Anywhere You Go

Chapter 5

5

Tatum

I’ve been doing some soul searching, and I think it’s best we go our separate ways. I’m not properly committing to this relationship, and you really don’t deserve that. Thank you so much for the time we’ve spent together. I wish you nothing but the best.

I read through what I’ve written again. The bones are good, but this message needs to strike the right balance between definitive and kind. That’s my art form. Delivering a gut punch with a bow on top. The client wanted me to make this one delicate. I chew on my fingernail, thinking about how to communicate that. Maybe a little more self-deprecating?

Don’t worry, I’m definitely the problem here, as usual.

Or go full niceness overload?

It’s hard to say this to someone who has been nothing but wonderful to me.

“Whatcha writing?” One of our line cooks, Maurice, asks me, even though he’s already reading over my shoulder. Peanut, the other line cook, peers at my screen too.

I startle, having no idea how long they’ve been standing there.

They don’t know about my side gig. Maurice and Peanut are some of my favorite people on planet Earth, but they wouldn’t understand the innate fragility of such a task. There’s a real discretion to it—writing people’s intimate messages for them. Maurice and Peanut happen to be the most direct, emotionally brazen people I know. They might be the only people in the world who are capable of drawing an actual argument out of me. We fight like lovers over French fries. We go to war over burger toppings. If they knew I ghostwrote other people’s breakups, they would embarrass the shit out of those people somehow. And me. They’d drag me for enabling it.

“Nothing.” I shove my phone into my pocket.

“You’re breaking up with someone? I thought you were single forever,” Peanut says.

Once Peanut learned I don’t date men, therefore I didn’t want to date him , he has made it his personal mission to vet every single woman I have ever so much as breathed toward. Somehow he’s never heard about the time that June asked me out, which I consider to be a gift. He’d probably spend every shift convincing me to change my answer. Maybe he’d have been at my parents’ this morning, joining their impromptu intervention on my supposed lack of happiness.

“Who is Tatum breaking up with today?” My older sibling Carson stands in front of the cash register, grinning. The mess of brown waves on their head looks a little damp. Could be from a recent shower, or could be from setting off the sprinklers inside another local establishment, then fleeing the scene. You never know with them.

I throw my hands in the air, cursing my ability to get so lost in a task that I shut out the rest of the world. “Should I just connect my phone to the TV and screen share my activities? Pass out a survey for everyone to answer at the end, just to be sure I’m getting all the proper feedback?”

“Yes. I need to see whose heart you’re shattering. It’s been a while.” They lower their voice. “Is it who I think?”

Carson knows about my ghostwriting gig. And they obviously know about June. They also know I don’t want the cooks to know any of this, which is exactly why they’re taking this moment to fuck with me.

“Nobody’s but my own,” I say with a hardened squint.

The problem with Carson’s unbreakable commitment to being a shit stirrer is that there is no way to disable them. If they are in the mood for chaos, chaos it is. I expect to be put on trial in front of the afternoon crew at Rita’s, with Carson as lead prosecutor, offering up my short but memorable roster of ex-girlfriends, emphasizing the fact that I’ve broken up with every single one of them before I love you s could be exchanged.

I’m already drafting up my defense, preparing to explain that in each scenario, it was a kindness. I saved everyone involved from a worse heartbreak by cutting the relationship off before things could sour.

If Carson does the unimaginable and brings up June’s name—with June herself in the diner—I will have to go for the gut and remind Carson that they can’t keep a relationship going either.

Family trauma. Isn’t it lovely?

Instead Carson dips their head down, letting a single brown curl flop onto their forehead. “On a serious note, do you have a minute to talk?” they ask me. “About the email.”

Having no idea what email they’re referring to, I say, “I’m at work,” in my best Captain Obvious voice, even though there is no one else in the diner except for the one and only June, who has on headphones and bobs along to a beat none of us can hear. Hopefully her music is drowning out this very conversation.

“Dad sent us an email,” Carson says instead, intuiting my ignorance on the subject.

“Is this about syncing his phone up with the car? I already fixed that for him this morning. And I don’t have anything in my inbox.” Because of my ghostwriting gig, I have email notifications on. I miss nothing. “Unless…” I say, already knowing where this is going.

Sure enough, my dad sent the email to the AOL account I set up when I was eight and never deactivated. No matter how many times I tell him that BeachyChick204 is not the place to reach me as a twenty-nine-year-old, and that I chose it after one childhood family vacation to the Disney resort in the Bahamas and no longer feel defined by the title—I just keep it around for whenever I have to give my email to a random website—he can’t seem to stop using this address.

