Chapter 2 It Should Be Surprising
Chapter 2
It Should Be Surprising
B y the time I sat down at my desk at my office the next morning, my phone was lit up with texts. Before my breakup, I’d been an early riser. Up with the sun, yoga on the patio, side-hustle tasks from my home office, half my to-do list crossed off by the time I arrived, early, at work.
I never would have guessed that Will had been some kind of glue holding the responsible bits of my life together, but in the weeks since he’d moved out, my nights stretched later and my mornings became more acquainted with my snooze button. Yoga and sunrises seemed like friends I hadn’t talked to since college; the other morning I’d leaned over to pet my cat and yoinked something in my lower back as if all of my flexibility had packed up and left with Will. My ADHD had been well managed with medication and careful scheduling since my diagnosis a few years back, but it felt like all it took was this one life change for everything to fall offtrack.
My inbox chimed with three new messages in the span of a couple seconds, so I turned my phone face down on my desk and set all my attention on my work computer. The truth was that I’d worked in the entertainment industry since I’d arrived right out of college, and I’d learned at my first assistant gig that the workday rarely actually started at nine, and even more rarely beforehand. I might have missed my old self, with her crossed-off tasks and ability to pet cats without bodily harm, but it was doubtful anyone at my office had even noticed. Getting here at nine sharp instead of ten-’til still meant that I was usually the first executive in the door, and my routines here were still, blessedly, intact.
Anyway, it seemed unlikely that the texts I’d already received would contain the one I not-so-secretly hoped for. Chloe Lee didn’t seem like someone who’d text a girl before business hours. She also didn’t seem like someone who’d text a girl like me at all, but I’d stared at Gillian Anderson’s face on my phone several times last night to accept that it had indeed happened.
I had no idea what to make of her, and that, in and of itself, contradicted something I’d very much wanted to be true. When the idea had been new, just a little germ of something growing in my subconscious, ending things with Will and starting over, there’d been this one hopeful light that glowed stronger and brighter as it all took shape.
It wasn’t only that I felt like I’d missed out on something, realizing that I wasn’t only attracted to men only figurative moments before meeting a guy I’d date for nearly twenty years. It was that—well, I knew women! My best friends—Will excepted, if Will counted—were women! I was a woman, with three-and-a-half decades of experience being one. There was no way, I’d thought, that dating women would be more difficult than dating men.
And now I was only a few hours into my first attempt at my new queer life, and I’d honestly never felt so confused by a person and their intentions before.
“Good morning!” Tamarah, the department assistant, leaned into my office. She was dressed in a bold yellow fit-and-flare dress that was striking against her dark brown skin. Her dark brown braids were tossed casually over one shoulder. I’d absolutely never looked so put-together in my early twenties. Her hands were even wrapped around a steaming ceramic mug of green tea; Gen Z seemed to make such healthier morning choices than I ever had as a youth.
“I saw all of those vendor proposals come in,” she said, nodding at my inbox. “Should I drop them into the presentation? Just so you know, Aubrey asked me to put together a deck, so …”
“No, I haven’t even reviewed everything yet, help Aubrey and then check back in with me,” I said. “Please and thank you, sorry, tell me if I ever sound like a taskmaster.”
“You could never ,” she said. “I’ll check in with you in a while.”
“Sounds good,” I said, turning back to my inbox. Eventually, I made my way through my morning emails, popped into the office kitchen for a cup of coffee, and returned to my office to flip over my phone and see if my hopes were to be dashed or not.
Family meeting tonight, urgent, 7pm sharp!! Attendance is MANDATORY!!
Five minutes later, my brother Greg had sent a follow up message: Dinner will not be served!
Three minutes after that, another message from Greg: Red alert! Don’t park in the driveway!! It’s being repaved!!!
I sighed deeply and, instead of dwelling on the annoying evening I was bound to have, tapped back to last night’s text from Chloe. If a photo of a fictional FBI agent counted as a text. Did I actually hope she’d text me, or did it just fulfill the fantasy of the woman at the bar and my number in her phone? Honestly, at the moment I couldn’t sort out the difference. It had been so long since I’d wondered if someone was interested in me, and everything had changed since. It had nothing to do with the fact that Chloe was a woman; when Will asked me out, iPhones didn’t exist. There wasn’t really any social media to speak of. I did have a cell phone when I met Will, a tiny flip phone my parents had insisted on buying for me before sending me off to college, but I don’t remember going around exchanging cell phone numbers on campus. You always just found people. And one day later after chatting in the campus bookstore, Will cut me off on my way into my Marketing 101 class, and that was that. Twenty years ago it seemed like people met each other that way all of the time. Now it might as well be the story about my grandparents on my mom’s side meeting in the line to vote for Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Are you getting these messages?? Please confirm!!
