Overdue

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

I arrived ten minutes late to the restaurant.

I’d always taken pride in my punctuality, but my life had gotten so erratic that now I ran late for everything.

Tonight the delay had been my outfit. I had removed my work clothes to exchange them for something nicer, but then it had felt strange to dress up for Cory yet equally strange to wear something I’d worn on a date with somebody else.

I’d ended up riffling through our closet for too long, willing something new to appear, before finally accepting defeat and putting my work clothes back on.

It was unusual for Cory to be late, too, but his car wasn’t in the lot.

A glance around the restaurant confirmed that he wasn’t inside.

I sensed the observant stare of the host, an older brawny man with a lumberjack beard who gave off the vibe of owning the place, even though the diner was called Lottie’s and the name on his shirt was KEVIN .

He was often stationed here at the front.

“I’m looking for my…” Boyfriend still wasn’t sitting right on my tongue, so I let the sentence hang in the air, unfinished. “I don’t think he’s here yet.”

“Booth for two?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah. Yes,” I said, doubling down on my hesitant confirmation.

He guided me past Grease , Moonlight , After Hours , Waitress , Swingers , and When Harry Met Sally to the Back to the Future booth.

Cory and I never called this place Lottie’s, or even Kevin’s.

It was the “diner-themed diner,” and it was one of our favorite places in Ridgetop.

Rainbow flags welcomed the guests out front, the seats were sparkly pink vinyl, and the employees wore matching pink shirts in a fifties-style cut with their names embroidered on the fronts.

Embroidered! Nobody did that anymore. But the real standouts were the tabletops, lovingly themed and collaged.

Tonight I stared at Marty McFly in the original diner as well as the eighties-themed diner from Part II .

Apparently, the saloon in Part III didn’t count.

As anxious as I felt, it was comforting to be somewhere familiar after a month of new bars and cideries.

This was the everlasting charm of a diner: familiarity.

Cory appreciated the predictability of their menus, but I also liked that a person always knew what to expect when stepping inside one.

For the first time ever, I didn’t know what to expect.

Cory.

I started at the sight of him. My heart squeezed with pain and joy. He noticed me, too, and grinned. Our hands lifted in a wave. Mine trembled. As he crossed the checkered floor, I stood for a hug but suddenly became nervous to touch him.

Our embrace was loose. Out of practice, out of sync.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said as we sat down on opposite sides of the booth. “There was this thing with a canceled reservation, and then Mitchell caught me on the way out, and you know how he is—”

“I do know,” I said with a laugh. The doorman at the Tamsett Park Inn, Cory’s workplace, was a good guy but also very chatty and very boring. He had a lot of theories about the Knights Templar. “I actually just got here, too.”

His grin widened. “Who are we anymore?”

The question was valid. Under the nostalgic glow of the diner’s pink globe lights, he still looked like Cory.

He had the same gingery hair with its upward, Tintin-like swoop, the same closely spaced freckles that in certain lights made him look tan instead of Irish-pale, and the same friendly smile that always put everyone else at ease.

A college friend once told Cory and me that we had matching smiles.

We were also the same height and had been born with the same poor vision, although I’d gotten Lasik during my first year on the county’s health insurance while he still wore chunky black glasses.

His overall appearance was cute and cartoonish.

But something about him was different tonight, some infinitesimal thing.

“You look…”

“I know.” He was staring back at me, similarly mystified. “You look the same but dreamlike. Like my eyes can’t fully process you.”

“That was the longest we’ve been apart in eleven years.”

“I’ve wanted to call you so many times.”

I leaned forward. “Me too. Anytime something happened, it was weird not being able to tell you about it.”

“ So weird.” His fingers drummed against the tabletop.

It was his energy, I realized. He’d always had a lot, but tonight he was fidgety and jittery. Perhaps even a bit manic. He pushed his menu aside to reveal young George McFly ordering “a milk, chocolate.” “What a good get!” Cory said. “Although still not as good as—”

“ Diner ,” we said in unison.

Long ago, we had decided that the Diner -themed table in the diner-themed diner was the apex table.

Unfortunately, we’d never been seated there.

