Chapter 3
3
Gabe
Driving down Main Street in my Lincoln Navigator, I feel like I’ve slipped through a wormhole back to high school. I haven’t been back to Kentwood much since graduation. Gretchen preferred to spend holidays in more exotic places, and I’ve worked or traveled most summers. Everything is both familiar and disconcertingly different—shabbier, shinier, a tree missing here, a building torn down there. In high school, my friends and I would cruise down this street, blasting Drake and drinking whiskey out of water bottles. I was usually the designated driver; someone had to keep those guys from wrapping their cars around trees, and for whatever reason I felt like it should be me.
As a rich kid, I really had no choice but to hang out with other members of Kentwood’s upper class. They expected it. My parents expected it. Would I have rather been at home, sorting my rock collection? Yes. But at the time, I reasoned that it was better to have friends, even if they weren’t my favorite people, than be alone.
I’m alone now, though. Listening to sadcore and feeling, admittedly, a little like Jack Lemmon as I watch the storefronts pass by. There’s the appliance store that can’t hope to compete with the Lowe’s on the other side of town, the furniture store I have never seen anyone enter, and the sewing machine repair shop that I’m pretty sure is a front for something. Things get a little more picturesque as you get closer to downtown, but from here Kentwood looks downright depressing.
I tell myself that things could be a lot worse. That even though I have to come back to Kentwood to work as a paralegal for the city attorney, I still have a job. I’ll miss living in Chicago, but with the exception of Paul, I won’t miss my life there.
I’m telling myself that coming home isn’t a defeat, it’s a strategic retreat. I’ll lick my wounds, regroup, and come out of this experience stronger. I might even find out something about The (thoroughly un-Google-able) Girl, though that thought is simultaneously so tantalizing and terrifying that I usually repress it immediately.
I slow the car down as I cross the intersection leading to slightly-more-bustling downtown Kentwood. To my left are the spires of several churches: First Baptist, First Methodist, First Presbyterian, and several more whose names I can’t remember. To my right, I can see the top of the courthouse, an imposing structure of rustic stone that dominates the town square. I’ll report to work there in a few days, but first I have to go to the bank to meet my father for lunch. He told me he has “something” he wants to “discuss” with me. I already know it won’t be a discussion at all, but another lecture about how I’ve failed to live up to the expectations of my illustrious family, who first settled in this area 150 years ago.
I can practically hear my father now.
“Gabe,” he’ll say, “I don’t understand what went wrong. You were on law review your first two years. Your grades were perfect. And then this. ”
Then he’ll sigh and look out the window, like he’s just heard about the death of a beloved family member.
It might even feel that way to him. One minute I’m engaged to the pretty daughter of a prominent local family and at the top of my class at Northwestern, the next I’m doing gig work and refusing all calls and offers of help from home. I gave into the courthouse job out of sheer exhaustion. I can’t possibly explain what the past ten months have been like for me, or that I might not actually want the things he wants me to want.
As I drive around the square, a scruffy dog suddenly runs out in front of the car. I brake hard.
No collar, no leash, and no owner anywhere in sight.
I shake my head. Typical Kentwood. People let their pets run wild here. I’ll never understand it. The last thing I want to do is kill some poor kid’s dog.
I briefly consider getting out of the car and trying to rescue the mutt. Maybe it can be the first of my homestead companions? But it runs off into the alley behind the former diner, now apparently the Kentwood Café, so I decide to let it go. There’s probably no way I’d be able to catch it anyway.
I put my foot back on the gas, only to stomp on the brake again a split-second later to avoid hitting a young woman. I wince as the tires squeal. She jumps back and I can’t help but notice that she’s strikingly pretty.
She’s also furious. Great. Kentwood’s most beautiful woman already hates me, and rightfully so.
We make brief eye contact. She mouths “ What the fuck ” and fixes me with steely gray eyes. Truly gray. River-stone gray.
I know this girl .
She looks away, shaking her head in disgust, her light brown ponytail switching back and forth as she strides into the café.
