Chapter 22
If Will had appreciated that Clarissa was detail oriented, he was nothing less than grateful that she had had a steady hand.
Because when his head had slumped to his shoulder and his whole body, including his arm, had gone limp, she had pulled away the needle without flinching, ensuring that that last part of the 12 didn’t become an unintelligible squiggle. He’d come to a few seconds later when Rachel had placed her hand on his cheek. She was concerned enough that she didn’t immediately give him a hard time about fainting, but it quickly became clear that the only thing wounded was his ego. Accepting the Strawberry Kiwi Capri Sun from Clarissa’s minifridge before she finished the tattoo hadn’t exactly mitigated his embarrassment.
He’d felt like a child, not a man capable of being a father or a partner capable of being the one Rachel could count on when she needed him. Like when she delivered the baby. They’d been planning on him being in the room, but now he thought he would probably only be in the way.
So when Ali had texted him around midnight in response to Will’s cryptic message from earlier, he had simply written back:
False alarm.
Will couldn’t tell Rachel there, not after that. So the secret remained his and his alone.
“I have to give you credit,” Rachel said. They had grabbed breakfast at the hotel before checking out and now were on I-75 once again, this time with her behind the wheel. “You really went through with it.”
Will looked at the bandage on the inside of his wrist, covering the tattoo. “Just barely.”
He hadn’t just ruined the moment by fainting. He’d also broken whatever spell had convinced him that some ink on his arm would be a kind of magic binding them together. Thinking about it now, his home state of Ohio rolling by outside the windows in a display of scenery as unremarkable as anywhere in the Midwest, his plan in that tattoo parlor made him feel ridiculous.
“Still counts,” Rachel said. “But, yeah, of the two of us, I think it’s good I’m the one who gets to look forward to having the excruciating pain of childbirth relieved by a five-inch-long needle.”
She smiled and patted him on his knee but didn’t say anything else since she hadn’t paused the audiobook, and he wondered if he should just volunteer not to be in the delivery room so she wouldn’t have to be the one to say it.
But that was a problem for another time. Right now, he had to figure out a new plan for telling her about Creative Vices. And before he could do that, he had to figure out what they were going to do when they got to Lexington.
Earlier that morning, he’d received an email from the farm hosting the charity horse show they were supposed to go to the next day informing him that it was being rescheduled for the following month due to a gas leak on the property. The organizers had been very apologetic and offered anyone who couldn’t attend on the new date a full refund, which Will had declined and told them to consider a donation to the racehorse-adoption program. He’d felt good about that decision and known Rachel would, as well, when he told her about it. But it hadn’t solved the problem of the suddenly gaping hole in their itinerary, nor had perusing the websites of popular horse-farm tours they might go on instead. He had no doubt they were impressive operations, but learning about things like breeding practices and training regimens wouldn’t be of much interest to Rachel, especially after she’d been looking forward to the charity event.
“Mind if I pause for a minute?” he asked when the chapter they were on ended.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“So the charity horse show got moved to next month,” he started, not wanting to see the disappointment on her face.
“What? What happened?”
“Apparently there was a gas leak in the main barn. No one got hurt, but they’re not going to be ready by tomorrow.”
“That’s a bummer.” She stopped—thoughtful, but not overly distraught. “That they had to cancel, I mean. I’m glad there were no injuries.”
“You didn’t need to clarify that. I operate under a baseline assumption that you’re not a practicing sadist.”
“That’s very decent of you.”
“Well, I’m a decent guy. That’s why I told them to keep the money for the tickets as a donation.”
“I one hundred percent support that.”
“Now all we have to do is figure out what we’re doing in Lexington,” Will said. “I found something called the Kentucky Horse Park that has a museum and equestrian shows. So that could be cool.”
The website for this one was the last he’d come across. From the bit of browsing he’d been able to do via his 5G connection, it looked a little more like horse Disney World than a farm dedicated to racehorses, and given Rachel’s experiences riding as a kid, he thought the equestrian piece in particular would capture her interest.
“Yeah, that sounds fun,” she said. He could hear her hesitation, though.
“Are you sure? I can keep looking for something else.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m sure this would be great.”
He could tell her heart wasn’t in it. First the fainting, and now this. All the momentum he’d been working to build with the trip had started to wane.
“I get it,” he said. “It’s not the charity show.”
“Oh no, it’s not that, either. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was looking forward to it, but I’m fine. Really.”
Will was confused. “What is it then?”
“I’m trying to think of the right way to say this,” she said, turning on the windshield wipers as it started to drizzle. “Because I don’t want to offend you or anything.”
“It’s all good, babe,” he said in a credible impersonation of someone who wasn’t unreasonably invested in his wife’s thoughts on horse attractions. “Just tell me.”
“Okay. So, I’ve loved everything about the last five days. Up to and including you staring at your gauze for long stretches on this car ride like you have no idea how it got there. Because let’s be honest, you kinda don’t.”
She clearly meant it as a joke, and he pushed himself to react as such. Fake it until you make it, right?
“Hey, I was awake the entire time she was tattooing. I just ... stepped out for a few minutes in the middle.”
Rachel looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Yeah. Anyway, as I was saying, this trip? Amazing.” She paused. “But we’ve also been going almost nonstop. And I’m tired. So I was wondering: Would it be the lamest thing ever if I suggested that we just hang out at the hotel in Lexington for a day and a half? Like, sleep in and sit at the pool and stuff before we go to Nashville? Because I’m gonna want to dance my ass off to Taylor Saturday night.”
The hotel did look nice. It was more luxurious than they typically would’ve done, but Will had gotten a great deal since it was a midweek booking, and when he imagined trading a seat in a barn for a reclining lounge chair poolside, he couldn’t help but smile.
