Chapter 2 Hungover Memento
Hungover Memento
Saturday, Now
The wine was probably a mistake.
Well, the mistake was the three blueberry spiced mojitos I had before the wine, but adding malbec to the workload of my already struggling liver probably wasn’t wise.
I shouldn’t have introduced myself to the family celebrating their nana’s eighty-fifth birthday as “the youngest divorcée in the restaurant.” I definitely shouldn’t have kept repeating that icebreaker throughout the night after it crashed and burned the first time.
When I blink open my eyes, the sliver of light peeking out from behind my blackout curtains pierces my eyeballs like they’re little chunks of steak sliding onto a skewer. My fingers peel a crusty strand of hair out of my mouth but pause at the sight of Sharpie on my hand.
Wet Ted
It seems my night at Ruth’s Chris Steak House took a turn and the subsequent hangover has plummeted me into a detective novel against my will.
I wander toward my master bath to piece together the victim’s final hours.
The victim, in this case, is my head, which throbs like some particularly anxious soul pried my brain from its skull and squeezed it like a stress ball.
Who Ted is, why he is wet, and what “Wet Ted” is doing on my hand in Sharpie is something I cannot emotionally take on right now, but in releasing the contents of my stomach into the formerly pristine toilet bowl, the night returns to me in flashes, like hungover Memento .
I think I cried. I don’t remember it, and I’m not typically a crier, but feelings have a way of creeping up on me when my defenses are down.
I rub my forehead and massage the face muscles, which feel fatigued in the way they only do when I cry.
But that might be the hangover. Or whatever I did after I put on my sports bra and leggings.
And clip-in rowing shoes. Dear god, did I drink and row? Again?
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’m not much of a drinker. I don’t like feeling out of control, and I rarely know where my car is parked sober, let alone the morning after a night of debauchery.
I have a vague memory of leaving my car at home and Ubering both ways, but I peek out the curtains to verify that there’s a Prius in my driveway.
My little silver car is there. And so is a gigantic white cargo van.
I didn’t steal a van last night, did I?
Okay, I’m 99 percent sure I didn’t steal a van last night. People who aren’t otherwise prone to grand theft auto don’t itch for a joyride after only three blueberry spiced mojitos. And a malbec.
I grab my phone from the charger and pull up my email to look for any clues about the provenance of the cargo van.
Did I overnight a couch? I’ve been meaning to buy furniture, but I’d hoped to make a day of it at the Galleria’s Crate & Barrel—wandering the showroom, flopping into one Lounge Collection configuration after another, imagining the possible futures that come with each small, seemingly permanent decision, like choosing between the boucle fabric and the linen weave.
Though I made those same mental calculations when I purchased my Restoration Hardware custom Cloud sofa with Rich, and look where that got me: the youngest divorcée in a steak house chain, drunk-dialing Wayfair because I secretly love a flat-packed bargain.
I find no shipping confirmations in my email and finally brave the driveway, where the front wheel of the van is gently crushing my azaleas.
There’s no driver behind the wheel. It doesn’t not look like a delivery van, but something about the scene tickles a spot in the back of my head like a tiny thread on my brain stem, waiting to be unraveled.
I knock. There’s no answer but the muffled rustle of a creature inside. I pause, and when the movement stops, I bang on the door of the van, the metal bellowing.
A male voice curses and slides open the van door with aching slowness. My limbs vibrate. It can’t be…He wouldn’t…
Hey, you. That little flicker in my chest recognizes him, and I know with devastating certainty that the person waking up in my driveway is Ethan Powell.
With a subtle lift of his chin, he reveals more of that face a Pitchfork writer once described as “obtrusively magnetic,” and I lose all sense of time analyzing every new bit of him that is both exactly the same and completely different from the last time we were together.
His face is as lit from within and sun-kissed as ever, with new lines etched by time and inconsistent sunscreen application.
His hair is the same warm brown with new salt and pepper strands woven in.
Though it’s too short for a bun now. He must’ve gotten a haircut.
He pushes his hair back in that boyish, sleepy way so his steely-blue eyes collide with mine, and suddenly, I’m thirteen again.
I’m under our tree, messing around with my dad’s Canon and resisting the urge to photograph Ethan while he’s strumming a couple chords to see if he “finds something.” He never wrote songs, he “found” them, like they were hidden in the corners of his mind, waiting to be uncovered by a sunset or the chorus of rain beating against the windows or the sound of Petey and Laurel arguing over Mario Kart.