The subject of the email is, cryptically, Our Family .

“What’s this about?” I ask. “Dad didn’t say anything to me about an email earlier.”

Carson shakes their head. “You need to read it for yourself.”

I sigh, opening it up.

Hello to my three precious children,

As you know, I have been married to your mother for thirty-seven wonderful years. It hurts to remind you that I have not been faithful the whole way through. I know that it’s been hard on all of us, dealing with the consequences of my poor decisions. Please allow me to apologize for any pain I may have caused any of you.

When I look up at Carson, they are suppressing a laugh of some kind. Nervous or genuine, I’m not sure.

“Seriously, what the hell is this?” I ask.

“Keep going,” they urge.

Your mother and I have worked together in couples counseling for many years. I am grateful to her every day that she gave me another chance to rectify the terrible mistake I once made.

Recently, I told you all you have a half brother. Now I would like for you to actually meet him. We will be holding a family reunion of sorts. A family union, really, opening our arms to the newest “old” member of the Ward clan. The only way for us to heal is to accept him into our hearts. He is one of us, after all.

It will be a week of activities around Trove Hills. All of it is already planned. I did my best to accommodate everyone’s schedules. If you can’t make it to every event, I would really appreciate it if you’d make as many as possible. There are lots of opportunities for all of us to bond. The schedule is attached.

With every ounce of love in my heart,

Your father

My dad doesn’t have the spirit of a prankster. In fact, he is earnest to a sometimes painful degree. It’s one of his most defining attributes, and why he’s so good at his job as a family doctor. He is a sensitive soul who does not believe in pulling one over on you. Still, this has to be a joke. Or a scam. Anything other than a weeklong family reunion with our surprise half brother planned via an email sent to BeachyChick204.

“Am I hallucinating?” I ask Carson, who laughs so loudly it startles the cooks.

“What? You weren’t expecting an email about meeting our secret brother sent with every ounce of love in Dad’s heart ?” they ask. “Personally, I was hoping Dad would announce this through a ten-part video series he could cross-post on all available platforms. I think we could go viral.”

Flustered, fuming, and everything in between, I open my work email again and look at the breakup text I’m working on, erasing everything I’ve already written.

Hey,

We need to break up. This isn’t working between us.

Good luck with whatever comes next for you.

I send it out to my client, then throw my phone into the cabinet under the cash register. Why bother with delicate tactics when the heart of the message isn’t delicate at all? Why do I spend so much time being careful on behalf of other people’s feelings when no one is careful with mine? The relationship is over. That’s all the other person needs to know.

Head spinning, I comb through the storm of my thoughts until I can decide on my next question for Carson. “Has Laney read this email?” Laney is our twenty-five-year-old little sister who lives in Nashville.

“She’s already booked her flight. She can’t get in until Sunday. I’m picking her up from the airport,” Carson says. “I told her not to say anything to you until you read it yourself.”

This sharpens my anger into something specific enough to grab on to—Laney having to fly into town for this supremely weird situation. My siblings planning their travel situation before I’ve even learned of this event at all.

“Dad can’t just drop something huge like this and then not give people the space to think about it. I would know! This is what I do!” My head starts to ache. “We have to spend a whole week with this guy? Dad didn’t offer us any space to consider this or an option to take some time. And to apologize for the pain he’s caused ?”

My shift started twenty minutes ago and I’m already dreading the end of it. Leaving here means going home, and home is the guest cottage. Most nights I stop in the main house before entering mine, picking at the dinner leftovers that my mom hates to have crowd up her fridge. Sometimes we play a board game together or watch an episode of whatever random reality show my parents have gotten into lately.

I tell myself I do this so they aren’t stuck with only each other. Really, I do it for myself too. We’ve all agreed to this strange little life together. As disjointed as it might be if you look too closely at it, in everyday practice, it’s neat. Contained. Charming, even.

When my parents have fallen asleep, dozing off on the couch mid-sentence most times, I walk myself through their backyard, passing all the beautiful, elaborate flowers that Mom tends to as an excuse to stay outside, following the cobblestone path Dad built for her with his own two hands, and I enter the space I’ve lived in since I graduated from college. I usually read a book, comforted by the presence of a story—the knowledge that through fiction, someone else is rocking me to sleep after all, keeping me company in the dark quiet of the cottage—and my head hits the pillow softly, contentedly.

