Chapter 4 Half-Used Bottle of Men’s Dove
4
Half-Used Bottle of Men’s Dove
I always liked that Sam lived off the Green Line. There are only two light railways in the Twin Cities, and the Green Line starts in front of my apartment in Saint Paul and crosses in front of Sam’s in Minneapolis.
I’ve always loved public transportation, particularly trains. My earliest memory is of setting up a model train under the Christmas tree to weave through our gifts. Sometime in high school, my rail enthusiasm went into hibernation—the popular kids weren’t as fascinated by engines—but every Christmas, my dad unpacked the model set and I let my inner train geek run wild.
The train lurches to a stop on Saturday morning, one week after the funeral and my single-syllable exchange with Adam. I’m plopped into the heart of Sam’s neighborhood, made up of assertively hip converted warehouses along the river, but Sam’s condo is not in one of those unattainably chic buildings. His is in a new complex stacked on top of a pricey organic grocery store, a “green” dry cleaner, and a florist—a redundant beacon of gentrification.
I’m at the door when a rush of grief and embarrassment rolls over my skin like a hot flash. My fingers are poised to text Sam to let me up. My stomach flips, and my mouth tastes of acid and Cheerios.
On my exhale, the feeling recedes like a tide, leaving only my embarrassment as evidence it was ever there in the first place. A patch of wet sand buried in my chest. I’m debating whether I can scale the building’s exterior in a heeled leather boot when a young woman with a tiny white dog dressed as a sushi roll for Halloween exits. I’m in.
“Hello?” I announce myself, slowly opening the unlocked door to Sam’s apartment. I unbutton my wool coat and hang it on the teak coatrack next to a thick, denim men’s jacket with rough tan lining.
I haven’t been to this apartment for two months, but everything that made it essentially Sam’s is the same, down to the basket of dirty clothes on the washer.
“I’m starting in the bathroom.” Adam’s voice echoes through the open door into the hallway.
The first time Sam invited me over to his apartment, which boasts so much natural light it borders on oppressive, I saw the home of a new boyfriend with all the intoxicating potential that came with it. During those early days, I pictured us taking trips to the places where he’d bought the woven tapestries on his walls. The brown leather couch and vintage trunk in his living room were where we might relax and kick our feet up after a long return flight. The dark countertop was the surface on which he’d make us coffee after we woke up slowly in each other’s arms.
When he dumped me, the rooms were sapped of their magic possibilities. Because—self-conscious of my new breasts—I always found excuses not to sleep over. We never ended up traveling together, and now I know that most of his art is from West Elm.
Now that he’s gone, I try to look at the space as nothing but real estate. Cluttered real estate.
I assault Adam with a cheery “Happy Halloween!” upon my intrusion into the bathroom.
“There’s a spare set of keys on the counter. I didn’t see any of your stuff around, so I figured you didn’t have one.”
Sidestepping my lack of keys, I respond, “Starting with the bathroom. Very brave.”
The side of his face doesn’t register my attempt at levity.
I push the bathroom door wide, and the scratch of the metal trash can against the floor bounces off every white ceramic surface in the modern space. My entrance is so loud and so inelegant that his failure to acknowledge it has to be deliberate.
He’s sitting on the edge of the spa bathtub, so I’m left to make do with the lidded toilet. The back of Adam’s neck radiates irritation, but somehow, I still notice that he smells good—notes of firewood, hot coffee, and soap, but that last one might be the eleven or so mostly empty bottles of shampoo and body wash lying next to him on the white hexagonal tile. A few are economy sized, but most are hotel filched.
Adam grimaces at a dark gray bottle of body wash, the dried bits of creamy light blue soap crusted down the side in a hardened drip. “I’m tossing anything perishable or mildewy first. I emptied the fridge, so that’s dealt with.”
“You work fast.” I hold my hand out for the soap.
“Did you want anything in the fridge?” Judgment rings through his tone.
