Overdue

Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Something needed to change, and I began to believe it was my hair. “I think I’m gonna get bangs,” I said, holding my hair over my forehead to show Kat.

“Under no circumstances,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I refuse to allow you become a cliché. If you still want a fringe in three months, fine. But you are in no condition to be making major decisions about your hair right now.”

I dropped my hair, dejected. “But I think it might be cute.”

“Hold on.” By the way she was staring at her screen, I could tell she was pulling up an app. “I’m writing it down: July. If you still want a fringe in July, you’ll have my full support. I’ll even pay for it myself. Consider it an early birthday present.”

“Oh God. I’m turning thirty this October.”

“I know.”

“This isn’t how I imagined my life would be at thirty.”

“None of us thought this would be our lives at thirty. Our parents never told us that the economy would be shit and that we’d have no jobs or money or houses.

” Kat and Lachlan were saving up for a place outside of town with some land for Howie to run around on, but they wouldn’t be able to afford it for several more years.

“My parents got married right out of college,” I said.

“And mine got divorced when I went to uni.”

“I think I do want bangs, though.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

That evening, I hauled my boring sad hair and boring sad self over to Brittany and Reza’s house for an invitation I had been unable to refuse.

Brittany could be forceful when she wanted something, and she wanted to lay her eyes on me and make sure I was doing okay after the breakup.

Also, I still felt like I owed them for what I’d put them through in January.

“Ramadan Mubarak,” I said, lifting a wooden salad bowl in greeting. I had looked up the phrase on my way over, as I did every year.

“Hey, look at you.” Brittany smiled as she ushered me inside. It smelled like spicy fried food and chaat masala. “Ramadan Mubarak.”

“Is she here?” Reza called from the kitchen.

“It smells incredible,” I called back. This was a lie. I still had no appetite, so it was going to take some serious effort to politely eat a little of everything. “Ramadan Mubarak.”

Reza’s head popped out. “Hey, look at you,” he said in the way longtime couples speak the same language with the same intonations.

Even though I was an unlovable shell, I pretended to be glad to be there.

I hugged Brittany with my available arm and placed my quinoa salad on their table.

It had been set with a tablecloth and a pair of unlit tapers.

Two bowls rested between the candles, one empty and one filled with dates.

Reza grew up in a practicing family, and although he didn’t practice now, he still observed some of the traditions.

“A faint wash,” he’d explained the first time Cory and I had been invited over for dinner. “The rituals are comforting.”

“Do you fast?” I’d asked.

“I eat light,” he’d said. “I drink water.”

It was mid-Ramadan, and every year, they hosted a whole schedule of dinners.

His family always visited for one week, and then they used the other weeks as an occasion to check in with friends.

This was the first year that my dinner with them was alone.

Were they hosting only me, or had Cory been invited separately? There wasn’t a polite way to ask.

As far as I knew, he hadn’t been here since their housewarming party the previous autumn.

We’d taken the tour, admired the additional rooms and second bathroom that our apartment unit didn’t have, strolled through the modest backyard, and listened to their giddy chatter about future projects—tile floors, landscaping, new countertops.

Everything had been bare then. The photographs and art had yet to be hung, and the rooms were mostly devoid of furniture.

But even though the house hadn’t felt like a home yet, it had shimmered with potential.

The memory reminded me of Macon’s house now, although his had the advantage of age and beauty.

Brittany and Reza’s house had been built in the aughts.

But despite its plainness, I had left their party feeling envious.

That night, I’d dreamed their house was mine, and it was moving day.

My apartment was crowded with marvelous furniture and objets d’art that I’d been collecting for years, everything stacked and teetering, crammed into the small space, but as I moved each item into the new house, I was amazed to discover that everything fit precisely.

When I woke up, I’d felt compelled to help my friends settle in.

Cory hadn’t understood it, but I’d gone back weekend after weekend.

I’d helped Brittany and Reza paint the rooms and fill the empty spaces.

It didn’t look like my dream home, but it did look like theirs.

It gave me pleasure, like recommending the right book to the right reader.

My shell ooh ed and aah ed performatively as Brittany narrated a new tour, showing me what they had updated in the months since I’d been there.

“Show her the room!” Reza called out across the house, and I was surprised when she blushed.

But then I knew. During the first tour, they’d told us that a particular room near the back of the house would be their shared office and maybe perhaps eventually—nervous titters—a nursery.

The last time I’d seen it, it had still been untouched.

Now the room had soft green walls and a charming wooden crib.

“We’ll put a rocker over there, I think.

” She spoke a little too quickly, and my heart lurched, signaling that it was not so dead after all.

“And maybe the changing table there? I’d like to find those used, if we can.

Reza can refinish them, but I wanted the crib to be new. ”

“Brit.”

She sheepishly placed a hand on her stomach, and I threw my arms around her.

“Did you tell her?” Reza appeared behind us, down the hall. “You told her,” he said, answering his own question.

I detached from her and launched myself at him. “Congratulations.”

He wrapped me in a hug. A real hug. It was the embrace I had desired but not received from Macon, and it filled me with a powerful longing. Not for one of my friends, necessarily, but for someone of my own, someone with a Reza-shaped body.

