Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9
WREN
My whole life, my mom has always preferred doing Thanksgiving with friends. It was her parents’ favorite holiday, she’d always told me, and it is the one holiday that made her wish she had someone. One of the rare instances when loneliness would catch up to her. Not Valentine’s or Christmas or New Year’s. Thanksgiving. She’d say the day felt like a choreographed dance between properly timing all the dishes, spinning through all the sounds of the day, dipping in and out of all the smells and flavors. She claimed that hosting without a partner felt like too much work, and showing up somewhere where everyone belongs to someone else that day felt too sad. Even after I got married, rather than come along with me to the Byrds’, she always went over to Martha O’Doyle’s and did something more casual. Usually bunco and a potluck of desserts. I’ve never judged her for it, but this might be the first year that I truly understand it. Ironic that, also this year, I know she’s brought her man friend along to her traditional celebration.
At Sage’s house, I float from room to room alongside the smells of roasting turkey and can’t shake feeling like an outsider. Indy and Sam are sitting on Sage’s couch, huddled together over Indy’s phone while she shows him the photo shoot she staged with Gary (a goose) in a hollowed-out pumpkin and a variety of other autumn vignettes. The cat and dog are sharing Sable’s plaid bed on the ground. Silas is sprawled out on an overstuffed yellow chair that’s been moved into the living room so a dining table could be arranged in the sunroom, and football plays quietly on the television. Silas is also preoccupied with his phone, but when he sees me hovering in the kitchen, he gestures for me to come closer.
“If you had to make an educated guess,” he asks me, “does this girl look like she’s into mutilated monster romance or, like, hot for the Phantom of the Opera?” He shoves his phone in my face with a dating app open on a pretty girl.
“I don’t know. Why?” And then I realize. “You are not mutilated , Silas Byrd,” I say sternly. He’s trying to joke away what happened to him, but I see the flash of real vulnerability there. When he registers my unsmiling expression in the face of his phony-smarmy one, he drops the act.
“I know I’m not.” He sighs, deep and bone-weary and uncharacteristically old. “Feels like if I talk about it in the least sensitive way, maybe I’ll get less sensitive about it. Just think I need to get out and get laid and, like, rip the bandage off. For lack of a better expression,” he says. He’s always so achingly open when he feels safe to be.
“Silas, you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable at all,” I reply. When this makes him get twitchy, I decide to throw him a bone. “And honestly, Si, you’re not gonna have any trouble. People love a scarred hero. You didn’t hear this from me, but you could probably use it to your advantage.” His eyes light up instantaneously. “With great power comes great responsibility, though, dammit. Use it wisely. Be honest.” Please don’t lie and tell women you got those scars saving a litter of puppies or kittens. Have more faith in yourself than that. Have more faith in whoever it is you choose, too.
Sage and Fisher drift in from upstairs, patting down hair and adjusting clothes before they perform some terrible charade about how they’d been “looking for something together,” which everyone dutifully ignores. Their love cloud is so thick it’s a miracle they can see anyone else through it.
A timer goes off in the kitchen, and I make my way toward it, just as Ellis bursts in through the sunroom door. He scrapes his boots on the mat and peels off his mist-covered jacket, the scents of petrichor and firewood wafting over and mingling with all the smells of the meal. The sight of him brings the usual pang, but when he looks my way and his mouth hooks into a half-formed smile, I find myself smiling back, reflexively. He stares at me and I at him, and whatever shredded and frayed thread is still between us pulls unbearably tight. You all belong to each other, with or without me , I think. But I want someone to belong to me again, too. I wish it were still you. I hate that I wish it were still you.
Just as I think he’s about to say something, his phone rings from the pocket of his jacket, hanging on a hook that looks like a mushroom growing out of the wall. He scoops it free and steps into the kitchen.
“It’s Micah on FaceTime,” he says before he answers.
I remember the pie from the oven and spin to retrieve it while Micah’s floating head is passed around the room.
“Let me see the desserts,” I hear Micah say. “I just gotta lay my eyes on them for a minute.”
Sam walks the phone to me, and I smile at Micah’s face, sitting with his back up against a headboard in what looks like a cheap hotel room, a carton of Chinese takeout balanced precariously on his chest.
“Walk me through them, Wren. Give it to me good and dirty.” He licks his lips.