“No. It’s fine. Fast is good. Better than good,” I prattle, flailing my arms. Mercifully, the shower curtain has obscured his face, so he can’t see me.
“I would’ve been faster, but Judy asked me to wait for you.”
It’s faint, but if I listen, I can hear how put out he is by having to consider me at all.
“In case I want to keep his half-used bottle of men’s Dove?” I hold the bottle up like a slimy trophy before setting it next to the other soaps on the floor.
He grunts, turning away from me.
I promised Sam’s sister I’d play along, I remind myself. For Sam and his family. Sam. Sam. Sam.
“I’m sorry. It was nice of you to make sure.” I hesitate, briefly wondering whether Sam’s Current Girlfriend would be able to part with his things so easily. “I’ve never been much for remembering people through their stuff, but I’m glad to help sort through it all, especially for his family,” I say, to remind him why we’re both here.
Adam points at the trash can, his face expressionless. I uncap a tube of hair pomade and inhale the scent one last time before tossing it in with a low clunk. I don’t know why I do it—or why I do it with the other hair products—before discarding it forever. It doesn’t conjure a feeling or a particular memory, just Sam’s smell. One small, static part of him I can hardly remember.
I wipe dried toothpaste off the inside of the medicine cabinet with a sponge while Adam rubs Goo Gone on a mysterious, tacky stain Sam hid behind a painting. Every so often, I attempt friendly conversation. Adam always seems to thwart it.
“Adam.”
He doesn’t respond.
Adam lost his best friend, I remind myself.
“Adam,” I repeat, touching my hand to his forearm. His eyes dart to my fingers and then up to my eyes. I’m intending a reassuring, supportive pat of camaraderie—a You and me, buddy, we’re in this together gesture. What I’m delivering is more of a tentative middle-school-dance hold.
My self-preservation instincts are screaming at me to remove the offending hand and run out the door in humiliation, but I can’t.
It’s my first proper look at Adam since the luncheon, and he looks completely different outside the context of a funeral. His eyes are just as striking as before, but today, there’s a warmth to them, like hot chocolate so decadent and rich, coffee shops would have to call it “drinking chocolate.”
His dark brown hair is oddly swoopy, like he’s been nervously tugging at it. Under the lights of the bathroom vanity, I see the way his beard is dusted with gray hairs and wonder if I might be into this silvery detail if I allowed myself to examine my reaction to it. Which I will not.
The whole “unkempt man of the woods” thing is a more appealing picture in his comfortable posture and regular clothes—jeans, off-white Henley, and Red Wing leather boots showing signs of serious wear. His shirtsleeves are pushed up to his elbows, doing that sexy-magic thing Henleys do to male bodies by pulling tight through the chest and arms to make shoulders look their brawniest and forearms look their forearmiest.
He’s not sculpted in the way Sam was—a body that required hours of targeted work to maintain. Adam’s body is muscled in the way men are when they develop strength through chopping wood in the forest.
And now I’m imagining Adam chopping wood in the forest.
But it’s not as if he’s passively accepting my appraisal. He’s looking back, his gaze heavy on my skin like fingertips padding along the blush blooming on my neck, my cheeks, the tips of my ears. I shudder to think what he’s cataloging about me .
It’s at this moment the realization crashes into me. Mara was right, and if I wasn’t noticing him at the funeral, I am now, while I’m perched on the toilet lid in my dead ex-boyfriend’s bathroom. Neither the location of this revelation nor the flush creeping up my body in this current moment is ideal.
His mouth turns down at the corners as we run out the clock on what would be a normal amount of time to look at another person. I can either acknowledge it and make a joke or tear my arm away and cower in shame and denial.
I choose the latter, dropping his arm to ask, “You didn’t empty the freezer, did you?” I’m out of the bathroom and crossing the living room toward the kitchen before his mouth can form a response.
He yells from his seat on the bathtub. “Some of it, but I left behind—”
“Yahtzee!” I smile into the glowing freezer, letting the cold air cool my cheeks.
