11. Sunday #2
“Your tea’s ready, Rene,” came her mother’s voice. “You said milk, right? I hope milk is okay because I don’t have any cream.”
“Milk is great!” Ren called. The moment was broken. Sarah let out a relieved sigh when he headed back to the kitchen.
Her mother pulled Sarah quickly aside as Ren was carrying Sarah’s small duffel bag to the car.
“You’re not dating him?” she asked urgently.
“No, Mom.”
“He’s just…you know, men that handsome…he’s not going to stay.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I’ll call you this week to tell you how it’s going, okay?”
Sarah gave her mother a huge hug. She wasn’t going to see her again on this trip; Ren had managed to book Sarah a flight out of Deer Lake, near their workshop, straight to Toronto, so she wouldn’t be flying through St. John’s on her way home.
She had the same terrible feeling she always did when she left her mother, like a heavy weight was dropping from the top of her chest to the bottom, breaking everything it hit on the way down.
She hated to go. She loved her mother so much, but she always felt like she could breathe easier when she was far away.
Maureen’s eyes filled with tears as they hugged goodbye. It might be six months before they saw each other. Sarah promised to call every Sunday.
Then Sarah climbed into Ren’s red SUV rental car and closed the door.
“Ready,” Sarah said without making eye contact with him.
She could feel his sympathetic gaze all the same. “Thanks for doing this.”
Ren started up the car and gave a last wave to her mother, who was watching their departure through the front window, the white curtains framing her face like two walls crushing in from either side.
Sarah managed a last bright smile until they were out of the driveway, and then she felt herself crumbling, her shoulders dropping.
Grieving, she thought again. She was grieving the times she had come here with a husband in tow.
Danny had been such a bright light when he came to visit, so cheerful, making everyone laugh.
Her mother had trusted Danny to take care of Sarah.
Everyone had trusted him. She sighed, shaking her head to clear the memories.
“What are you thinking about?” Ren asked.
“Nothing important.” They headed down the road. “My mother just told me you were too handsome for me to date,” she added a moment later.
“What?” He stared at her for a moment as they reached the town’s only stop sign.
“She doesn’t trust handsome men,” Sarah said. “She said if we dated, you would leave me.”
“But what does that imply about…I mean…you’re…”
Sarah shrugged. “She just worries.”
“Your self-doubt makes more sense now,” Ren said quietly.
“If you want the real reason for my self-doubt, drive up the road twenty minutes to my high school. For four years, I had exactly three friends and two hundred people who hated me. Someone took the air out of my tires the night I was going to drive my boyfriend to prom.”
He stared at her. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Because I was different. And I refused to be normal. I had blue hair for a while. It caused my mother so much stress that I wouldn’t just fit in.”
He considered this. “Well, for my first couple of years of high school, I was the resident gay guy who wasn’t actually gay.”
“Why did they think you were gay?” She remembered his comment once about having girls’ eyes.
“The usual reasons. I dressed well. I read books. I listened to weird music.”
“So you got your revenge by sleeping with every girl you could.”
“Not really. I only slept with five girls in high school.”
“Ren, that’s a lot!”
“Is it?” He frowned.
“I’ve only slept with five people my whole life.”
He glanced at her while she put up her fingers to count. “My high school boyfriend, then Ivan, Liam, Matthew, and Danny.”
“Which one was Matthew?”
“When you moved to Las Vegas. I saw him for a couple of years. You and I were still texting, but we didn’t talk about personal stuff.”
“No, we didn’t.” He was silent for a moment as they drove down the road. “So what was the high school boyfriend like?”
“You’ll love this. He was our school’s only goth.”
Ren laughed. “Black hair, black clothes?”
“Black eyeliner. Black combat boots. He wrote anti-capitalist song lyrics and planned to change his first name to Crow when he started college. I don’t think he went through with it.”
“But his actual first name was…”
“Philip. I broke his heart when I broke things off before going to McGill and he wrote angry songs about it. What was your first girlfriend like?” She thought about how strange it was that they’d never talked about this stuff.
At university, they’d talked about music and books, but never about their lives.
“First girlfriend or first person I slept with?”
“Either.” The answer itself was interesting, Sarah thought.