Now my dad is attempting to fix the thing I thought we were all collectively ignoring for the rest of time, and somehow, it hurts worse to have him do that. Because if he wants to fix it now, it means he’s known all along that it’s been broken. For all these years, he’s ignored what’s always been so obvious to me. Maybe for someone else, it would be a better late than never situation, getting his apology and his plan to have us “heal.”

For me, it’s Why now, after all this time?

“Let’s just get through the week,” Carson says. “And be nice to our brother. Whoever he is.”

“Why should I be nice to someone I don’t even know?” I ask. “Why do you want to do that? You’re not even nice to me most of the time, and you’ve known me my entire life!”

This gets a half grin out of Carson. “It’s much easier to be nice to a stranger.”

This is classic Carson, always acting unaffected, pretending this whole situation is casual. Sometimes, it’s a quality in them that I admire, the way they can brush off the biggest of deals. Today, it’s an irritation. I need them down in the trenches with me. I can’t be alone in my struggle.

“C’mon,” I say pleadingly. They give me a semi-sympathetic look, which is the closest I’ll get to any kind of emotion from them, so I switch gears. “What does Laney think?”

“She’s excited,” Carson tells me. “She wants to know what our brother is like. His name is Ben, by the way. She couldn’t find out a lot about him online, but she found his wife really easily. Do you want me to show you?”

“No,” I say resolutely, shoving down my natural curiosity in the name of maintaining my fixed position as person who is staunchly opposed to this event . In our sibling dynamic of three, it’s the best way to secure an ally. If I can’t get Carson to believe my stance is correct, I will have to try to convince Laney. As the youngest of the three of us, she’s always a harder sell, forever determined to be independent. Hence her living in Nashville.

Except now we are four.

Now this whole scenario is different.

I really am alone in this. At least until I can text my group chat of fully biased friends who no longer live here. They will take my side no matter what I tell them. That will help me in an hour or so, when I’ve calmed down enough to redirect my energy toward explaining this whole mess. It would help even more if my sibling, another person directly involved in this situation, agreed with me right now.

Denise appears, handing me a plate of onion rings. “Take this out to table seven.”

It’s June’s order of the hour.

I exhale, relaxed a bit by the prospect of interacting with her. Even when nothing else makes sense, I know our careful, considerate rapport will.

Except when I reach June’s table, she’s looking down at her phone. And to my infinite shock, she’s crying .

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Vanessa just broke up with me,” she says, showing me her phone.

As my eyes scan the text pulled up on her screen, my heart begins to sink, an anchor of despair that starts in my throat and drops into my toes, rooting me in my own misery.

For as much as I want to believe that someone in Trove Hills wrote a word-for-word re-creation of what I sent off to a client not five minutes ago, I know it isn’t true.

“I wrote that,” I blurt out. A weaker person would lie. Most days that’s how weak I would be. Not today. Today I’m strong—trained under the wise tutelage of the line cooks. Today I have nothing more to lose.

June looks up at me. Her eyes—sweet, infinite brown, crystallizing in the midday light—stare into mine. She doesn’t ask a question out loud, because she must know her face has asked it for her. What do you mean?

“People reach out to me online to write things for them. And your girlfriend—” I clear my throat. “Your ex-girlfriend, I guess. Vanessa.” I force myself to say her name, accepting the full reality of what I’ve done. “She asked me to break up with you for her. She messaged me yesterday. I was spending all this time trying to get it right. Finally I was like, there’s no way to get this right. Bad news is bad news, and we can’t protect each other from it. So I sent out this really blunt message. And you’re the recipient. I’m so sorry.”

On that fateful day a few months ago when June asked me on a date, I said, I don’t think that’s a good idea . Because for as much as I’d thought about it, there wasn’t a single scenario in my head that didn’t result in either June and me breaking up, or something even worse, like quietly resenting each other in our hearts while believing we needed to stick it out, because we’d risked the diner bubble for this.

I told her then that I don’t really believe in dating, because it was mostly true, and it also seemed like the fastest way to communicate that my rejection had everything to do with me and nothing to do with her. Well, it actually had everything to do with her and me together. But that seemed too complicated to express.

I thought then that I might not ever see her again. Surely she wouldn’t want to come back to the diner after I’d turned her down. I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was a mild letdown instead of catastrophic breakup. That would have to be enough.

But June kept showing up. She went out of her way to treat me the same way she had before she’d asked me out. So I did the same in return. It wasn’t even hard. I had no trouble treating her with my special Waitress Tatum care, mixing together all her favorite dipping sauces. Checking on her whenever she started to scowl at her computer screen, stressed about some element of her perfume business. Making her laugh as often as I could.