“The Thin Mints or the sugar-free JonnyPops?” His gruff voice carries down the hall.
I pluck out the green box. “The Thin Mints, obviously.”
“I don’t know how he has those. He never ate sugar, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a Girl Scout.”
“It was April.” But it sounds like “Erroll,” because my mouth is already full of cookies. “And he has them because I left them here.” I considered texting after our breakup to arrange a drop-off, but that seemed like Thin Mint–junkie behavior, and keeping a stash in my freezer from April to January is my hard line. “They’re best frozen. You want one?”
“I try to hold off on cookies until at least noon.” He sounds only vaguely disgusted by my sugar addiction.
“Your loss. They’re perfect with coffee. Speaking of coffee…” I stretch out the word, searching the crowded countertop.
“In the fridge.” His voice still echoes from the bathroom.
I grab a tall, slim can of cold coffee from the fridge, but when Adam speaks again, I don’t dare leave the kitchen island. Shouting across the house has facilitated my longest conversation with him yet. Plus, this position prevents me from noticing more of his physical attributes—an added bonus.
“I got a six-pack of some cold coffee from the market on the ground floor. There are beans in the cabinet, but Sam doesn’t have a coffeemaker.”
“He’s a member of the Cult of Pour-Over.” I crack open my can of cold brew and admire Sam’s shelf of mismatched mugs—souvenirs from vacations past and time abroad.
“We’re talking about him like he’s still here. He drinks pour-over coffee. He has cookies in the freezer. I keep doing that,” he says, his voice sounding sad and a little frustrated.
I walk back toward the bathroom and see Adam sitting on the side of the tub peeling at a shampoo label. He throws it in the trash before tying off the bag and removing it from the can in one movement.
“This needs to go out.”
He doesn’t say anything else before walking out the door.
It takes the rest of the day to empty the kitchen cabinets and wipe their interiors. Sam wasn’t much for deep cleaning, so I spend a fair amount of time scraping at mysterious, hard chunks.
I can best describe the rest of my interactions with Adam as stiff .
He doesn’t talk to me again other than the occasional inquiry into the location of tape measures, pens, and additional utility items. I’m not as familiar with Sam’s place as Adam thinks I am, and there are multiple drawers in contention for the One True Junk Drawer. I have to stall with anecdotes until I stumble upon his requests, which only further agitates him.
“You talk a lot,” he observes. His tone doesn’t impart judgment, but there is literally no way to take the words you talk a lot as anything other than a moderately less confrontational version of please don’t talk so much, as if I’m a precocious child or a particularly chatty parrot.
I don’t take the bait. Instead, we work in complete silence for about an hour, and I notice every second of it.
I open yet another drawer of bric-a-brac and find boxes of little cocktail umbrellas. Sam bought them for a party here in June, right when we started seeing each other.
I’d been envious of how effortless he was socially. He introduced me to a small group chatting about their indoor soccer league, and before I realized it, he had floated off to enamor a new group of people over a game of beer pong. I tried to find my groove in a group of strangers but had nothing to add to his friend’s complaints about her infrared sauna installation. Before long, I found myself leaning against the kitchen island, fiddling with the paper umbrellas and pretending to text.
I wander into the living room, twirling a paper umbrella between my fingers. “Did we meet at the Summer Kickoff?” I ask Adam.
He’s around the corner now, removing art from the walls and wrapping it in bubble wrap. Just out of sight, I can only imagine the perplexed look on his face when he asks, “Is that a parade?”
“No. It was what Sam called the party he threw this past June. I didn’t know anyone there, so I was wondering if we met without realizing it.” Though now that I’ve said it, I find it hard to believe. Adam would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb at that party. He probably would’ve been hiding near the food with me.
“I didn’t make it down this year,” he says, with no sign of forthcoming embellishment. I can hear my attempt at conversation flopping to the ground like a dead, wet fish.
