Maybe he was right. Probably not, but perhaps.
“Now come on, up you go. I brought your favorite.”
“Chai tea?”
“Bucket of spaghetti.”
“For breakfast?”
“Sweetie, it’s 5:00 in the afternoon.”
“Meatballs?”
“What do you think I am, a rookie? Of course, meatballs, but you don’t get any until you take a shower. Your hair is doing a thing all its own, and it ain’t pretty, my dear. Sort of a cross between Cruella De Vil and Broom Hilda.”
I didn’t care how I looked, but the spaghetti sounded good, so I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling lightheaded.
“Someday this will all be a blip in the road,” Eddie said, holding out a hand to help me up.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me to give it time?” I said, grabbing my black-cat leggings and heading to the bathroom.
“I don’t know if it’s true what they say about time healing everything that hurts,” Eddie said. “But it’s the only thing we can think of to say, even if it’s utter and complete bullshit.”
16
“It’s rained a lot since I’ve been down here,” Bryan texted from North Carolina. “But that’s OK, because at least it’s not freezing cold.”
Bryan had found a one-bedroom apartment less than ten miles from his Cassie and Ben. He said it was small but all he needed for furniture was a bed, a couch, and a kitchen table with two chairs. Beyond that, he was starting over.
“There’s so much stuff I need that I never thought of,” he texted. “Like a trash can, a frying pan and a broom. Do you think you could ship down my Blu-ray player? I want to watch the Batman movies with Ben. Can you believe he’s never seen them?”
What I couldn’t believe was that he sounded like the old Bry, the one who went to Halloween festivals and parades and always beat me in mini-golf.
He needed his Blu-ray player, and I needed him, especially now that he sounded like his old self. I would send Bry anything he needed. No, I would drive down and deliver them. I could leave now and be there by sunrise. I realized, for the first time, that if Bryan had moved across town, we’d never stay separated. I’d be at his doorstep when he got home from work every day.
The only thing keeping us apart was the 1,800 miles between us.
But I couldn’t tell Bryan this. I couldn’t tell him how much I cried, or keep him up on family news, like about Ian’s project on the Egyptian empire, or that there was so much lint in the dryer vent it almost caught fire. I couldn’t tell him how I’d lain in bed the days after he left, because I didn’t want him to feel responsible.
Instead, I asked if he was eating.
“Mostly eggs,” he texted me. “Scrambled, hard-boiled, you name it. I still can’t poach an egg the way you do.”
Sometimes you have to leave behind the ones you love, he’d told me.
And sometimes you have to send them away.
Bryan had three solid leads on jobs, and I was hopeful one of them would pan out. He’d be more settled then. In the texts, Bry still called me “honey,” and “sweetie,” because that’s who we were to one another, maybe forever. We didn’t use emojis, because it would always be the crying face.
“Do you see a lot of Cassie and Ben?” I asked.
“I get to take Ben when Cass works on weekends. I’m also looking for some new projects to start in between job interviews.”
I’d imagined Bryan holding Ben’s hands and swinging him over the low waves at Wrightsville Beach, digging in the sand for crabs barely larger than spiders. Cooking burgers on the grill. Riding his bike.
A couple days later, after three glasses of wine, I did the unavoidable: I drunk-texted Bry.
“How’s it going?”
He texted back immediately.
“Pretty good. I’ve had second interviews but no offers.”
“The right thing will come along,” I texted, sipping more wine and looking down at Penny, who was tilting her head to one side the way she did when she was studying me.
“How are you doing? How’re the kids?”
“They’re good, busy, Ian is finishing up spring semester. Maddy started a new job as an assistant in a doctor’s office while she decides what to do with her life.”
“Still not quite sure what to do with that sociology degree, huh?”
“Nope.”
“So, how are you?”
I felt the tears sting my eyes and my heart lurch.
My fingers were poised to text that I was fine, I was good, I was busy. But I couldn’t type those words.
“Not great,” I texted, breaking our silent rule to not tell each other when we were having a bad moment. “I cry a lot.”
“Yeah, I cried on the drive down here.”
“Did we do the right thing? I think maybe I want to take it back,” I texted, looking for Kleenex.
“It’s too late, Jess, you know that. We can’t go back.”
“I miss you,” I said hiccupping. “I miss you every day.”
“Me too. But we did the only thing we could think of to get happy,” Bry texted. “We’ll both be better. Just takes time.”
There was that fucking saying again about time healing things. Time moved like a snail from one lonely day to another, and it didn’t seem like anything was getting any better.
“I love you,” I texted, blowing my nose on a napkin.
“I love you, Jess. Even when I don’t text, know that I miss you,” was his last message for the night.
I fought myself to resist texting him again.
I wanted to message him about the good times, the adventures, like our trip to Salem, Mass, known as the “witch city” for Halloween when we’d dressed up for the Witch’s Ball in a fancy hotel believed to be haunted.
We went as a Day of the Dead wedding couple. I found a hoop-skirted wedding dress at a thrift shop and Bry bleached out an old suit. I got a Marie Antoinette wig, snowy white,