I sighed and texted back to my brother that I’d try to make it by seven. He and his wife lived up in the suburbs, where we’d grown up, so rush hour traffic made it tough to guarantee an on-time arrival. I actually had no idea why I’d agreed to these demands so quickly; I had better things to do with my evening than jump when my brother said how high, but at least whatever this was would then be over with. Maybe other people would be alarmed at an urgent and mandatory last-minute family meeting, but the last time Greg issued a red alert, it was to inform me that I needed to chip in a few hundred dollars to buy some fruit trees and other plants for Mom and Dad’s backyard, a gift we had never before discussed. Tonight, I was sure, would be similarly low-stakes.
I knew that I should have just established some firmer boundaries with Greg long ago, but I was sure I’d missed that opportunity when it had presented itself. This was just how things had settled, now that the two of us were adults. And so now I did things like fight traffic for a family meeting that could have been an email.
Tamarah popped back into my office. “Aubrey might need me for a while, but if you need my help, tell me it’s urgent and I’ll avoid her instead.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, please don’t hide from anyone. We’ll get everything done before deadline.”
“The audience research stuff is really interesting,” she said, dropping the volume of her voice a few notches. “But I really like all the media stuff with you. Do you think that could ever just be its own job? It seems like you’re really busy, and I’d never complain about having a lot to do, of course, but—”
“No, understood,” I said. “I think there’s a lot to consider—and most of it wouldn’t be up to me. But it’s been on my mind, too, so I’m glad you brought it up.”
When I’d started at Big Marketing Energy, I’d been thrilled at the prospect of building a department from nothing. The owner and president of our boutique marketing agency encouraged me to do things the way I’d always wanted to back in the days when I reported to other people. And I had , and slowly over the last five years, media planning and buying had earned BME a bigger and bigger percentage of their yearly profits. But I was still a one-person team with a shared assistant, and the more business that came my way, the more I wondered how sustainable the current setup would be. If Tamarah was feeling it too, things were definitely shifting.
My day continued like most of my workdays did; unremarkable but full of enough small tasks that I felt mildly satisfied when I was wrapping things up at the close of it. Google Maps said I could still get to Greg’s in time to ring the doorbell at seven sharp, but as I slipped on my cardigan and grabbed my bag, my boss, Phoebe Reyes, leaned into my office.
“Hey, great work on that digital proposal,” she said, her tone bright. “You know how I feel about a well-designed slide.”
“I do, but I have to give Tamarah credit there; she’s very good in PowerPoint.”
Phoebe had started this company completely on her own after running marketing at a couple of major studios, but none of those viciously competitive and potentially toxic vibes seemed to have worn off on her. She worked as hard—if not harder—than anyone who reported to her, and yet the entire team tended to put in reasonable hours and the idea of a work-life balance was all but taken for granted. Considering she had a beautiful family and an incredibly cool and aspirational friend group, she was absolutely leading by example there.
“I was actually thinking …” I shook my head quickly. “Sorry, I’m sure you have somewhere to be. I won’t derail your PowerPoint slide love.”
Phoebe laughed and stepped into my office. I knew she was only a few years older than me, but she projected authority in a way I’d never possessed—and felt comfortable stating I never would. Today she was in a blue patterned button-down over gray slacks, with casual blue boots completing the look. Her short, nearly black hair had started graying over the last few years, but the effect only made her seem wiser and, somehow, cooler.
“What’s up?” she asked, casually leaning against my desk. I’d give anything to be a person who could casually lean.
“I’ve just been thinking how much busier I’ve been on a pretty consistent basis,” I said, doing my best to make hand gestures that showed that I in no way thought this was a serious matter. “It isn’t just the proposals; we seem to be booking a higher percentage of the work we’re proposing, and we’re just such a small team.”
“Sure,” Phoebe said with a nod. “It’s like one and a third people.”
