Chapter 41 Back Where You Started
Back Where You Started
Jamie
Lucy Ewen: Please tell Jack I love him and I’ll miss him dearly. And to be good for his uncles. I know you’ll tell him all this yourself, but make sure he knows I said it too?
Jamie Gallagher: Lol ok. I will.
“I can’t wait until you get a new car,” Casey said. “The fact that I still have to use an aux cord in here is egregious.”
“We don’t have to listen to music, you know.”
“You really live like this, huh?” Casey reached across the console to grab Jamie’s iPhone. “Do you even have music on this thing? I still haven’t figured out why you bought it.”
“For your information, I do,” Jamie said, snatching his device back as they stopped at a red light. He opened his music app and chose an old Ray LaMontagne album for their ride to Jack’s school. “Now finish your story.”
“Oh, I was basically done,” Casey said. “I’ve learned the hard way that Jelani’s gonna do what he wants to do. He’s so stubborn sometimes.”
Jamie glanced at his brother, waiting for a punch line that never came. “And you think you aren’t?”
“That’s not the point here.” As they resumed their drive, Jamie’s phone pinged, signaling a new email, which Casey took upon himself to investigate. “ NYU Office of Admissions ? Excuse me?”
Jamie bristled, annoyed by both the sender and the fact that his brother was now aware of it. “Gimme that.”
“What is this?”
“It’s nothing,” Jamie said, trying to reach across the car while keeping his eye on the road. “Gimme my phone.”
“Dude, no,” Casey protested. “You applied to NYU?”
“No, I did not.”
“Is this for Jack?” He frowned and then gasped. “Is this from Eve?”
Jamie rolled his eyes. “Give me my phone, Casey.”
Instead of acquiescing, Casey ignored him and proceeded to read the message.
“?‘Dear Jamie. Congratulations! I am delighted to inform you that you have been selected for admissions to the BS in Leadership and Management Studies program at the New York University School of Professional Studies Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies for Fall 2026.’?” His voice managed to go up an octave with every other word he read.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouted.
Jamie glared at his brother. “It’s nothin’.”
“What are you talking about? This is huge.”
“It’s really not.”
“I didn’t even know you applied to anywhere but Vanderbilt. This is amazing.”
Jamie applied at Eve’s suggestion, figuring, if nothing else, it would be cool to say he got into NYU, even if there was no way he could actually attend. But now, it just made the pain of their breakup even more acute, and he wished it were something he could’ve quietly ignored.
“I’m not going to NYU,” he said. “I just wanted to see what it would take to get in.”
“And now that you know, you’re not gonna take advantage of it? You’ve wanted this for so long, Jamie.”
“Yeah, but…Vandy was always the real dream. I was never gonna be able to live in New York for nine months of the year. And especially not now that me and Eve are done.”
“What?” Casey chirped. “Since when?”
“Since December. Since March. I don’t know.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Jamie said, dodging a punch to his shoulder. “It just didn’t work out.” He tried to sound nonchalant about it, but he suspected his broken heart was betraying him.
“Bullshit,” Casey said. “She adored you.”
Jamie frowned, doubting Casey could come to that conclusion in the little time they’d spent together. “You met her, like, twice.”
“I don’t care. I saw it,” Casey said. “And you, her, so what the hell could’ve happened that was so bad in three months?”
Jamie shook his head. “We didn’t wanna be in a relationship one weekend at a time. And she has everything going for her in New York.”
“And…you think Jack wouldn’t like New York? Or what?”
He sent his brother another sidelong glance. “Unless I can convince Lucy to move there with me, I’m not sure how that’s gonna work.”
“You think he’d be the first kid to live a few states away from one of his parents?”
“I can’t do that to Lucy.”
“I believe I sat in a courtroom last summer where the state of Tennessee literally said you could.”
“Casey.” Jamie turned solemn, the way he did with Jack when he had to be firm. “It’s not gonna happen. I’m not taking my kid from his mother.”
“You’re not taking him away. You’d just be doing something for yourself for once. Do what you want. Not what you think you have to do. You don’t get extra points for getting through life unhappily.”
“When you have kids, you’ll understand.”
“I hope I never understand this ,” Casey grumbled, clearly disappointed to hear it all.
And Jamie hated disappointing him. He spent most of their lives trying to hide the hard stuff from him, taking care to protect him when their parents wouldn’t.
Tried to be the perfect role model for him when their parents couldn’t.
But try as he might, Jamie could never hide this heartache from his perceptive little brother.