We could have asked for it, I’m sure, but we joked that we were waiting for it to happen naturally.

We shared a fondness for silly theming, a holdover from growing up in Orlando.

Neither of us wanted to live in the theme park capital of the world anymore—we both sort of hated it, and we definitely hated all the recent legislation in Florida—yet a good theme still recalled some of the happier memories from our childhoods.

Cory’s smile was soft and a little sad. “Yeah.”

“So… uh. Hi.”

“Hi,” he said.

We laughed again. It was awkward but nice. It really did feel like a date.

“How are you, Iggy? You look good.”

I hadn’t heard that name in a month. Cory and Riley were the only people who called me Iggy, and I was still ignoring her texts.

As the older sister, I’d been christened with the family name.

Ingrid Dahl had been our paternal grandmother.

Farmor and Farfar—“father’s mother” and “father’s father”—were immigrants from Norway, and my father was their only child.

And although my name was more common now, when I was a kid it had felt like an immigrant grandmother’s name.

I’d been jealous of Riley, two years younger, who’d received the American name.

But Riley had given me “Iggy.” As a baby, she hadn’t been able to pronounce my name, and the nickname stuck.

Everybody had called me Iggy for years until I finally embraced my real name in college.

It was Riley, of course, who’d been the one to call me Iggy in front of Cory not long after we’d started dating.

“Iggy Doll would be the coolest rock-and-roll alter ego,” he’d said.

Although he wasn’t a musician, he was passionate about music, especially unconventional artists who played in styles I didn’t quite understand.

And so the nickname stuck again. But I didn’t mind.

Now it was something only my most beloved could call me.

“You look good, too,” I said.

“How was… your month?”

“Uh. I don’t know.” I tried to smile to cover my discomfort, but I couldn’t maintain it. “I’m not sure how you want to talk about this. How was yours?”

“Um, fine. Strange. Good. I’ve had a good time.”

Good.

“But I don’t want to make it weird or whatever,” he said. “I mean, we’re not going to talk numbers, are we?”

By the way he said numbers , I knew he didn’t just mean his number and my number. It was a pluralization, a confirmation. Cory had slept with multiple women. I felt ill.

“Yeah,” he said, correctly interpreting my expression, “I don’t think I want that sort of information from you either.”

We jumped as two red plastic tumblers of water thunked onto the table. Our server was a lithe man with a dancer’s body and a shaved head. The name HANK was embroidered on his shirt. “Hey there. I’ll be taking care of you folks tonight. Can I get you something else to drink?”

“Water’s fine,” I said, already grabbing it to cool myself down.

“A Coke, thanks,” Cory said. “Actually, I think we’re ready.

” He glanced at me, and I nodded. We always ordered the same thing here: he got the chicken tenders and fries, and I got the grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Hank tapped his smooth head to say he didn’t need to write it down and then strolled gracefully away to place our order.

“We’ll keep it general,” Cory said. “Did you… have a good month, too?”

We were stuck on that adjective. I didn’t know how to respond and flushed with embarrassment.

“Uh-oh.” He rubbed his hands in anticipation of a juicy story.

It would have been easy to lie. I could have slipped my own pluralization into the conversation and let him draw the wrong conclusion, but honesty was required. “I haven’t.”

He didn’t get it yet. “You haven’t…”

I widened my eyes.

“Oh,” he said. And then, “ Oh .”

“I’ve met people, I’ve gone on dates. But… no.”

Cory sank back against the sparkly booth.

He looked disturbed. I hadn’t known what reaction to expect, but it wasn’t this.

“I—I’m gonna need a moment to process this.

I mean… what does this mean? Is this something you even wanted to do?

Did I pressure you into this?” His breathing quickened. “Oh my God, Iggy—”

“No.” I reached for his hand. It took a moment for him to realize what I was doing and give it to me. I squeezed him hard. “I wanted this, too. It doesn’t mean anything except that”—I shrugged helplessly—“I’m really, really bad at this.”

The alarm faded, but he still seemed hurt and confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m out of practice. That’s all.”

“But I am, too. Neither of us was ever in practice.” His hand wriggled free of mine as his panic spilled back over the table. “I’m an odd-looking dude, and you’re an attractive woman. This should have been so much easier for you.”