“You sure? You’re only torturing yourself, man,” I say with a laugh.
“Yeah, just let me see,” he replies.
“All right, well. I made chocolate bourbon pecan,” I say with a wince.
“Fuuuucccckkkkkkk,” he growls ferociously.
“Sorry, bud. I also did a pear frangipane tart. You know I had to bust out the big guns with the fancy chef here this year,” I say.
He makes a sobbing sound, and I turn the camera around to show him. When I bring it back to face me, he’s nothing but a flesh-colored blur, his phone pressed into his forehead.
“I gotta go cry in private now,” says his muffled voice.
“Okay, bud. We miss you.”
He hangs up without a goodbye.
“Poor kid,” I say to myself.
A text comes through, and I open it on instinct.
It’s a picture of a pretty woman I don’t recognize, holding a turkey leg. I know your grumpy ass is thankful for me , the message says. I see the name Kirby at the top.
Ellis’s phone. Not mine.
The synapses in my brain won’t fire for a moment. I feel like I’m being held down in canned cranberry, like my heart and head and limbs are all stuck in sludge and can’t break free. And once everything does kick over again, it’s too fast and with too much force, making me lightheaded. I drop the phone on the counter like it’s on fire and try to catch my breath, bile in my throat.
Fisher and Sage start working around me then. Fisher bastes the turkey in the bottom oven, and Sage goes back to chopping celery for stuffing. The dulcet tones of football drift in from the living room, where Silas and Ellis are also making conversation, and Sam and Indy are talking about the PE teacher at school and his refusal to wear shorts with anything longer than a three-inch inseam, all while I’m stuck in one place, coping with the gut punch of reality that is Ellis moving on.
That explains why he invited me to stay the other day at the barn. Why it wasn’t agony for him to reach out and touch me. How fucking wrong was I to think I was going to get to a place where I wanted this? Where I’d be happy for him? I can’t breathe again. Something heavy is sitting on my chest and crushing it down. Down. Down. Down. And what a fucking hypocrite am I? I’ve slept with other men since the divorce. I haven’t tried in earnest to date , though. I’ve barely started to talk about dating again. I only caved last week and created an online profile that I made Silas look at for me. I certainly haven’t connected to anyone else enough that it would warrant a warm holiday text.
Oh god, she was really cute, too.
“Hey, you good?” Fisher says, touching my elbow.
I shake my head, blinking and clearing my throat with an overly animated smile. “Yeah, sorry. Just zoned out for a second.” I force a laugh.
I slip away into the hall bathroom and scrounge for some composure. Turn on the sink and listen to the hiss of the water, then watch my reflection breathe so I know I’m doing it.
I have no right to feel like this. We are split. What did I expect? He’s handsome and steadfast and immensely kind, and that’s all on the surface. He’s even more beneath it. He deserves to be happy. We hurt each other too much. We let our love die. I’m the one who said the words I want a divorce first. I’m the one who gave up and admitted that they wanted to leave. Someone else deserves him. To be satisfied by him, protected by him, liked by him. Loved by him.
I just never let myself face it before.
I do my level best for the remainder of the evening, try to maintain conversation and laugh at the appropriate times. Keep my awareness of him as muted as humanly possible.
The placid mask nearly falls away entirely when the desserts start to make the rounds, though. By this time post-gorge, we are all in various spots in the house, whatever place and position allows us to spread out. In years prior, this has made it easy for Ellis not to partake of dessert. It’s not as if we’re all still seated at the table and he has to outright deny a piece of something in front of my face and make it awkward for anyone else. He just doesn’t get up to serve himself some.
When I see him walk back into the living room with a piece of pie on a plate, it might as well be my heart. Later, I know I’ll see how illogical this is. I’ll remember that it’s just a baked good and convince myself that there is no deeper meaning. I’ll recognize that I also just had those letters come to an abrupt end and am clearly suffering from a sensitive time.
But… the Ellis I knew always dealt in absolutes. We didn’t belong to each other anymore and it was painful and messy and we’ve avoided any avoidable crossover in order to stave off more mess and more pain. Part of that for him meant he never ate my food. Tonight, him casually enjoying something I’ve made again feels like a confirmation that he really has moved on.
He’s not affected anymore. Why would he be?
And why the hell am I?