Black marks on the living room wall catch my eye. I noisily pull back the end table by the couch to reveal three years of beer pong scores written on the wall in Sharpie and curse. “I forgot about the scoreboard.”
I remember seeing people keeping score on the wall at the party and thinking, I wish I could be like that —be the kind of person who doesn’t worry about his walls until he has to move out. Now he never has to.
“I didn’t know he was still doing that.” Adam’s voice breaks through my thoughts. Without warning, he’s in the living room only a few feet away from me. He stares at the scrawl with a pinched forehead. “I don’t think his family knows what rough shape this place is in. He was barely around to take care of it, and when he was, he treated it like a frat house. If I’m only coming down on weekends, this’ll take me the rest of the month.”
I offer him a bright smile. “I’m here to help.” My voice sounds desperate for approval.
He grunts and walks back to the hallway, returning to his task.
“Do you need anything before I go?”
“Nope. I don’t need anything from you,” he says quietly, and though his tone doesn’t precisely convey an insult, I simply can’t rule it out.
“Okay. When will you be here next?”
“All day tomorrow. I’m staying at my sister’s tonight.”
“That makes sense. I wouldn’t expect you to drive back to Duluth tonight.”
He finally turns to face me. With a sheet of bubble wrap still in his hands, he folds his arms across his chest in challenge. His eyes look me up and down—clinically, impersonally, like an MRI machine scanning for anomalies—until he returns his gaze to the mass-produced modern art print on the wall. “I’m glad you approve.”
This conversation feels like a game I’m losing, but I double down on friendliness. I can’t help it. “See you tomorrow?” I despise the cheery eagerness in my voice.
He releases a long exhale, drained by one day with me. “I’ll be here.”
Then so will I. Unfortunately.
—
Halloween revelers are meandering along the sidewalk, already several hours into their debauchery. It’s warmer than the weather forecast predicted, so every painted face and sexy cat eye is a bit drippy. When I board the light rail back to Saint Paul, a steampunk zombie argues with Frank N. Furter in that loud, lazy way only drunk people do.
“It’s like, it’s like, you don’t even care! You don’t even care!” the zombie yells over Frank, who’s slurring back, “You didn’t even ask! You never ask!”
More costumed twenty-somethings hop on, and I get off early. Despite the weather apps predicting the first snowstorm of the year tonight, the breeze is warm on my skin, and I’d rather walk five extra minutes if it means escaping an intoxicated Addams Family.
When I turned thirty, a switch flipped, and holidays that once felt shiny and limitless started to look sweaty and claustrophobic. I fight the throngs of face paint and latex masks—which will undoubtedly end up in the street at one a.m., when their owners realize just how little those things breathe—all the way to my apartment, where I change into my low-effort costume before heading back into the mess.
“Tell me we have a table!” I beg the blond milkmaid braids I hope belong to Chelsea when I step into the crowded pizza place that hosts Halloween-themed trivia.
Chelsea spins on her stool away from the bar and gives me a delighted, if slightly demented, grin. “Ahh! You’re here!” She pulls me into a suffocating hug and knocks me into the red laminate bar counter. My forehead bumps her cat ears askew as she rocks us back and forth, alternating between screaming across the room and loudly whispering in my ear over the blaring alt-rock, “MarsBars! Al is HERE! Al is here. I was so worried.”
When she releases me, I spot Patrick Finley—our reliable fourth in trivia—hovering next to her in a navy sweater vest emblazoned with a giant gold R .
“Archie for Halloween? Again?” I point at his red hair and overall lack of creativity.
Chelsea sways into his chest. “I told him he should upgrade to Riverdale Archie next year. The youths don’t know about the comic book. Ooh! Does Mara have cheese bread?” Chelsea gallops off to the table Mara’s guarding.
I plop into her abandoned stool next to Patrick’s, the splitting vinyl scraping my pants. “So…Chelsea’s drunk.”