“Chuck.” He greets me with a tilt of his head as he hops out of his dorm room on wheels, and suddenly, I’m eye to eye with Ethan Powell, the boy who at one point knew me better than anyone on the planet, whom I now keep in touch with primarily through memes and text message reactions.
It’s the sad, predictable trajectory of countless childhood friendships as one barrels into adulthood.
Once upon a time, I spent every day with this boy and knew the exact noise he made when he slurped soup. Now I send him GIFs.
Which raises the question, why is Ethan Powell sleeping in my driveway?
“What are you doing here? At my house? In a camper van?”
“Well, good morning to you too. You look…” His eyes snake up my body like he’s surveying damage to his car after a fender bender.
I recall the way I woke up this morning and stiffen.
He may be just as I remember, but nothing about me is the same.
Last time we saw each other, I was about to get married.
I was on a career upswing. I was looking at houses and had momentum. Now I’m…untethered.
Ethan’s grin crinkles his face in that irresistibly charming way I’ve never been able to trust, as though he’s a basset hound and I’m merely a person in front of him with sausages in her pockets.
“I’m sorry. You look really bad,” he says ruefully.
“I shouldn’t have started that sentence, but it’s just so bad, I had to say something or—”
My laugh cuts him off. It catches us both off guard.
It’s just such an Ethan thing to say. He’ll tell anyone what he’s thinking, 90 percent of the time, at least. It’s that pesky 10 percent that’s always been a mystery to me. When I think I’ve got a handle on him, he rips the rug out from under me and I’m left crashing to the floor.
“Your hair is, uh, mid-takeoff—” He reaches for my head, but I swat his hand away. “Are you in tap shoes?”
I look down at my clip-in rowing shoes and back up at Ethan. I’m not prepared to explain. “Yeah, yeah. You look like shit too.”
He folds his arms with a sideways smile. “I can’t look worse than you do.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this very early morning visit?” Or any kind of visit , I don’t say out loud, because I’m unreasonably excited to see my friend parked on my landscaping, and I’d hate to scare him away.
“I told you I was going to be nearby.”
“And I never responded.”
His head tilts, confused. “You don’t remember responding?”
My stomach floats into my chest as my dehydrated brain tumbles around my skull searching for any inkling of what he might be referring to. My cheeks burn hot. “Obviously not.”
Inside the van, I spy the sun reflecting against a kitchen cabinet handle and a fret of the acoustic guitar leaning against it as he yanks the door shut behind him.
“You texted me,” he explains. “A lot.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls through the damning evidence: a humiliating wall of gray text bubbles. All from me. Every so often he reacts to one or attempts to respond, but my messages move from one topic to the next at a breakneck pace.
“Oh god.” I hand him back the phone. If I had anything left in my stomach, I’d vomit it up. Right there on the pavement.
His forehead scrunches the way it does when he’s trying not to laugh.
“Don’t be embarrassed, Beekman,” he tells me, pulling me into his arms with his signature warmth, which I’ve never been able to resist. I can’t help but lean into it.
“I like it when you drink and meme. And I would’ve come if it was one text or a thousand.
I’ve missed you. It’s been way too long. ”
I huff a laugh into the collar of his T-shirt.
We’re about the same height, so my face always ends up in his neck.
I don’t know if he still smells like sugar donuts or if my brain has permanently grafted that smell onto him over the years, but it’s nice, whatever it is.
He smells the way he’s always smelled to me.
It’s comforting to know some things never change, even when the world feels like a current that’s sweeping my feet out from under me.
“How long can you stay?” I ask.
His chin drops onto my shoulder. “As long as you need.” His voice is steady and sure, and I feel my defenses slip a little. Then he says, “But…I’m playing at a festival in Grand Marais next weekend.”
There it is.
As much as Ethan teases me about my devotion to my calendar and the routine predictability of my life, his bursts of spontaneity are far more tedious.
I could set a clock to Ethan’s wanderlust. Just when you’re starting to get used to him, he’s itching to take off.
Love it or hate it, it’s who he’s always been.
His restlessness is my unremarkable constant.
“But I have nowhere to be all week.” He says it like it’s an eternity. For him, it probably is. “Are you hungry? It’s been ages since someone’s complained about the way I order cereal.”
I pull my head back so I can properly rib him: face-to-face. “It’s not just the way you order it. It’s that you order it. Who orders cereal at a diner?”
“Someone with celiac,” he says, even though we’ve had this particular argument countless times before.
“You’re still hopeless without me, aren’t you, Powell?”
His smile is so wide it reveals his elusive right cheek dimple. “An absolute disaster.”