Scot on the Rocks

I left the meeting in a daze and walked back to my office on autopilot. I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be going with Jack to the client. I was really counting on that time alone to talk to Jack. An hour’s drive there and back were all I needed to apologize and make him realize that he was still madly in love with me. I even had a cute outfit planned for it and everything.

I walked back to my office and slumped into my chair. How was I going to get Jack back if he wouldn’t even speak to me? He hadn’t returned my phone calls or e-mails since we’d been back and my only hope at getting him alone was the work we’d been scheduled to do together.

The phone rang and I checked the caller ID. Jack’s name came up. Jack was calling me! He must have been trying to act professional in our meeting so that neither one of us got fired. Surely, if he’d told the partners we were going to Healthy Foods tomorrow they would have noticed that the man is totally, completely, madly in love with me. I should have known it was all an act all along! Turns out, Jack really is a good actor!

“Are you back in your office?” he asked me.

“I’m right here,” I said and a smile came to my face.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m swinging by.”

Of course he was coming to my office! Because Jack still loves me. So it doesn’t even matter if I have to work all weekend or miss going to the client or any of it at all. Because I have what I really want — Jack. Well, truth be told, I’d rather not work all weekend, but…

I began to prepare for the big reconciliation. I shuffled through my purse for some lipstick and Listerine breath strips. Making up is the best. It’s so good that it almost even makes up for the actual fighting. No doubt Jack will come up to my office, pull me into his arms while he says, “I was crazy to ever let you get away, even for a minute,” and ravish me right there on my desk. Just thinking about it made me blush and smile even wider.

Then I began to panic. I reached for the pressed powder and blush, and even pulled my hair out of its bun and flipped my head upside down to give my hair a few good shakes.

Just as I was scouring my drawers for some perfume, he knocked on the door.

“Come in,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, waving my arms above my head to make the cloud of hair spray and pressed powder dissipate.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” I said, getting up from my desk so that I could be at the right angle for him to pull me to him and ravish me.

“You left your legal pad in the meeting,” he said, holding it out at arm’s distance.

“Oh,” I said, grabbing the pad. I flipped the pad over, hoping that Jack didn’t see the front page where I’d scribbled Jack, Jack, Jack with little hearts all over it.

“Jack, we should talk,” I said.

“Talk?” he said. “I don’t think that there’s anything left to say.”

He turned on his heel and walked out the door before I even had a chance to formulate a thought.

26

When I got back to Vanessa’s apartment after work that night, she was sitting on the couch, glued to the television screen, flipping through the channels. The apartment still smelled like cheap Mexican takeout. I could tell she had been crying.

“Bad day?” I asked her. She nodded her head yes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, throwing my bag down and approaching the couch.

“I don’t think that I’m ready to talk about it yet,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, “when you are, let me know.” She nodded and kept flipping channels. I picked my bag back up and went to the spare bedroom — my bedroom for the past few weeks — and threw my stuff down and took my shoes off. Unbuttoning my pants as I walked, I opened the closet door and grabbed a pair of pajama bottoms to change into. On the closet floor there was a basket that hadn’t been there that morning. Trying as hard as I could not to peek inside (read: not at all), I saw a pile of picture frames with assorted pictures of Vanessa and Marcus. I knelt down and picked the first one up — a sterling-silver Tiffany picture frame filled with Vanessa and Marcus’s wedding photo. I ran my finger along the side and felt a tear come to my eye. I could barely imagine how hard this was going to be for Vanessa if it was this sad for me.

“Did you eat yet?” Vanessa called out from the living room. I jumped up like a kid who had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, almost dropping the frame that I was holding in the process. “There’s some leftover chicken fajita if you want it.”

“Thanks,” I said, making a fast exit from the closet and changing into my pajama bottoms as quickly as I could, practically tripping out of my black work pants as I did so. I walked back to the living room in a walk-run to account for the time I’d been nosing around Vanessa’s guest bedroom. “I’m not really hungry,” I said, throwing a pillow against the side of Vanessa’s lounging body and putting my head down. She continued flipping through the channels.

“I have some Lean Cuisine frozen pizzas,” she said.

I jumped up from the couch and headed toward the freezer. I noticed that Vanessa had thrown out the carton of Rocky Road ice cream that had been there just this morning. Marcus’s favorite.

“Did Marcus move his things out?” I asked, turning from the freezer to face Vanessa. Her eyes stayed glued to the television screen.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s strange, though. He was never really here that much, so the place doesn’t seem any emptier.”

“How do you feel?” I asked, taking the frozen pizza out of its box and turning the oven on.

“Sad, mainly.”

“Sad because it’s sad, or sad because you did the wrong thing?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“It’s never too late to change things if you did the wrong thing,” I told her.

“Do you really think that?” she asked, turning to look at me. I answered her quickly. I didn’t need to think about it at all — I really did.

What if when Jack had asked me, I’d considered for more than just one day whether one of us should leave the firm? What if I hadn’t shrugged it off? Hadn’t shrugged him off?

And why had I done that? For a job that I didn’t really like? Not that I would have immediately quit my job for a kiss, but maybe if I’d taken him more seriously back then, I wouldn’t have let the last few years just pass me by. Jack would never have gotten engaged and I would never have met Douglas and Jack and I would be together. Like I told Vanessa, you can’t change the past, but it was never too late to change your future.

Those very words came back to haunt me the following morning.

“You can’t change the past, but you can change your future,” she sung, leaning over my bed at 6:00 a.m.

“Five more minutes, Mom,” I moaned as I tried to pull a pillow over my head.

“No way!” Vanessa yelled as she pulled the pillow off my head, “You said that we were turning over a new leaf today!”

“That was really more for you than me,” I said, eyes still tightly shut. “I meant that you should turn over a new leaf today. My leaf is just fine.”

“What about all those changes you said you were going to make? You said,” Vanessa reminded me as she opened the wood blinds, “that you were going to start training for next year’s marathon with me?” As I turned over to face away from Vanessa, I vaguely recalled telling her the night before that I would begin training for the New York City Marathon with her. However, at the time, I was trying to convince her to let me eat raw cookie dough from the tube (she seemed to have some silly concern about raw eggs), and I really would have said anything just to get the goods.

“Statement made under duress,” I said, opening my eyes slowly. It was so early in the morning that the room didn’t get much lighter with the blinds open. “Not admissible.”

“Well, I’m holding you to it,” Vanessa said, grabbing the blanket off my bed and dragging it behind her as