He grimaces. “It happened slowly and then all at once. Two hours of food, water, and Mara should do the trick.” Patrick’s eyes examine Chelsea across the room as she struggles momentarily with her straw. “I’m grabbing another pitcher of water, just in case. Can you watch her?” I give him a nod before weaving through the bodies.
Mara, in a blue striped button-up with a tie and suspenders, looks me up and down as I slide into the booth. “What’s this? We all have to be in costume for the extra point.”
I gesture to my hiking boots and olive cargo pants. “I’m Cheryl Strayed. She wrote Wild . Reese Witherspoon was in the movie.”
“I know who Cheryl Strayed is. What I don’t know is in what world you think a reference to a memoir from the early 2010s is an appropriate Halloween costume.”
“She’s from Minnesota.”
“Don’t insult me by pretending you put effort into this.” Mara poises her pen over our team’s trivia sheet. “I’m writing down Laura Dern from Jurassic Park . Any objections?”
“I would never object to being Laura Dern. Who are you supposed to be?”
“Gordon Gekko.” She tsks, disappointed I even had to ask.
I bob my head in agreement. Her outfit and red-brown slicked-back lob definitely resemble a vamped-up version of the famous Michael Douglas look.
“See how you immediately got it, and I didn’t need to summarize a nonfiction book from ten years ago?”
“Yes, I understand. Now, hand me the image page. Laura Dern needs to make her guesses before the live questions start.” I take the sheet from Mara and analyze the iconic horror villains for clues.
“I’m buying him out!” A splotchy-faced, sexy minion runs to our table. I assume she’s lost until she presents her phone to Chelsea. “I wrote the email and everything.”
Chelsea takes the stranger by the hand. “Sadie, you’re doing the right thing. If he didn’t respect you as a girlfriend, he won’t respect you as a partner in your hemp water business. But maybe leave that email in the ‘drafts’ tonight?” she advises with a one-eyed squint.
Chelsea’s the kind of drunk who has profound conversations in women’s bathrooms. Even when she’s sober, lost souls tend to find Chelsea wherever she goes.
With the interloper gone, Mara rubs Chelsea’s shoulders like a cornerman with his champion boxer. “Okay, Chels. Eat some pizza and look alive. We’ll need you sharp out there.”
Chelsea’s responsible for earth science, math, and reality television; I cover general pop culture, TV, movies, and geography; Patrick is our resident academic; and Mara is in charge of politics, music, and basically everything else. Sports is our team’s Achilles’ heel.
We tend to stick to official Twin Cities Trivia League events. At participating bars throughout the Cities, league hosts provide each team a blank front sheet at the start, with the back covered in a series of images based on a theme. The night always ends with a music round. No phones are allowed, and host rulings are always final.
Top-ranked teams qualify for a yearly tournament on New Year’s Day. Besides happiness for her friends and success in her career, winning that tournament is the thing Mara wants most in this world.
By the time we get to the halfway point, Chelsea is mostly herself but without volume control. Every answer she gives is followed by Mara’s and Patrick’s loud shushes. When she yells out “ Scream 2 !” during the third round, Patrick covers her mouth and tells her with an easy laugh, “Chels, you’re giving away the farm!”
Mara knows most of the songs in the final music round but hums one to herself, hoping the last elusive ditty will come to her before the host grabs our sheets for scoring. Patrick asks over Mara’s musical mutterings, “How’s the railroad business, Al?”
Patrick always asks me about work in what I suspect is a fishing expedition to figure out what I do. If pressed, he’d probably admit that he thinks I’m a Gilded Age railroad tycoon who wears a monocle to the office. In reality, I’m a transportation consultant, specializing in public transit systems, but I’m too pleased with his vision of me as a Monopoly character to ever fully explain it to him.
“Booming.” I pantomime twirling my mustache. “But we’re all very concerned with the rise of zeppelins.”
His face crinkles into a smile before turning uncomfortably serious. “I was sorry to hear about Sam. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”
I tilt my head side to side as if the movement will arrange my thoughts. “Yeah, it’s still hard to believe he’s gone.”
