Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It had been exactly one week since the show, and Allie still hadn’t heard anything from Ryan, further solidifying her belief that he was set on avoiding her forever. It was embarrassing.
She made a playlist called Humiliating Heartbreak Songs and sang along as she worked. Ren made a few gentle cracks about how much Fleetwood Mac was too much Fleetwood Mac, but otherwise, no one commented, and Allie was grateful. The music soothed her, but in a new way. Instead of just letting the songs carry her into a state where she wasn’t thinking about her problems, they showed her that other people had the same problems.
She tried not to pester Ren for inside info, but regardless, Ren volunteered whatever they had, and it wasn’t much. Word from Anisha was that Ryan had been either absent or quiet for the past week. He’d missed dinner two nights in a row, and when asked, just said he was doing “research.” That was the most detail Ren could provide. But of course, they had opinions to heap on top of the minimal facts.
“I think he’s heartbroken, too,” Ren posited one afternoon when Anisha had come to the café for a tea and Allie came briefly out of the kitchen to say hello.
Anisha, wearing a dress made of rainbow-hued velvet, stood at the counter, looking at Ren like a lovesick exotic bird. “I think Ren is right, Allie. I can’t get him to talk to me about it, which is a sure sign that he’s feeling…something? He usually won’t shut up about whatever is going on in his life.”
“Ugh.” Allie turned and gently hit her forehead against the wall. She was glad that the café was surprisingly empty for a Sunday afternoon, so she wasn’t entertaining a bunch of curious customers with her angst. “I’m sorry. Now whatever this is is affecting your friendship. This is so awful. I made such a huge mistake.”
“You both made that mistake together.” Anisha put her teacup down gently on the counter. “And honestly, who knows if it was a mistake, anyway?”
“Anisha,” Allie huffed. “It was obviously a mistake. Ryan won’t even talk to me. And now he will hardly talk to you. I don’t get to hang out at your place anymore, and I miss your food. And your company. But you know, the food .”
Anisha laughed. “And I miss feeding you. You should just come over, anyway. Fuck that guy. You’re my friend, too.”
“No.” Allie shook her head. “Too awkward.”
“Yeah, babe,” Ren chimed in. “What’s she supposed to do? Sit beside him at the dinner table and say Hey this is great soup, and wasn’t it weird that we boned that time and then stopped talking? ”
Anisha rolled her eyes but offered no further protest.
Allie retreated to the kitchen to mix batter for scones and left Ren and Anisha making eyes at each other in between customers. She was just setting the batter aside to rest when she heard the bell on the front door ring and Ren’s loud, confused voice.
“Ryan?”
Allie went still.
My Ryan?
Hardly breathing, she walked to the door of the kitchen and looked out into the café.
There he was. His hair neatly combed and his usual shirt and jeans combination unchanged. He was looking at Ren and Anisha when Allie first saw him, but he quickly shifted his gaze to her.
“Hi.” His voice was soft.
Allie’s face drew into a suspicious pout. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” Anisha was the one to finally ask what they were all wondering.
“I’m, uh, meeting someone.”
Was he bringing a date to her café? Was he legitimately that ridiculous? From the horrified look on Ren’s face, Allie knew they were thinking the same thing. Before any of them could ask any follow-up questions, the door opened again, and three children tumbled in, obviously siblings, laughing and shoving each other. They all had the same dark hair and wide smiles. They went right for the pastry case and started poking fingers at the glass, exclaiming over the tarts and slices of cake.
“I think this is them now.” Ryan looked at the kids and then back to the door. Allie followed his gaze.
The door opened again.
“ Jessi ?”
Allie’s voice came out as a croak.
Jessi Jetski had just walked through the door of Mindy’s Café. Allie looked at Ryan, who had an unreadable expression on his face, and then to Jessi again.
Jessi looked right into Allie’s eyes.
“Allie.” Her voice was full of warmth and so, so familiar.
They stared at each other for a moment. When Allie saw tears start to spill out of Jessi’s eyes, she started to cry as well. Jessi stepped around the children— her children, Allie now realized—and grabbed Allie into a bone-crushing hug. Allie had forgotten what it was like to receive a hug from Jessi, but in that moment, everything felt so good. She squeezed back and closed her eyes tightly, not wanting to let go.
“Holy shit,” Jessi murmured into Allie’s ear, squeezing tighter, then releasing her.
