Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I don’t listen to music on the train ride back to Chicago, an hour later. Maybe the most telling thing of all.
It took twenty minutes to pack two and a half months’ worth of belongings. The other forty is spent forcing myself to schedule a car. I could have just taken Lovie’s, but if anyone could get a DUIH (driving under the influence of heartbreak), it would be me.
I only cry when I’m mad and when I absolutely cannot help it—and when I’m head over heels in love with the man I leave behind.
Chicago at Christmastime used to be my favorite, with holiday music spilling out of restaurants and department stores, red buckets with jingling bells on each corner. The hoard of tourists at Millennium Park, skating on artificially frozen ice. Friends shopping together for last-minute gifts, lovers stealing hot chocolate kisses beneath sprigs of mistletoe. Last year I got so excited for the holidays I decorated for Christmas the day after Halloween.
I won’t decorate this year. Maybe because this hasn’t been my home for a while.
I must be more heartsick than I thought, unable to stomach the idea of entering my apartment alone just because I shared it with Adam for twelve hours and some change.
By the time I get to my apartment, a familiar face greets me so I don’t have to.
I fall into Dakota’s waiting arms, and he tucks my head under his chin.
“I brought so much wine,” he says. “And tequila. But I wouldn’t recommend you mix them unless you’re drinking to forget.”
He takes most of my luggage from my shoulders before shepherding me inside. “Liss is grabbing pizza.”
My lip trembles. Adam made pizza here.
“And more wine, apparently,” Dakota mutters.
Inside my apartment, I sit down right on the foyer floor and pull off my boots, one, two. They thud to the hardwood, bounce and echo in my brain as Dakota deposits my bags on the kitchen table.
“Here,” he says. He’s holding out a glass of chilled red wine. He must have come prepared.
Wine before three in the afternoon is pushing it, even for me. Whatever. I am heartbroken and shit.
I take a sip.
“This is good,” I say, before throwing back the entire glass and helping myself to another.
He snorts from his sentinel at the fridge, where he’s offloading not only junk food but also green leafy vegetables and fresh eggs. “It better be, for five hundred dollars a bottle.”
I nearly tip it over as I scramble to my feet. “ Five hundred dollars? ”
He shuts the fridge with his hip. “It’s from Brody Boswell. A thank-you gift for all the wedding stuff Liss is doing.”
I read the label more intently. “I’m in the wrong business. Do you think it’s too late for me to play professional baseball?”
“Just barely,” Dakota says dryly. “But maybe you could try podcasting? I have a feeling you’d be good at that.”
“Wowww,” I say slowly, slumping into a dining chair. I pull my knee up to my chest and rest my chin on it. These are the nice deep dining chairs where people with big thighs can do that. “Aren’t you supposed to give me some super-sage life advice that has me crawling back to him with my tail between my legs?”
He laughs. “If it were me, we’d just end up staring at pictures of his triceps. I think if you want some actual advice, you’re going to need to wait for Liss.”
“Can I call your nana, then? She seems like a nice lady who wants to listen to all my problems. And she has the three boyfriends, after all.”
Dakota looks pained. “Liss was right behind us, I swear.”
The first communion I took when I was thirteen must still be in effect (probably strengthened by the wine), because as if summoned by God and all His angels, the door rattles as someone messes with the handle on the other side.
“Here! I’m here! I’m sorry!” Liss slings pizza boxes onto the table before dumping her purse and other bags on the counter Dakota just cleaned off. She pulls out a to-go box from the bakery, a child-sized loaf of French bread, and another bottle of wine. She’s frazzled in the way Liss always is, blonde hair creating a wild halo around her head, and the sight of her is enough to start a fresh round of tears. I thought they all dried out on the train.
Just another thing I got astronomically wrong.
I sniffle. “You got the good bread.”
Liss’s rosy cheeks pull up into a sad smile. Or maybe that’s a grimace. This is some nice wine Mr. Boswell sent. “Dakota said it was an all-carbs-on-deck situation. Is he wrong?”
“ Never ,” Dakota says, affronted. “But also, no.”