“He was a good guy. Chelsea said you were at his house today?”
“His friend and I are getting the condo ready to sell,” I tell him between bites of room-temperature pizza.
“Why?”
“She’s Sam’s girlfriend again!” Chelsea announces at top volume.
“Like a Patrick Swayze Ghost situation?” he asks.
Chelsea claps like an excited toddler. “That’s what I said! But Devon Sawa.”
He turns toward Chelsea with a wide grin. “Classic film. Or Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense .”
“Or Casper Meets Wendy .”
“Now you’re just naming Casper movies.”
“You took the other ghost movie I know.” Chelsea grabs his arm playfully, her face stuck in a beatific smile.
He tears his eyes from hers when his phone buzzes. “Shit. Mara, can you turn in the answer sheet? I need to use my phone. Josie left like ten messages.”
Chelsea’s face goes slack. Mara grumbles but catches the host on his way to the front. Patrick is dialing before he’s shaken off Chelsea’s hand.
Mara gestures at an exiting Patrick. “This mind-meld thing you two do is adorable, but it isn’t helping the situation with Josie.”
“We’re just friends. He’s been dating Josie forever, and I have several Petfinder profiles bookmarked on my web browser. There’s an elderly Russian blue that’s really ticking all my boxes.” Chelsea sniffs a pepperoni and sets it back down, her face green around the gills.
I grab her hand across the booth. “What happened to Ritter?”
“We broke up.” Chelsea waves off my supportive friend assault, and the movement loosens a lock of hair from her braid crown. “It’s for the best. I told him my love languages were gifts and acts of service, so he bought me an NFT of a meme he had to explain to me.”
Mara grimaces. “Yikes.”
“Onward and upward! I’m either going on a total man hiatus or applying for The Bachelor .”
“ Bachelor, ” I vote.
“Neither,” Mara argues.
“I’m too old for The Bachelor anyway. Once you hit thirty, you get the ‘crazy and desperate’ edit.” Chelsea fights a losing battle with her loose hair strand before finally retreating to the bathroom with a huff.
Mara raises her brows. “That’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Speaking of disasters,” I say. “Sam’s best friend might hate me. Probably.”
Her eyes crinkle to slits. “What did you do?”
“Nothing! I’m perfect!”
“Does he know Sam dumped you?”
I shoo her negativity away with my free hand. “Okay—it was very nearly amicable—but no, he never mentioned anything, and I wasn’t about to tell him. He spoke like seven words the whole day. Is that enough of a reason to flake on Sam’s family and avoid them for eternity?”
“For me? Yes. But you’re the one who has to live with telling a grieving family you can’t be bothered to box up some dishes.”
I slope my head into my palm.
“Are you still into ‘the friend’? Adam, is it?” Mara asks.
“I was never into ‘the friend’!”
Chelsea slides back into her side of the booth with her refreshed, perfectly imperfect hairstyle. “Oh, thank god! I was worried you were talking about me. So Al’s in love with Sam’s friend. Go.”
I pale at the accusation and turn to find Patrick, who’s placing the scored answer sheet into Mara’s greedy hands. “That’s so messed up. That would be like if Demi Moore left Patrick Swayze for Whoopi Goldberg.”
Chelsea’s teeth tear into discarded pizza crust. “That would be such a good movie!”
Irritation scrunches my features. “No, we’re not…He won’t even talk to me. We’re two people stuck together until we finish the job, never to speak again. Then I’ll no longer be Demi Moore. Or Whoopi Goldberg. I lost track of Patrick’s analogy.”
Chelsea gives me a playful wink. “Oh, Al. You’re a total Demi.”
My groan is cut short by the announcement of our narrow victory. While Mara whoops in unhinged euphoria, Chelsea redirects our prize pizza to a group of crying Harley Quinns, who appear to need it more than we do.
The streets are still bursting when I trudge home, bracing myself for another day in Adam’s company.