“I had an in-retrospect deeply problematic relationship with a twenty-one year old when I was sixteen.”
Sarah was appalled. “Ren.”
“I guess she qualifies as a girlfriend. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good idea. I was acting out a lot around then.”
“Was that after you saw your mother’s article where she regretted having kids?”
Ren shot her a surprised look, as if he hadn’t expected her to remember that. “Yeah, partly. And our household was very tense in the years leading up to their split, which I guess I blamed on myself.”
“So what happened with the twenty-one year old?”
Ren shifted his eyes away. “So I have a question about Ivan, while we’re on this topic.”
Sarah nodded, noticing Ren’s deflection. “What about him?”
“Why that guy? I hated him so much. He was so into talking about his feelings and his taste in movies was boring David Fincher shit. And then you got right back together with him after you finally broke up. Like two days later.”
“Well, first of all, he was the only person who asked me out at McGill.”
“There’s no way that’s true.”
“It’s true,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t somebody people were into. You must remember this. I wasn’t sexy and elegant like Kristie or a blond fairy princess like Anya.”
“You know what’s funny,” Ren said. “You talk about yourself like you’re not attractive, but in the twenty years I’ve known you, you’ve almost never been single.
I’ve been single for probably ten of those years, and you’ve been single for maybe three.
And when you were single, you turned it into an amazing photo series.
So I don’t get this theory you have that you aren’t attractive. ”
“Oh come on. Compared to you, my love life has been staggeringly boring. You were hooking up with two or three women a month.”
“One a month, maybe,” he replied. “And I should get a little credit for the ones I turned down.”
She laughed. “Rene Durand, hereby awarded sainthood for the million women in Montreal he managed not to sleep with.”
They drove past another small town made up of little more than a gas station and a fish and bait shop.
“I think you’re just better at falling in love than I am,” he said after a moment. “It always seemed like you could fall in love with anyone. And it took me forever to even like most people.”
Sarah shrugged. “Not to dig up old issues, but it’s not like you asked me out. There was one night when you said we could have sex but you definitely didn’t want a relationship, but aside from that…”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I thought about asking you out after Kristie broke up with me, but I was sure you would laugh in my face.”
Sarah frowned in confusion. “Why would I have laughed at you?”
“Because you hated me back then. Or I thought you did.”
“We talked a lot.”
“Yeah, but mostly because you were mocking me,” he replied. “Your default attitude towards me was that I was an asshole.”
“But that didn’t mean I didn’t like you!”
He smiled. “Oh, okay. Wonder why I didn’t pick up on that.”
The past seemed very close for a moment.
She thought back to all the times when they had been together as part of a larger group, all the times they had wound up next to each other, debating books and movies.
“I liked you when you were being normal,” she said.
“It was like you dropped the cool guy act sometimes and became a really nice person. But then you would start doing this brooding, mysterious, Kerouac quoting thing, and I didn’t know how to deal with you. ”
His mouth twisted into a half-smile as he looked out the window. “I wish I’d…”
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “I wish we hadn’t been so young when we were young.”
“If we’d dated, I would have messed it up, though,” Ren said. “That’s the one thing I’m glad about. I would definitely have done something stupid if we went out, and you would have left. Never spoken to me again. There is no way we would be friends now if I had dated you back then.”
“Well, I messed up all my relationships, too. I was too insecure. That was the good thing with Ivan. I didn’t have to be insecure around him because he was so clingy. I had to worry about whether I was making him happy, but not about whether I was pretty enough for him.”
“You were always pretty enough,” he said quietly.
She kept her eyes out the window. None of this had to do with now. “It’s funny to talk about all this, all these years later.”
He nodded. “All I had to do was kidnap you and lock you in a car for seven hours.”
“And pay me ten thousand dollars,” she added. “That’s my price to talk about the past.”
“It’s worth it.”
Her heart warmed at the words. She didn’t want to kiss him anymore, but this felt like friendship, and friendship was good.
“So you started a photography business,” she said after a while, when they were heading down the highway. “And now you are some kind of international superstar.”
“If only.” Ren shook his head. “I don’t sell a lot of work. A few pieces a year. Most of my income is from teaching workshops.”
“Sure. But how did that all happen? It’s really impressive.”