Real Live Boyfriends

Did she have children? A dog?

I knew she had a boyfriend named Jonah, because I’d seen them together once, at the Birkenstock store where I used to work.

Maybe the photo was new. Maybe she got a pet, or got engaged to Jonah, or had a baby born in the family.

Whatever it was, it had to be important enough to her that she wanted it up in her workspace even though it meant she had to turn it facedown whenever any of her clients were in there with her, which must be most of the time.

Or maybe it was a gift from a client. Maybe some deranged neurotic thought: Oh, I’m going to give Doctor Z a photo of myself so that she can look at me always. And the client was pretty much loony, so Doctor Z had to display the photo whenever the client came for therapy because otherwise he would go berserk and have to be straightjacketed with maniacal grief. Then when he wasn’t there, she didn’t really want to look at it, so she turned it facedown.

“Ruby!” Doctor Z startled me.

“What?”

“Is this subject difficult to talk about?”

“I got distracted,” I said. “What were we discussing?”

“Your relationship with Noel.”

Oh.

Yeah.

Funny how I could forget that, even for a minute. Why is my brain like this? It just switches gears and starts obsessing about something completely unimportant.

“I’m really happy he wants to be together,” I told Doctor Z. “It’s so great to have him back. I’m so relieved.”

She stared at me.

I wasn’t lying.

I really felt that way.

I just felt a whole lot of other stuff too.

She stared at me some more. I could hear the clock ticking. I could hear myself breathing. I could hear someone out in the hallway talking.

I twisted my hair. She knew what I was going to say. And she knew I knew she knew.

“But I’m not,” I said. “Actually. Happy. Or relieved.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Why are people so crap at apologizing?” I said. “I know people feel bad about stuff they’ve done, but still they don’t apologize for it. My dad never apologizes to my mom. He just starts cuddling her or rubbing her shoulders until she stops pouting.”

“Could that be a form of apology?”

“Kind of. But also not.”

“Noel apologized to you. Didn’t you say that he did?”

“Yeah, but ‘Sorry I was so hard to reach’ isn’t a real sorry.”

“Why not?”

“He made it sound like the whole thing was out of his control. He didn’t say, ‘Sorry I didn’t call you back. Sorry I didn’t write you. Sorry I hurt your feelings. Sorry I didn’t run after you.’ ”

“It didn’t feel like a real sorry,” Doctor Z said. She does that a lot. Repeats what I’ve said.

“And when he said sorry he was hard to reach, I said, ‘It’s okay.’ But only because that’s what you’re supposed to say when someone says sorry. Not because I meant it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or maybe because I wished it was okay. But—”

She looked at me.

“—it was a complete lie.”

“Oh.”

“I was basically acting fake the whole night, trying to pretend I was just letting everything go. Or like I hadn’t even minded how he’d disappeared on me and not called me and all that. Like I was some extra-mellow relaxed girlfriend who didn’t care about anything. Like those two poems made up for everything.” I bit my nails. “I kept thinking—all night I kept thinking that if I had never gone over to his house after work, he might never have even called me.”

“Really?”