I lowered my voice to help calm him down. “There were men I could have slept with, but… I don’t know. None of them seemed right.”

“Well, yeah, but we weren’t looking for soul mates. We were just messing around.” He shifted forward again as a new thought occurred to him. His voice became hard-edged. “Were you afraid they might hurt you? Were they creeps?”

“No, nothing like that.” When he continued to stare me down, I released an unhinged laugh. “I don’t know! I don’t know why it hasn’t happened for me yet.”

Cory sat back a bit. “Yet.”

I bit my bottom lip, as if that could prevent the word from having slipped out.

“Are you—” He stopped himself. “No. Tell me what you mean by that.”

Blood rushed to my head. I wasn’t okay with ending our experiment, not when I was still in the middle of it. Not when he had numbers and I had none.

“I’m not ready,” I said. “I need more time.”

Cory deflated. At first I assumed he was devastated. But when he bent over with laughter, I realized he was relieved. “Thank God.” He removed his glasses to rub his eyes. “That month, like, flew by. I’m not ready either.”

“You’re not?”

“No!”

He burst into another laugh that sounded more hysterical.

I began laughing, too, though mine was clouded with shock.

I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t ready. There wasn’t a ring.

Up until that moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to feel the full disappointment of my failure.

Of having January be it, forever. But I was getting a second chance.

My shock and despondency were swept away by an exultant relief that matched his.

“What were we thinking?” he said.

I gasped. “A month! As if we could do all this in a month.”

“I was terrified to say it because I didn’t know how you’d feel, but… one month!”

We continued to mock our stupidity until Hank interrupted with the food.

We dug in, elated, refueled with foolish confidence.

Cory smashed his fries into his ketchup, and I slopped my grilled cheese into my soup.

Red stains splattered onto our work clothes as we extended our plan by another month and discussed our time apart.

“So who have you told?” I asked.

“Well, you know…” He named most of his coworkers. “I didn’t want them to think I was cheating on you or that we had broken up.”

“Yeah. Same.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why do you look so surprised?”

He ripped into a chicken tender and then took a moment to chew and swallow. “I thought my coworkers might see me at one of our bars, but I have a hard time imagining Sue or Alyssa going out drinking. I guess I assumed you wouldn’t tell them.”

The Tamsett Park Inn contained multiple restaurants and bars.

Somehow, it had never occurred to me that he might try to hook up with a guest. Surely that was against the inn’s policy, but maybe not?

Or maybe everybody just looked the other way.

It would have been convenient for him to go straight up to their rooms. I also couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t mentioned Macon.

For whatever reason, Cory had always disliked him.

“Yeah, but Sue and Alyssa see me every day. They would have known something was up. And what if one of them did see me or caught me using a dating app? I didn’t want them to think I was cheating on you either.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Is that okay?” I felt affronted.

Cory shook his head to explain that wasn’t what he’d meant. “Of course it is. It’s just weird to think about your coworkers knowing our business.”

“How is it any weirder than yours?”

“You know. Your coworkers are all so… adult.”

That was true enough. Most of Cory’s coworkers—the ones he hung out with, at least—were under thirty and single. And sure, Alyssa was also younger than us. But she was married, dependable, and responsible. Unlike his coworkers, she’d never called in sick with a hangover.

“What does Macon think about it?” he asked.

I squirmed, and the vinyl cushion beneath me squeaked. “What do you mean?”

“Ah, forget it.”

My face grew warm again. “No. What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” He crumpled up his napkin and dropped it in surrender. “The guy’s a little judgy, that’s all.”

That didn’t feel like all , and it wasn’t a fair assessment of Macon, but we left it there. I certainly didn’t want to explore the topic any further.

“So,” Cory said after several seconds of awkward silence. “You’re using a dating app.”

The tension broke. He’d ventured onto the same app, so I told him about the men with dead fish, and he told me about the women with duck face, and we shuddered and laughed at the idea of running into each other there.

Beneath our plates, Marty McFly sat beside George McFly and gaped at how young and innocent—and weak and clueless—his father had been at his age.

One more month would be enough time, right? We actually believed this.