Now, impossibly, I’ve managed to find a way to break up with her anyway.

June starts looking past me—through me, really—grasping for an answer somewhere within the walls of Rita’s Diner. Seeing the way this has rocked her, knowing it’s rocked me much the same, I feel true guilt over my side gig for the very first time.

The ghostwriting thing has always been anonymous. That’s part of the point. Maybe I’m the reason someone cried. Maybe I’ve blown up someone else’s life. But the recipient doesn’t know it came from me. I’m not the one who has to clean up the pieces. They got a message they needed to hear either way, and I got a sense of purpose out of it. I found the words someone else could not. I fixed for them what I’ve never been able to fix for myself. It’s always supposed to be a win-win arrangement. I’m not supposed to know what happens after.

But I do know June. I know every slope of her face. I know her shoe collection and her rotation of handbags. She does a small black clutch whenever she’s in her lace-up boots. She has a large green crossbody she pairs with her white Adidas sneakers that have the green stripes on the side. And she brings a pink backpack for days like today, when she’s turned the back booth into her office. She gets a red imprint from her palm on her cheek because she spends so much time with her head in her hand, thinking.

Whenever she picks music for the jukebox, it’s always Whitney Houston or the Bee Gees. There is no in-between. These are all surface things I guess, but they make up a lot of someone’s life. June is an important piece in the fabric of my day, and I’ve just unraveled hers completely.

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand this. How could you possibly know enough about my relationship to be the one to break up with me?” she asks. “And why would you want to? Who would ever hire someone for that? Why would Vanessa not just do it herself? Did she know it was you who’d be writing it? She couldn’t type out like ten words all on her own? This all seems…too much. It’s too much.”

These are the right questions to ask. And she’s not even asking them with malice. It’s stemming from a place of confusion and hurt. I know it well, because it’s the exact same place I’m in when it comes to this family reunion.

“It’s always been kind of cathartic,” I tell her honestly. “Vanessa might have known it was me.”

For a brief moment I’m also hung up on the how of it all, wondering if Vanessa looked me up online the same way I’ve looked her up. My ghostwriting page is linked to some of my socials, but it’s very low-key. Not something I hide, but not something I’m loud about either.

“But I didn’t know it was her,” I continue, wanting to be sure this point gets emphasized. “People submit anonymously through my website. My page gets traction every few months when strangers make videos about what I do. Through that I tend to get a whole new wave of submissions, a lot of which are spam or jokes, honestly. But I treat them with as much truth as possible, just in case. Most often, people find me because they know me. Someone in my family or friends has told them about what I do. They’ll mention that in their submission, but I try not to look into it too much. I don’t want to know exactly who they are. I’ve never had to meet a person face-to-face.”

June takes me in again, examining my reddening face in the same way I’ve examined hers. In this appraisal, she seems to make a decision, nodding as if she’s learned something about me that I can never rewrite, no matter how much I want her to believe I’m not a bad person.

“Why did she want to break up with me?” she asks, wiping fast-falling tears from her cheeks.

Not only have I never met one of my anonymous clients in person—that I know of for sure—I certainly haven’t shared an initial request with a message recipient.

“She said you’re too fragile,” I tell her, wincing as I say it.

If this is how I lose her presence in my life, at least this will end with me telling the full truth. She deserves that much. And I’ll have my perfume to remember her by, even if it doesn’t capture the apparent complexity of me, the not-so-middle sibling who has a not-so-perfect-anymore life. Maybe moldy towel is exactly what I should be smelling like considering the circumstances.

June hides her face behind her hands. She’s now crying so hard she’s embarrassed by it. My impulse to care for her becomes too great to ignore. I slide into the booth across from her and reach out to grab her hands, which is not appropriate in normal circumstances, but this is far from normal.

“Please don’t cry because of me,” I say.

“It’s not you,” she sniffles out. “Not really. I don’t understand, but that’s not even my biggest problem right now.”

This is another unexpected turn of events. Add it to the list. My hands are still on June’s hands, coaxing them down to the table.

“What is it?” I ask.

“New York. She was supposed…to…come…with…me.” She’s upset all over again, choking on her own words.

I rub my thumbs atop her palms in soothing circles. “This is a good thing, then, isn’t it? It’s a nightmare traveling with someone you’re dating anyway.”