“I knew this wasn’t your usual, thoughtful quiet,” Casey said, gesturing in Jamie’s direction. “You seemed melancholy.”
“Things don’t always work out the way you want them to,” Jamie said. “But for the next nine years, Jack is my only priority.”
Jamie could feel Casey’s stare boring into him. “Have you ever heard the ‘hole in the sidewalk’ metaphor?” Casey asked.
Jamie looked at Casey again as they pulled into the parking lot of Jack’s school, joining a long line of cars awaiting the children’s release. “I don’t think so,” he said, squinting in the afternoon sun, wary of where this was going.
“All right, well, it’s a poem by the lady who plays Sister Berthe in The Sound of Music —”
“Why do you know this?” Jamie interrupted.
“Shut up. Because it’s good. So the poem goes, ‘I walk down the street. There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in. I’m lost, I’m helpless. It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out,’?” Casey began to recite quickly.
Perhaps trying to get through it before Jack emerged.
He repeated the same line about the sidewalk, with only slight variations of the narrator falling into the hole and obviously recognizing their destructive patterns, leaving Jamie feeling like he was listening to a broken record.
“Okay,” Jamie cut in again, “I think I get it.”
Casey hushed him. “I’m almost done. ‘I walk down the same street. There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it,’?” he said pointedly. “And finally, ‘I walk down another street.’?”
Jamie gazed intently out the window, internalizing the allegory and how it related to his own life—and even those around him. “Okay,” he replied quietly.
“I don’t know if Eve is on that different street,” Casey said. “Maybe you move on, maybe you try again. I have no idea. But I just…I don’t want you to get stuck again, Jamie.”
“I don’t want to either,” Jamie said, thinking about how hard it had been to get over Lucy.
Hell, the only reason he really did was Eve.
What was he supposed to do now? Move on to someone else?
That sounded like falling in the same hole.
“I’m tryin’ not to. I’ve been making amends with Mom.
I’m finally doing this college thing that’s been plaguing me for twenty years now.
But with Eve…I don’t know. We agreed to move on. ”
Before he could say any more, the doors to the school went swinging open, and classes full of third, fourth, and fifth graders flocked outside, searching for their parents’ cars. Jack found them quickly, seeming to add a little pep to his step once he realized Casey was with him.
“I didn’t know you were gonna be here!” he greeted Casey brightly. “Dad said you were gonna meet us at the airport.”
“I was, but I decided to come in a little early to hang out with your old man,” Casey said, helping his nephew into the back seat. “Uncle Jelani is still gonna meet us in a couple hours. His layover’s at six.”
“What time will we get to LA?” Jack asked, the excitement in his voice not fading.
Jamie looked at Jack in his mirror and simply chuckled. “And hello to you, too, bud.”
“Hey, Dad,” he replied nonchalantly.
“How was school?”
“It was good.” He was already pulling his juice box from his backpack for his afternoon snack as he spoke. “We didn’t really do anything except hang out.”
Casey and Jamie exchanged knowing looks, Jamie glad to know he was paying tuition for his son to “hang out.” “I’m guessing you don’t have any homework for the week then.”
“Nope,” he said with a grin. “But we have a Spanish test the day we get back.”
“Oh, we’re gonna have to put your Spanish to the test while we’re gone then,” Casey said. “LA is a great place for that.”
“Mrs.Bermudez said Los Angeles literally means ‘the angels,’?” Jack said. “I never really noticed it was a Spanish word until she said that.”
Casey smiled back at him. “Maybe we should take you down to Mexico while we’re there,” he suggested, looking to Jamie. “If that’s cool with you, Dad.”
“You can do that?” Jamie asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Drive down to San Diego for a day or two, and from there, you can literally walk to Tijuana through San Ysidro. We can hop on some bikes and explore the city.”
“Whoa, that’s pretty cool,” Jack said.
Jamie was genuinely delighted that his son would get to see another country while he was gone.
Once upon a time, he and Eve discussed taking Jack somewhere for spring break, and he regretted that it obviously wasn’t going to work out that way.
But at least Jack was still getting his trip.
“You ready to add another stamp to your passport?” Jamie asked him.
“You should come with us, Dad,” Jack suggested, his mouth full of fruit snacks as he spoke. “We already know you’re not gonna do anything while I’m gone.”
“I have to work,” Jamie sent back as both Jack and Casey laughed at the cold reminder that he was back to his old habits, no real life outside of his son. “But I’ll be fine,” he said. “You guys have fun for me.”
But Jack and even Casey were right; he really did need to do something about that. Find himself a different street.