newsstand.
“I have some pictures. Mine are actual paper pictures because my phone is so ancient. I think I have some of Gran and Gramps, and oh, a great one of Henry and Willow. They brought their kids to visit me at the Marlboro Festival last summer,” she tells me. “Beatrix, or Trixie as they call her, remember their little girl?
She’s five now. And they had another baby, a little boy, Theo, named for Teddy.”
At the mention of Teddy’s name, my gut seizes up. In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person’s absence will affect you more than another’s. I loved Mia’s parents, but I could somehow accept their deaths. They’d gone too soon, but in the right orderparent before child — though, not, I supposed, from the perspective of Mia’s grandparents. But somehow I still can’t wrap my head around Teddy staying eight years old forever. Every year I get older, I think about how old Teddy would be, too. He’d be almost twelve now, and I see him in the face of every zitty adolescent boy who comes to our shows or begs an autograph.
I never told Mia about how much losing Teddy gutted me back when we were together, so there’s no way I’m gonna tell her now. I’ve lost my right to discuss such things. I’ve relinquished — or been relieved of — my seat at the Hall family table.
“I took the picture last summer, so it’s a little old, but you get the idea of how everyone looks.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
But Mia’s already rooting through her bag. “Henry still looks the same, like an overgrown kid. Where is my wallet?” She heaves the bag onto the table.
“I don’t want to see your pictures!” My voice is as sharp as ice cracking, as loud as a parent’s reprimand.
Mia stops her digging. “Oh. Okay.” She looks chastened, slapped down. She zips her bag and slides it back into the booth, and in the process, knocks over my bottle of beer. She starts frantically grabbing at napkins from the dispenser to sop up the brew, like there’s battery acid leaking over the table. “Damn!” she says.
“It’s no big deal.”
“It is. I’ve made a huge mess,” Mia says breathlessly.
“You got most of it. Just call your buddy over and he’ll get the rest.”
She continues to clean maniacally until she’s emptied the napkin dispenser and used up every dry paper product in the vicinity. She balls up the soiled napkins and I think she’s about to go at the tabletop with her bare arm, and I’m watching the whole thing, slightly perplexed.
Until Mia runs out of gas. She stops, hangs her head. Then she looks up at me with those eyes of hers.
“I’m sorry.”
I know the cool thing to do is say it’s okay, it’s no big deal, I didn’t even get beer on me. But all of a sudden I’m not sure we’re talking about beer, and if we’re not talking about beer, if Mia’s issuing some stealth apology. .
What are you sorry about, Mia?
Even if I could bring myself to ask that — which I can’t — she’s jumping out of the booth and running toward the bathroom to clean the beer off herself like she’s Lady Macbeth.
She’s gone for a while, and as I wait the ambiguity she left in the booth curdles its way into the deepest part of me. Because I’ve imagined a lot of scenarios over the last three years. Most of them versions of this all being some kind of Huge Mistake, a giant misunderstanding.
And a lot of my fantasies involve the ways in which Mia grovels for my forgiveness. Apologizes for returning my love with the cruelty of her silence. For acting as though two years of life — those two years of our lives — amount to nothing.
But I always stop short of the fantasy of her apologizing for leaving. Because even though she might not