“Yeah, exactly. Which has been fine, but, lately, I wonder …”
“If the media team should be expanded into a full department? I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, too. Tell you what, why don’t you put together a presentation for the board, and we’ll see how it goes.”
I nodded quickly before her words actually sank in. “Wait, we don’t have a board. Isn’t that just you?”
Phoebe grinned and made her way back to my doorway. “Yes. It’s just me.”
“When?” I asked. “Did you have something in mind?”
“No, take some time to think about it. Maybe within the next couple months?”
“Sounds good,” I said, and while it sounded a great many things—stressful, unexpected, terrifying—that much was true, too.
“Oh, and I think we’ve got another project from Celebration Pictures coming in next week,” she said. “I don’t have all the info yet, but sounds like Jeremy’s calling because it’s got a queer subplot and he always trusts us in that category. Don’t worry—I know straight people are very capable of doing the media planning for gay movies.”
“Uh-huh, of course,” I said, looking down at my hands and then at the doorframe near Phoebe and not making eye contact whatsoever. Coming out had always sounded like a big and serious thing I might have to manage someday; I’d already semi-rehearsed the kinds of things I might say if I fell in love with someone and was eager to tell the world. But I didn’t have a queer girlfriend and a great love story! I just had queer thoughts! I wasn’t having queer sex; I was watching queer porn. This particular speech I hadn’t rehearsed at all.
“I should get home to my wife and kid,” Phoebe said, fortunately apparently completely unaware of the maelstrom of identity weirdness swirling around in my brain. Would coming out feel different if I had a straight boss? I genuinely had no idea.
Phoebe headed out of my doorway and down the hallway. “Have a good night, Clem.”
“You too,” I said, and waited a polite few moments before heading out to our parking lot. By now I was going to be at least five minutes late, and while that would have been no cause for alarm for anyone else in the greater Los Angeles area who understood how both offices and rush hour traffic functioned, I spent the drive north on the 5 Freeway steeling myself for the reception that was likely awaiting me.
I parked right in front of Greg and Marisol’s place. It was a sweet little suburban home, stucco and siding and shiny tile. If it were plunked down in the middle of the Eastside of LA, I’d love it, but I’d never entertained moving back to the suburbs for even a split second. Home reminded me of growing up, the clichéd path of never quite fitting in, in ways I couldn’t fully pinpoint, to the escape route of college in another state. Even if it was only a couple dozen miles up the freeway, it was the world I left behind.
Despite Greg’s earlier text, the driveway looked the same as always, so I walked right up it to the front door and rang the bell.
“Hi, Clementine,” Marisol said, swinging open the door. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me that someone-not-awful willingly married my younger brother, but Marisol was nothing less than wonderful. “How was the drive?”
“Not terrible, so I’ll take it.” I gave her a light hug before stepping inside. “Your hair looks great. I saw your Instagram story about growing out your bangs—”
“You’re late.” Greg walked into the room and glared at me. Actually, he was already glaring at me when he entered the room. “Some of us have to get up early for work and can’t make plans late at night.”
I glanced at my phone. “It’s seven-oh-six.”
“Greg actually has something exciting to talk to you about,” Marisol said with a smile. “And thank you. I don’t think I’m ready to grow out my bangs yet.”
“You made the right call. I did it like six years ago—remember? I looked like a disaster for like a solid four months.”
“No,” Marisol said, shaking her head. Her wavy dark hair rippled like a princess’s out of a fairy tale. “You never look like a disaster.”
Greg cleared his throat. “Mom and Dad’s fortieth anniversary is coming up in a few months, and I’ve decided we should throw them a party.”
I frowned because it was actually a pretty good idea and I should have had it before him. I supposed that ending my long-term relationship gave me some leeway, but I still hated the idea of being less thoughtful than my younger brother.
Also, the truth was that even though a great deal of my adolescent identity had been tied up in being the good kid, the kid who easily made my parents proud, the kid with a bright and hopeful future, now that I was down in LA proper while Greg was five minutes across town with a beautiful wife and two adorable children, I’d definitely been demoted to lesser child. Of course he’d come up with a thoughtful party and I had done absolutely nothing.
A medium-sized crash sounded from down the hallway, and Marisol darted off like this happened all of the time. I supposed when you had kids, life was probably just one medium-sized crash after another.