Liss comes around the table toward me, clutches my shoulders. “You wanna talk about it?”
I shake my head, and it’s so violent a tear flies off and lands on her arm. “I just want to drink.”
So we do.
As promised, they don’t force me to talk about anything. We play a card game that has us all crying—happy tears this time. Dakota is surprisingly, pleasingly bad at it. He loses. We drain both bottles of wine dry and crack open a third. The pizza and bread are demolished. So are the cake and ice cream.
With all of us too wine drunk and sugar high to bother being real adults, Dakota says to leave the dishes for the morning and passes out unceremoniously on the couch.
When Liss and I eventually pull ourselves back down the hall toward my bedroom, I catch myself on the doorframe. Adam might have made the bed the morning we left, but I know we didn’t change the sheets. The skin around my eyes is tight with salt water, and the fresh tears sting. “They’re going to smell like him, Liss. The sheets.”
Her eyes well with a lifetime of empathy. She feels my pain as much as her own. Her heart is the biggest. “Are we changing them?”
“Yes,” I say, before I can think about it too greatly. “I need him gone.”
So we change the sheets. The fresh ones end up with a few tearstains polka-dotting the fabric anyway. They’re cold when I slide into them.
“Are you gonna be okay?” Liss’s cheek is on my shoulder, the heat from her wine-flushed face doing little to warm me up.
“Yes,” I say before I know if it’s the truth. “I’m always okay.”
“It would also be okay,” she says, her mouth quirking into a frown, “if you weren’t.”
“Hey,” I say. “Do you think when you’re happily married to the man of your dreams, we can still have sleepovers like this?”
“Whoa,” she says, sitting up. Her hand goes to her head. “ Whoa ,” she says again. “Okay, I’m good. And, obviously. He’s not the man of my dreams if there’s no room for you.”
Now I sit up, and my head spins in that super-bad drunk way. “Whoa.”
She points at me. “Right?” We laugh together, a few easy moments between all of the hard ones of today, of life in general. “I just assumed we’ll be having sleepovers until we’re like, in the nursing home or whatever. Pick cemetery plots next to each other. We should maybe look into booking those, by the way? I hear they might run out of space soon.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve been assuming a lot these days, and you know what they say about assuming.” I scrub my face, throw up my hands. Fist them into the blankets so I don’t cover my face and cry.
Liss reaches into the mess of duvet and grabs my hands, and my traitorous eyes water anyway. “That you probably weren’t assuming anything at all, and the feelings were there, and you just got scared and ran away. Because I know you, and I saw him, and I saw the way he looked at you.”
Too many feelings . Too much wine. Too little Adam.
I grab a pillow from behind us and throw it at her head. “Go to sleep. I drank too much to talk about this.”
She takes the pillow from me and lies down, humming. “He looked at you the way I look at chocolate cake.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, taste my heartbeat on the back of my tongue. “Good night, Liss.”
She stays for two days.
We eat takeout and watch trashy reality television while she touches up my roots with ill-advised box dye. She daringly adds one single streak to the underside of her hair in solidarity. Every night she sleeps in my bed, and I wake up next to her, but I may as well be alone. This apartment is empty without him. Hollow.
I know now what Lovie meant by lonely and horny being different emotions. I don’t miss Adam for the things he can do to my body; I miss him for the way he makes me feel inside it. Steady. Sure. Warm.
Angie has been filling in my role caring for Lovie. According to her, Lovie hasn’t mentioned Bobby once since I’ve been gone. I wonder if my grandmother herself notices something different.
I keep tabs on Forget Me Not , post on a consistent basis from the backlog I built while in Elkhart. People still love it. I still search comments for his name.
And some days I think what we had could have even been enough , if there weren’t other factors in our lives. We’d become confined by our circumstances, and when we found someone worth breaking the chains for, they’d already grown over and embedded in our skin.
Somewhere along the way I picked up an all-or-nothing mentality with love, the same way I’ve handled my podcast and my friendships and my stubbornness. I have no setting for in between , and that’s the space Adam fits in. In between now and forever. Which is, really, nothing and nowhere at all.