Allie stared at Jessi’s face and shook her head in disbelief. “Holy shit is right.”
The hug was interrupted by the front door opening again. Allie recognized Jasmine immediately. She also recognized the box that Jasmine was carrying.
“Babe! Thanks for grabbing the tapes!” Jessi moved toward her wife to grab the overflowing cardboard bootbox. It had seen better days and needed to be clutched against Jessi’s body to keep it from falling apart.
“I can’t believe you still have the tapes!” Allie said. “And, uh, hi, Jasmine.”
Jasmine’s smile was wide. “Hey, Allie. Good to see you.”
As Jessi laid the box on an empty café table, Allie took a moment to look at her bandmate and her wife. Jessi looked almost exactly as she had when Allie last saw her, minus the half-shaved head and torn black clothes. Both she and Jasmine wore jeans, Jessi with a plaid shirt and Jasmine with a loose gray sweater. Jasmine’s coat was long and woolly, Jessi’s was a khaki parka. Their cheeks were red from the cold. Allie turned to look at the kids, who were now squabbling over who would get the last lemon square in the display case.
“Wow,” Allie murmured.
“You okay?” Ryan was beside her. She’d forgotten about Ryan.
“It’s just, this is…a lot.”
Jasmine stepped forward and gave Allie a warm hug, then moved past her toward the kids.
Allie looked from Jessi to Ryan. “How? I mean…did you find her? How did you find her? How did he find you?”
Jessi grinned at Allie. “He was a pretty good detective, I’ll give him that. And very convincing when it came to getting us all to come into the city as a surprise.”
Allie turned to Ryan. “How did you do it?”
Ryan broke into a cautious smile. “Ren told me that Ayla said Jessi and Jasmine got married. And one day, I just randomly stopped looking for ‘Jessi Jetski’ online, and I typed in ‘Jasmine Jetski’ instead.”
Jessi rolled her eyes. “It’s her Instagram name. She really wanted an account, even though I was not into it. She agreed to use a fake name.”
“I always wanted to be a Jetski, anyway.” Jasmine smirked at them from the counter, where she was paying Ren for the kids’ treats.
Jessi laughed. “But anyway, it’s fine. She doesn’t post any photos of me or the kids. And she never looks at her DMs.”
“Can confirm.” Ryan nodded. “That account was not very useful.”
“Hey!” Jasmine frowned. “I’m right here!”
“Sorry!” Ryan laughed. “Pretty photos, though. Lots of sunsets and flowers and that kind of garbage.” He looked at Jasmine, who was still staring at him. “Good garbage! Nice garbage! I mean…” Color rose in his cheeks.
“It’s okay,” Jessi said to him, grinning. “She’s not as mean as she looks.”
“Anyway.” Ryan gave Jasmine another cautious look before turning back to Allie. “One of her posts did say that she and her family were moving to a new house. Photos of stuff packed in boxes and all that. No identifying info about where they were moving to. Except at the end of the post, she said that the house was special because it had been in her wife’s family for a long time.”
Allie wheeled around and looked at Jessi. “Your grandma’s house?”
Jessi nodded.
Allie felt a whoosh of emotion sweep through her. “Oh my god, that’s incredible.” She turned back to Ryan. “But you wouldn’t have known where that house was! I never told you.”
“You didn’t. But you did say that the photo on the album cover was taken outside of the house.”
“Holy shit, Nancy Drew!” Anisha, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet up until then, stepped forward and patted Ryan on the back. She then glanced back at Jessi and Jasmine’s kids, who were staring at her. “Sorry! I meant ‘holy shoot.’ Holy shoot! ”
“It was really just a reverse photo search.” Ryan was modest but smiling. “And then when I found the street, I had to knock on a few doors—”
“He charmed our neighbor so much she basically gave him a whole cake and almost didn’t let him leave,” Jessi added.
“True,” Ryan confirmed, nodding. “Mrs. Evanstein makes a very good lemon Bundt.”
“Anyway, then we got this knock on our door, and I was very suspicious because we definitely don’t get weird strangers knocking at our door very often. I thought he was the guy who used to refinish my grandma’s deck every few years. But he wasn’t. He was your Ryan.”
Allie felt her heart jump.
Her Ryan.
“He told us all about your whole thing, how you were looking for me in places where I definitely wasn’t. I was just sitting out there in Fort Lee, picking my kids up from school and working part-time at an insurance broker.”