“Do you need to go—” I started, but Greg cut me off with a quick shake of his head.
“Marisol’s handling everything. If you had kids you’d get it. It’s not all some big emergency.”
“I didn’t say that it—sure.” Greg seemed constantly set on framing everything through the lens of how much harder and more serious his life was than mine, except when it was actually less hard and less serious, which was also something he could somehow hold against me. It was easiest to just let it go. “Anyway, yes, I agree that we should throw a party. What do you need from me? I’m happy to do whatever.”
Marisol walked back in, hand in hand with Lulu and Julian, who were four and five, respectively. Both of them looked more like my sister-in-law than my brother—or, well, me—with their dark hair and tan complexions. I was glad that my family’s future generations didn’t have mouse-colored hair or pasty complexions; it felt like an improvement for the Hayes descendants.
“Your aunt Clementine is here,” Marisol said. “Don’t you want to say hi to her?”
While they had inherited their looks from their mother, the kids had clearly inherited their dad’s feelings toward me, because this question was met with a mild shrug from each of them.
“Hey, guys, I like your sweatpants,” I said, because I did—child-sized versions of regular track pants were objectively adorable—and also because I never knew what to say to children. I’d assumed once I had my own niece and nephew that it would be different, but it didn’t matter that we were related. I was still making desperate and awkward small talk while their small eyes judged me.
“Aunt Clementine, is it true you fell off a seesaw?” Lulu asked.
“No,” I said, confused at the accusation. “Wait, I did, but it was a really long time ago. I was your age.”
“It’s really easy to stay on a seesaw,” Julian said—well, barely said, through his laughter. “There’s handles!”
“You must be bad at seesaws!” Lulu said, as Greg joined in their laughter. Nice to know he wasn’t entirely humorless these days. I was torn between wanting to save the good name of my teeter-tottering self and letting go of something that happened over thirty years ago.
“It should be a surprise,” Greg said, as Lulu shrieked and Julian threw a Squishmallows squirrel at my head.
“That was all very surprising,” I said, unsure if I was allowed to throw stuffed squirrels back at small children. Probably not, despite that it was tempting.
“He means the party,” Marisol said with a laugh. “Don’t you think your parents would love a big surprise party?”
“Oh, um, maybe,” I said, trying to imagine it, all of us popping out and screaming Surprise! at my parents. Mom and Dad weren’t exactly popping-out-and-screaming sorts, but they did always thank us earnestly whenever we did something for them. “Surprise parties are hard, though. You have to do all of this weird lying to keep the secret. I did one for Will’s thirtieth, and by the time the day of the party rolled around I was ready to just tell him.”
“You know, some of us have real jobs,” Greg said, because a while back he’d misunderstood one of my Instagram posts and decided that I did relatively little for a living. “So we’re used to hard work. I think we should make it a surprise party and not take the easy way out.”
“Fine,” I said, resisting the dig about my job because doing otherwise—up to and including “accidentally” once sharing my LinkedIn profile to our family group chat—had never made a difference. “So, again, what do you need from me? Tell me and I’m on it.”
“I have a list,” Marisol said, handing me her planner, heavy with color-coded tabs. “Maybe figure out what tasks you can handle and we’ll work on the rest?”
“Sure,” I said, as the squirrel flew over my head, “that makes sense.”
“Does Will’s friend still work at that brewery?” Marisol asked. “I remember he got us that great deal on those kegs for my work party the other year.”
“Oh,” I said, taking a step back from everyone. “Will and I … aren’t together anymore.”
Greg and Marisol exchanged a look, as I wondered how many more times I had to share this information. It made me want to wear a hat with I broke up with Will beautifully handstitched on the front.
I knew that lots of people had an ongoing group chat with their family. Will, for example, was in constant contact with his parents and two younger sisters via text. I was certain that group chat was overly active the day of our breakup. My family, though, had just never pulled toward communication that way. Our group chat very rarely activated.
“Anyway, yeah, I can still probably talk to Mateo,” I said, though I wasn’t firm on the politics of breakups yet. Will had kind of been my first and only, as far as relationships went. Could you text your ex’s best friend to get a discount on beer? What had Will told Mateo about me? I’d always liked Mateo, with his dad-joke sense of humor and the way he treated brewing beer like creating great art. Maybe I’d just never get to talk to Mateo again.