“I think there’s a spa too,” he said.
“Is that your way of saying you’re in?”
“I am so in.”
“Yay! Here’s to being lazy!” She extended her fist toward him so he could bump it, which he did.
“I don’t even think it’s laziness,” he added. “It’s more not treating vacation like you’re completing a checklist so a whole bunch of people whose opinions you don’t really care about anyway can ‘Like’ photos of what you’re doing online while at the same time judging everything they’re seeing.”
This time she reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I know I’ve said it before,” she said, “but this—this is why I married you.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t because I’m steady in the face of danger.” Getting the tattoo hadn’t been dangerous, but if he couldn’t even stomach that, real danger felt like a nonstarter.
“Seriously”—she stole a quick look at him from the driver’s seat, sensing he needed to be pumped up a little—“best trip ever. Thank you.”
Turned out the trip’s momentum was unharmed.
Now if his self-image and their marriage could just follow suit.
Rather than start the audiobook up again, they decided to look for a place to stop and use the bathroom. Neither of them was particularly hungry, so they went with a gas station right off the highway, figuring they’d keep things quick. But when Will had finished topping off the tank and gone inside, he saw there was a line for the women’s room, and Rachel was still third. She frowned at him when he walked by to go into the men’s, and then more deeply as he approached her again on his way back out.
“Can you get me a slush?” she asked him, keeping her voice down. “I was going to do it myself, but I think I live in this line now.”
“Sure. What flavor?”
Rachel looked surprised, pained even. “Red, Will. Always red.”
“You’re right. That was a dumb question.”
He started on his way from the front right of the store to the back left by way of the salty-snacks aisle, turning at the large cardboard box filled with five-dollar DVDs. Halfway past it, he stopped in his tracks and backed up, pulled over by the copy of It’s Complicated peeking out at him from the pile. It was a good rom-com from one of the masters, Nancy Meyers, starring Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin, and it had come out late in 2009. He knew all this not because he was a student of the genre but because it had been the first movie he and Rachel had ever gone to together. And that was when he remembered another one of the hotel’s amenities: a reservable theater room.
So that was that. There was nothing complicated about it.
They were going to the movies.
Will picked up the DVD—the possibility of streaming it felt vaguely yet definitively less romantic—and headed for the slush machine. Looking at its two porthole windows of red and blue frozen delights swirling away, he thought them to be an apt metaphor for his own brain spinning up this impromptu movie date. Then he remembered he was 10 feet away from a gas station Subway and, as such, his brain maybe should dial it back a notch. He was buying them a bargain-bin DVD, not taking her to Cannes.
As he grabbed the cup for Rachel’s drink, he got a text from Ali.
Do you remember Chocsplosion! guy?
Will did a quick search for the GIF of the infamous news clip where some dude gets fired on live TV as he watches his office building burn, with a long strand of caramel from a Chocsplosion! candy bar hanging from his face. He fired off one of several versions at his disposal in reply and then added:
I think I read he was actually the one who started the fire. On accident. But still.
It wasn’t the first time in his life Will had used that GIF, but it was the first where he thought, You know who else would pass out from a tattoo? Chocsplosion! guy.
Even so,Ali wrote back, the people in this conference room right now make him look competent. I’m seriously questioning whether any of them really went to law school.
That’s why I chose the insurance industry. No idiots allowed.
At least you have funny commercials.
No, our competitors have funny commercials. We have a jingle that sounds like a sitcom from the 80s.
It was a thread about nothing, which meant everything to Will. This was what they always did, and there was a comfort in that connection when so much else was up in the air.
Unsure whether this would be the extent of their conversation and not wanting to have to root around in his pocket while holding a slush if it wasn’t, Will put his phone down by the sleeve of domed lids before pulling the lever on the red side—nominally branded as cherry—to fill Rachel’s cup. He was halfway through when he heard the phone begin to shake on the counter.
“Hey, Mom,” he answered once the cup was full.
“Oh, good. I got you. I thought it was going to go to voicemail.”
“Yeah, sorry,” he said, snapping the lid on. “You caught me in the middle of pouring a slush in a gas station.”
“Where are you two now?”
“Ohio, actually. Almost to Dayton. If we weren’t trying to fit all this into a week, we’d stop and see you.” She still lived about an hour and a half from there, not too far from where Will had grown up, and she would’ve had the opposite reaction to his tattoo than what Rachel had gotten from her parents—which would’ve made the whole fainting thing more embarrassing. He found himself strangely relieved not to have to deal with his mom’s loving curiosity right now.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Will had been about to get Rachel a straw, but he stopped and looked up to nowhere in particular. It wasn’t like his mom to be distracted on a phone call with him, especially not when he’d mentioned a potential visit, even if it were just to say it wasn’t happening. But she was somewhere else, and now that had his full attention.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“Oh yes. Well, I think so.”
“That doesn’t sound too convincing.”
“I’m sorry, Willie Will. Everything is fine. I’m just a little thrown off, I guess.”
“About what?”
The line was quiet for a second. “Your father.”
Mentioning Will’s dad was rare for her. But calling her son for the express purpose of discussing her ex-husband? That was unheard of, and Will instantly braced for impact. Disappointment or frustration, anger or sadness, he wasn’t sure what he expected. But he knew it wouldn’t be good.
“What about him?” Will said.
“He called me last night.”
His instinct to want to protect his mother, something that had become far less acute the older they’d both gotten, shifted back into high gear. He was ready to hate his dad all over again for whatever lame-ass excuse he’d used to crawl out from under his rock and contact his mom—while also loathing the persistent little voice inside his head hoping that maybe, finally, things would be different.
“What could he possibly want from you now?” Will asked.
She paused again, longer this time, and then he heard her exhale.
“He asked me for your phone number.”