“That’s what you do?” Allie stared wide-eyed at her friend.
“Yep.” Jessi nodded. “I kind of love it. My coworkers are nice. The work isn’t too hard, and I have a ton of time to be with the kids and work on the house.”
“We’re putting in a new bathroom and finishing the basement,” Jasmine piped up. “Jessi won’t let us change the kitchen. But she’s going to do most of the other work herself.”
“Really? I used to have to plug in your pedals for you because you got confused about the patch cables.”
Jessi tucked her hair behind one ear and looked down. “Well, it’s been a decade since then, and somehow, I learned how to do stuff for myself. Wasn’t that kind of the bigger point behind our DIY punk youth?” She caught Allie’s eye and winked.
Allie was silent for a moment, processing. “Hey, can I meet your kids?”
“Oh damn, yes! I forgot about them for a minute.” Jessi laughed awkwardly, and for the first time, Allie wondered whether Jessi was just as overwhelmed as she was. They moved over to the table where Jasmine sat with the three children, all of them enthusiastically tucking into the treats in front of them.
“The large one is Emily, she’s eight. Middle guy there is Akira, he’s six, as of two days ago, right, bud?” Akira looked up from the lemon square he’d scored and nodded solemnly. “And the little one is Farah. She’s four. And I think we can all agree, she is the boss of us all.” Farah looked up with a smile that was verging on painfully adorable. Her siblings nodded, agreeing with Jessi.
“So, folks? This is my friend Allie. Remember how Mama was in a band a long time ago? Allie was in the band with me.”
“And you had a fight.” Emily looked from Allie to Jessi. “Right?”
“Uh, yeah.” Allie pushed her hand through her hair. “We did. It was my fault.”
“Uh, no.” Jessi shook her head. “It was definitely my fault.”
Allie looked at her in amazement, then decided that was a discussion for another time. Or perhaps for never.
“Well, at least you made up now.” Emily looked at Jessi. They had the same eyes. “You can be friends again. Right?”
“Yes.” Jessi nodded. “No time like the present.”
Happiness flowed through Allie like warm honey. To stop herself from crying again, she turned to the table where Jasmine had dropped the box of mixtapes. “I can’t believe you still have these.”
They sat down across from each other at the table and started sifting through the cassettes. As they giggled together about one particularly terrible ABBA mix that Mimi had insisted they play often, Allie noticed Ryan standing awkwardly by the counter.
“Ryan! Anisha! Come sit with us.” She waved them over.
“You sure?” Anisha asked. “We don’t want to intrude.”
Jessi snorted. “Oh god, if you won’t be bored by two ladies telling obscure stories about weird cassettes, then you are welcome to join us!”
“Allie, actually, can I just talk to you in the kitchen real quick?”
Ryan was shifting from foot to foot. Allie looked at Jessi, who nodded almost imperceptibly, their old telepathy returning as though no years had passed.
“Sure.” Allie got up and followed him into the kitchen, not sure whether she could take any more emotional avalanches. When they were alone, he looked down at her.
“Hi. How’s it going?”
“ How’s it going ? Ryan, you’ve been here this whole time. You can see how it’s going.”
“I guess I meant, how are you feeling?”
“About seeing Jessi?”
He hesitated. “Sure, let’s start there.”
“I feel great.” She felt the urge to reach out and grab his arm, but she kept her hands at her sides. “Thank you. Thank you so much for this. I don’t know why you did it, but I definitely appreciate it.”
“You don’t know why I did it?” Ryan’s face contorted into a mix of surprise and frustration. “Allie, I did it for you . I heard your song last week, and I feel the same. I always have.”
She turned her face toward the floor. “You don’t have to say that now. I know you only thought of me as a friend. And I blame myself for pushing you into more. It’s okay. You don’t have to compensate.”
Ryan huffed out a frustrated breath. “No, Allie, seriously, listen to me. I panicked the day after the party. I choked. I was so used to women not wanting to be with me, women thinking that sleeping with me was a mistake. I was in so deep with my feelings for you, I couldn’t take it if you rejected me, so I rejected you first. Which was so ridiculous. And then you wrote that song, and it made me think you still wanted me in your life, and I was so relieved. Killer song, too. That line about us both being monsters just trying to learn how to live like humans? Heartbreaking.”