“Great, I’m going to put your name by that task,” Marisol said, clearly unaware of the beer-related panic roiling through me. Was it good or bad that no one seemed to notice all of the crises unfolding in my brain? “Do you want to take a photo of the list and then text me what sounds good to you?”
It was a better idea than anything I’d come up with, so I took out my phone from my purse to snap a photo. My home screen announced Chloe Lee New Message but I calmly unlocked my phone, navigated to my camera app, and took only four blurry photos before I managed a good one.
I knew that people with kids tended to eat earlier than I did, but I still thought that Greg and Marisol might ask me to stay for drinks or a snack or something, but it became clear our interaction was over. So even though it had been less than a half hour since I’d arrived, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone else in the world would think this was a conversation we needed to have in person, I kept all those thoughts to myself.
“Why are you leaving?” Greg asked, as I slipped my purse strap over my shoulder and stepped to the door. “You’re supposed to take that envelope.”
“What envelope?” I asked, calmly, instead of screeching What the hell are you talking about , a move for which I felt I practically deserved an award for restraint.
“Here you go.” Marisol rushed over smoothly, a big padded mailing envelope in her outstretched hand. “We remembered how nicely you had everything framed for our wedding present, and thought you could take some photos of your parents and a copy of their wedding program to have done the same way.”
It was such a thoughtful idea I couldn’t be annoyed. And also maybe I’d misread the situation, maybe snacks and a drink were next up. I glanced hopefully in the direction of the kitchen.
Greg caught my eyeline. “I said no food .”
Oh my god. “You said no dinner , actually.”
“We already ate. Anyway, now you can go,” Greg said, his voice awash in finality. OK then!
All I wanted to do, really, was to swing through a drive-thru—the suburbs were so great for drive-thrus, compared to my neighborhood—and get back on the 5 for what I hoped would be a traffic-free drive home. But that text message was too hard not to think about, so I was still parked right outside of Greg and Marisol’s when I tapped on the bright red 1 notification.
What are you doing tomorrow night? Meet for drinks at Johnny’s?
The text took over my thoughts the entire time I sat in the In-N-Out drive-thru and the entire time I sped fifteen miles above the speed limit down the 5 so that the French fries were still vaguely warm when I arrived home.
“I’m back,” I called, even though in our two weeks of living together I’d learned that my new kitten roommate did not run to greet me. After all, I’d never run to greet Will, and yet I’d still appreciated when he called out a hello to me. Though I hoped that the cat and I would have a different—and more hopeful—future together.
Will was allergic, so I’d written off cat ownership as a goal that would remain unfulfilled. And I’d accepted that, rabidly following Instagram cats in lieu of loving any of my own, making cat toys at first for acquaintances but now on a regular basis for Etsy customers. But after my night of frantic gay-googling, I realized that women were not the only thing I could add to my post-Will existence. During downtime the next workday, I downloaded a pet adoption app and then spent that evening swiping right on tabbies and tuxedos. By morning I had seven follow-up emails, and more adorable kitten details than I thought possible. Eggnog loved to groom your hair while you watched TV! Mr. Buttons played fetch with crumpled up bits of newspapers! Kevin gave kisses on your forehead! I made an appointment with the first rescue organization that had responded, and found myself driving to Pasadena that evening to meet a tiny Siamese mix named, concernedly, Jesse Pinkman.
“Gus, Walter, and Lydia are all already gone,” the rescuer had told me. “Only Jesse is left.”
“Just like on the show,” I’d said, and she’d given me a funny look while I’d waved a feather on a wand for Small Jesse Pinkman to bat at. You’re the one who gave these kittens weirdly not-topical meth kingpin names , I’d thought, so why am I the weird one for remembering who lived and died? I hadn’t really known how to end the interaction, but then Small Jesse Pinkman had climbed up on my shoulder and purred when I’d petted him, so that was that.
I stared at Chloe’s message a while longer while I wolfed down my burger and fries. Small Jesse Pinkman dashed out from under the sofa and hopped up next to me, where he bit a fry directly out of the tray. I probably was supposed to discipline him, but a kitten with a French fry in his mouth was too adorable to yell about. Plus I admired his moxie; he saw what he wanted and he went right for it.
Feeling inspired, I replied to Chloe. Sounds good. 7?