“Are you excited?” I pulled away despite not wanting to. “You must be so excited.”

“I’m terrified.” He laughed. “But happy.”

“It happened quickly,” Brittany said. “I had my IUD removed after we moved in. It took my sister three years to get pregnant, so I guess I was expecting something similar.”

“How far along are you?” She didn’t look very pregnant, but every body carries pregnancy differently.

“I’m due in mid-July.”

“Do you know if it’s a girl or boy yet?” I didn’t know enough about pregnancy to know how far along you had to be to get that sort of information.

Kat had been on the other side of the world when she’d been pregnant with Howie, and only a few of my other friends had reached that stage of their lives, and they were all still living in Florida.

I hadn’t been there to witness any of their pregnancies firsthand.

I also hadn’t been thoughtful enough to ask many questions.

“A girl,” Brittany said, and then Reza—wanting his wife to say it first but wanting to say the words, too—quickly echoed, “A girl.”

I met someone , Cory had said. But later that night at the Diner -themed table in the diner-themed diner, he had also confessed that he wanted to have children.

It wasn’t this new woman who had changed his mind.

He said he’d been thinking about it for a while, but he’d been afraid to tell me because he knew my own mind had not changed.

It was more proof that our futures weren’t aligned, so it didn’t hurt in the moment—it only surprised me.

But it hurt now. Seeing this happiness, this shared future, before me was excruciating.

My shell cracked and threatened to leak, but thankfully I was still dry.

I smiled and squeezed my friends again and repeated my felicitations enthusiastically.

How much longer until I could go home?

“It’s time, it’s time,” Brittany said when we were interrupted by an alarm on her phone.

Exact sunset meant iftar, so we hurried back to the dining table.

We ate our dates to break our nonexistent fasts, deposited the pits into the empty bowl, and then Reza returned to the kitchen, refusing my offer of help.

At that moment, I would rather have been inhaling all of those formidable food smells than be left alone with a pregnant woman.

But I did my job and asked questions and kept Brittany chatting readily about her new daughter, even though surely she’d already had the same conversation with countless friends during the past few weeks.

“Late July,” I realized, doing the math. “We drank in early January.”

I said it before realizing this was inconsiderate and unhelpful, but she didn’t seem bothered.

“Yeah, I became suspicious later that night when that single beer made me violently ill. Luckily, I only had that beer plus a glass of wine around Christmas.” She shrugged.

“My period was irregular anyway, and… I don’t know why I didn’t know. But I didn’t.”

Reza entered with the first few plates, and I told them they were going to be great parents, which was true.

They kept the conversation flowing as Brittany and I helped bring the rest of what he’d cooked to the table: vegetable pakoras, eggplant kebabs, fried cauliflower, red lentil dal, and several other dishes that I didn’t recognize.

It was way too much—both in terms of what I could stomach and how much effort Reza had put into it—but he insisted that it wasn’t a big deal and that some of it was leftovers from previous nights.

“I’m sorry,” Brittany said. My melancholy had descended over the table. “We’ve been going on and on, and we haven’t even asked how you’ve been doing.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said in a tone that was so un-fine that I had to laugh at myself.

Brittany and Reza set down their forks pityingly, but not without compassion.

“We had dinner with Cory a few nights ago, and he was in rough shape, too,” Reza said.

“Don’t read anything into the order of invitations,” Brittany said. “It was only because that was when he was available, and this was when you were available.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. I’m glad you saw him.” I was also glad to hear that he wasn’t thriving. Though I was alone, I wasn’t alone in my suffering.

“Do you think you can still be friends since the split was amicable?” Reza asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so, someday. Not yet.”

“No,” Brittany agreed, but then she seemed unsure of how to continue. “Nice to finally be able to eat more than plain breakfast cereal and saltines.” She picked her fork back up and speared a cauliflower floret. “And just in time. Can you imagine if we’d served you Cheerios?”

She was trying to give me an easy out of the conversation about Cory, and perhaps also about the baby. She knew I didn’t want children. Perhaps she also knew now that Cory did.

“Cory would have been fine with Cheerios,” I said.

Thankfully, they laughed. “Yeah, we had pizza that night,” Brittany said.

“Well, I’m happy to be a greedy receptacle for your wonderful cooking, Reza.

And I’m glad you can eat again,” I said to Brittany.

I felt compassion for her but also relief that I would never be in her situation—followed by additional relief that I could love this particular joy for her without longing for it myself.

It was further proof that Cory and I had never been each other’s future.

For the first time, the thought comforted me.

My hunger emerged from its cave. I dipped a pakora into the cilantro chutney, and my first bite was full of contrasts: the golden pakoras were crispy and tender, the zingy chutney spicy and cooling.

I moaned with appreciation, and Brittany and Reza laughed again as I fully dug in to the spread.

It tasted like a revelation. I didn’t have to nibble and pretend.

Their house looked beautiful that night.

The table itself was new and large enough to fit their growing family, and the beeswax tapers gave everything a warm glow, honeying the air.

I had never considered beeswax candles before, but now I yearned for tapers of my own.

I wanted this feeling of home, this same love and hope and abundance.

Unfortunately, now that I knew I wanted it—now that it was so clear to me—it felt further away than ever.