My hands slowly relax their death grip on the steering wheel as I realize who I just almost literally ran into.
Kayla. Kayla Johnson. A.k.a. The Girl, whose mere memory destroyed my chances of marriage, whose laughter and easy companionship I’ve missed every day for the past eight years, the star of every sexual fantasy I’ve had since I was seventeen. When I go to apologize, will every imagined tryst be written all over my face? Every touch, every caress, every time I thought about wrapping that ponytail around my fist and covering her mouth with mine?
Because of course I have to apologize. It’s the right thing to do. I pull into a parking space in front of the café and wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. I feel like I’ve seen a ghost. And the thought of actually speaking to said ghost makes me feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you haven’t studied for the test and have also forgotten your pants. For the thousandth time, I wish I understood what happened with her. It’s true that I always felt like she was out of my league. She had seemed destined for greatness, the kind of girl who could run a company, or a country, with wisdom and integrity, whereas I was simply trying to stay in my lane and avoid disappointing my father.
For whatever reason, though, she seemed to like me well enough, at least for a while. In school, I was always scheming to spend more time with her—I’d ask her for help with my calculus homework, hang around the diner where she worked, coax her to sit down in a booth with me for a minute or two. She’d play with the ends of her ponytail and joke about the sleazy customers who hit on her, and I’d laugh while secretly wondering if there was a non-sleazy way for me to hit on her too.
Often I’d find her hanging around campus after school; she worked two jobs and her shifts didn’t start until four, which didn’t leave her enough time to go home. When it was warm enough, she liked to read under a big elm near the football field.
“So I take it you don’t share Mr. Bergman’s taste in literature?” I’d called to her one October afternoon. She was leaning against the trunk of the tree, her long legs stretched out in front of her. She would have been the perfect picture of serenity if she hadn’t been reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy with a mixture of horror and delight on her face. When she heard my voice, she tore her eyes away from the apocalypse unfolding on the page and smiled.
“I don’t mind the bodice ripping, it’s the happy endings I don’t like,” she replied.
“Then you’re going to be disappointed by the ending of that book.” She responded to this with such a look of despair that I laughed out loud.
“Noooo! How can The Road have a happy ending?! This is a world where literally the only thing people have to eat are other people.”
“I wouldn’t call the ending happy , just maybe not as bleak as you can possibly imagine.” She frowned at the book, pouting her full lips slightly. She looked so cute that I had to sit down next to her. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to consider my presence an intrusion. “What’s wrong with happy endings, anyway?” I’d asked.
“I just usually find them implausible,” she replied, turning towards me. She folded her legs so that her knees were almost touching mine.
“You find happiness implausible?”
She shrugged and looked away. “Kind of. Especially when someone’s happiness seems to depend on other people. I like characters who are self-sufficient. I don’t think you can ever really count on someone else.”
“Because they might eat you,” I quipped, gesturing toward the book.
“Exactly!” We both laughed, but her comments bothered me. I sensed that she was deeply, maybe even tragically wrong, but I didn’t want to argue with her. We chatted amiably about that book and others until she had to go to work. She seemed to take it for granted that I read as much as she did. For me, though, it was absolutely thrilling to talk to someone my age about topics other than past and future parties. She was as unpretentious as she was smart. I could have talked to her forever.
My so-called friends looked down on her, of course, because her family struggled like so many families here. I never figured out a way to see her socially, and she generally avoided me when my friends were around. Steven O’Connor’s graduation party was one of the only times she’d let me get close to her in public. And when she danced with me, I’d hoped, fleetingly, that she secretly liked me as much as I liked her. But I must have come on too strong. Maybe I acted like an arrogant asshole and repulsed her. Maybe I’m still that arrogant asshole, about to repulse her again.
I take a deep, shaky breath and remind myself that I almost hit her with my car. I need to apologize, just like I would to anybody else. It doesn’t matter if she hates me. She may not even remember me. I step out of the Navigator and force myself to go face Kayla Johnson for the first time in eight years.