Allie’s emotions were a jumble of relief and confusion. “Why did you leave, though?” Her eyes searched his. “Why did you bail right after my performance? Why did you not even contact me for a week ?”
“To find Jessi!” He was emphatic. “I literally went home and started searching and didn’t stop until I’d found her. You wrote me a song. I couldn’t come back to you with nothing.”
Allie stared at him, unsure whether to be charmed or frustrated. “You could have , though. You could have just come to talk to me. That was all I wanted. You left and you didn’t talk to me, and it just made me feel like…” Her voice got quieter. “Like you didn’t want me at all.”
They stood and stared at each other. Her heart plummeted.
“Well, damn.” Ryan’s voice was soft. “What do we do now?” He sounded as defeated as she felt.
“I don’t know. Maybe we can go back to where we started from? Act like we just met? See how things go from there?”
“I should have asked you out the minute you walked into the studio with my coffee.” Ryan sighed.
“You didn’t know how great I was.” She managed a cautious grin.
“Yes, I did.” Ryan smiled back. “Don’t you mess with me, Allie Jetski. I’ve had a crush on you for fifteen years.”
Allie snorted, grateful for the moment of levity. “Even you aren’t charming enough to pull off that lie.” They shared another uneasy smile. She had no idea what to do next.
“Oh!” Allie said finally, desperate to break the tension. “I finished my covers project.”
Ryan’s expression brightened. “You did? Nice!”
Allie stepped into the office and pulled her purse off the coat rack. She rummaged inside until her hand found the smooth plastic rectangle. “I gave one to Mindy and one to George, of course. And I saved this one for you.”
Ryan took the cassette when she held it out to him. He looked at the track listing and smiled, his eyes soft and sad.
“Thanks, Allie.” He looked up at her. “This is really something special.”
Allie swallowed the lump in her throat.
Unable to think of anything else to say, she led the way back out to the café, where Jasmine had joined the table of adults and was sifting through the tapes with Anisha and Jessi. The kids were happily coloring and chatting by themselves.
“So, people just made these for you? What people?” Anisha was asking as Allie sat down.
“So many people!” Jessi shook her head, looking amazed. “Promoters, sound techs, fans. I mean, to be fair, we did beg for tapes everywhere we went.” She picked up a cassette from the pile. Its scratched plastic case had the title of the mix written in black marker directly on it, with no paper liner or any other list of songs. “Oh, Allie, look at this one. Remember the tape we listened to when we drove home from Chicago in that snowstorm?”
“I was so scared that if we both weren’t watching the road, we were all going to die.”
“Yes!” Jessi was giddy, obviously enjoying dredging up these memories. “So you wouldn’t let me look down to change the tape. We listened to”—she paused to check the writing—“ Midwest Hardcore Scene Report VII , what, like, seventeen times?”
Allie could not help giggling at the memory. “There wasn’t much worth reporting, if I remember correctly.”
Jessi laughed, too, and kept pawing through the well-worn tape cases. She pulled out a nondescript case with a plain blue cover.
“Oh, here’s the Allie Crush tape.”
“The what?” Allie leaned in, confused.
“The tape with all the songs with your name in them? We all teased you about it.”
Allie scoffed. “You’re lying. I don’t remember this at all.”
Jessi was incredulous. “What do you mean? How can you not remember this tape? Look: ‘Alison.’ Elvis Costello. ‘Alison’s Starting to Happen.’ The Lemonheads. ‘Alison.’ Slowdive. ‘Allison.’ Pixies…”
Allie laughed, amazed that she didn’t remember the mix. She had been so focused on the band in those days, definitely never looking for crushes. “What else is on there? There aren’t enough Allison songs to fill a whole tape.”
“There’s other good stuff on here.” Jessi opened the case and pulled out the liner. “Some Talking Heads, some Velvet Underground. A few weird churchy songs that I used to just fast-forward through. Ha, oh yeah, that funny ‘Doctor Worm’ song…”
Allie felt a jolt of adrenaline shoot through her.
Church songs.
‘ Doctor Worm. ’
She looked at Ryan. He was fiddling with a spoon on the table in front of him. His cheeks were bright red. Allie reached for the cassette liner. “Let me see that.”
The handwriting was so familiar it might as well have been her own. She flipped the notes over and saw a tiny heart and an “R.A.” penned in the bottom corner. She could hardly get the words out.
“Ryan, can I see you in the kitchen again for a minute?”