I say this like it’s something I’ve experienced. The truth is, I have never gone on a trip with a girlfriend. I broke up with Sadie right before she was going to ask me to come home with her for Christmas. Wren and I made it through the end of spring together, and I knew we had to call it quits when the weather turned to sweltering muggy sunshine and she started mentioning how much she wanted us to get out of Illinois for a bit.

When things are going well, trips are places where people propose. Where couples exchange I love you s.

But trips can also highlight all the bad things. You learn your partner has really bad time management, or that neither of you has the same travel interests. Trips change everything, and I like to keep things the way they are. I’m comforted by familiarity. I understand it. Even my own pain. I know how to navigate it without causing any trouble for anyone else.

Or I did, up until five minutes ago.

June dares to look at me again. The immediacy of the glance, heavily charged, makes me pull my hands from hers. It’s suddenly so personal—too personal for Rita’s—and the distance helps me breathe better.

“I don’t like to be alone,” she tells me.

Forget the space between our hands. This is just as personal. Maybe even more so.

“Who does?” I try to joke, but our nerves are too raw.

June forces a courteous smile, directing it to the table. “I like it less than anyone you’ve ever met, I promise you that. I can’t go on this trip alone.”

“So cancel it,” I suggest. “Besides, we’d hate to not see you at the diner.” Who knows why I hide behind the royal we when I really mean me. I’d hate to not see her.

“It’s not refundable,” she tells me. “And I have to go, if I ever want my business to grow.”

Denise calls for me to come back behind the counter, pointing to Carson, who has taken to stacking all the coffee creamers into a pyramid. Seeing my sibling gives me an idea.

A wild, impulsive, completely reckless idea.

“I’ll go with you,” I say, chasing the impulse before I can give myself a chance to overthink it.

June looks deep into my eyes again. Third time in one day. Three times more than she’s ever looked at me like this .

“You don’t even know what we’re doing,” she says.

“What are we doing?” I challenge, fighting to keep my voice from shaking. What am I doing is more like it.

“We’re meeting with investors who might want to buy into my perfume business.”

She continues to say we . She might be into the idea of traveling with me. How that’s possible after my surrogate breakup with her, I don’t know, but every single thing I understand about my life has been upended, so this is my new normal.

“We can do that,” I tell her. If this is what it takes to fix what I’ve done, it’s what I’ll do. And this will take me away from Trove Hills and my new brother and this family reunion I want no part of.

The dynamic between June and me has already been altered by the ghostwritten breakup. Maybe this trip can undo whatever has changed between us today. Maybe in this one highly specific scenario, it will bring us back to our safely neutral territory instead of damaging us in some irreparable way.

“We leave tomorrow,” she says.

“I know you won’t believe me, but that timing literally could not be better. How long will we be gone?”

“Eight days,” she says, sniffling.

“June Lightbell.” I never use her full name, but it’s important in this moment, because we aren’t talking about her love of dipping sauces or her favorite Whitney song. We’re talking about our real lives—our complicated worlds outside the bubble of Rita’s. “I can’t tell you how perfect this is, all things considered.”

“Tatum Ward,” she says back. “There’s another problem. I don’t have anywhere for us to stay. My girlfriend planned all of it. My ex -girlfriend,” she corrects, wiping another tear away. “Fuck,” she mutters, the intensity of her crying increasing again.

That is a problem. Trove Hills isn’t super far from Chicago miles-wise, but the feel of this town may as well be light-years away from big-city life. I don’t know how to navigate a place of skyscrapers and trains as it is, but I certainly can’t plan several days of staying there on short notice.

“Do you know anyone who lives there?” I ask, running through my roster of former classmates and casual friends, trying to remember if any of them are in New York and would want to put us up for over a week.

“Wait, yes,” June says, some hope returning to her eyes. “I have this woman who buys all my perfumes. I’ve known her for years. She lives in New York. And she just posted about needing someone to come watch her cats as soon as possible…”

“Reach out to her,” I say. “We can watch her cats. We can do whatever she needs. Does she want somewhere to stay? She can come spend the week in the premiere Trove Hills guest cottage if she wants. I’ll send her my blood type and Social Security number to get this place. Anything.”

June grants me a small smile. “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“Of course,” I say, my resolve strengthening. “This is what friends do for each other.”

“Friends,” June repeats.

The uncertainty in the way she’s said it throws me for a loop. June and I are friends, aren’t we? Sure, we only see each other here, but we’d still qualify, wouldn’t we?

“Friends,” I say back, pretending to be certain. We can’t both have doubts.

Whether this is the best idea I’ve ever had or the worst, June Lightbell and I will be going to New York tomorrow. Together.

As friends.