24 Samantha
24
SAMANTHA
I STOOD WITH my siblings staring down at the giant wet mark on the sofa. The urine stain spanned almost the entire length of the left cushion. I wondered if I could fit the whole thing in the washing machine.
Grandma already had Mom in the shower. I was sort of glad Dad wasn’t here for this.
“What happened?” I said, shaking my head. “We just took her to the bathroom.”
“The doctors said incontinence would start to become an issue,” Jeneva said.
“She was doing so well though. She’s never had an accident before.”
“Uh, she’s fucking high as a kite?” my brother said. “I’d piss myself too.”
Jeneva bobbed her head. “He’s sort of right about that. Maybe we should take her sedatives down a little?”
I twisted my lips. “Maybe we should. I mean, now that I think back I could tell when she was getting worked up that one day. We could probably get ahead of the outbursts next time.”
We all stared at the cushion.
“She’s going to need diapers,” I said quietly.
“We knew she would,” Jeneva said.
We stood there in silence. Another layer of Mom’s dignity, stripped. One less thing she had agency over.
“Well, I’m getting her the cute ones,” Tristan said. “She’s not gonna be in some hideous old lady nappy.”
For once I appreciated my brother’s defiant energy.
“I’ll get the steam cleaner,” I said.
Tristan scoffed. “You think you’re cleaning that? It’s drenched.”
Jeneva lifted the cushion and winced. “Yup. Straight through.”
I looked back and forth between them. “So what do we do?”
She shrugged. “Get a new sofa? It’s not a bad idea, honestly. This one was so old anyway.”
Tristan crossed his arms. “Well, if we get a new sofa, we need to paint.”
I groaned.
The living room was the only room on the main floor that wasn’t being renovated. It was our last inside place to hang out.
“The carpet is pretty gross too…” Jeneva said.
“I know, but more remodeling?”
“I mean, the sofa’s done. It’s not like we have somewhere to sit,” she mumbled. “We could get it at Dad’s work, he’ll get his discount.”
I took a deep breath and blew it out through my nose. “Fine. Let’s vote on it tonight.”
But I had a feeling I knew what Grandma and Dad were going to say. The house was already chaos, why not just do the rest?
My phone vibrated with a picture.
Xavier. I smiled. I hadn’t seen him now in almost a month. As of right now, we hadn’t set a date for his next visit. He was thinking mid-November, but he was waiting to see if ticket prices went down.
He’d told me about his financial situation. He really did not have disposable income. Now that I knew that, it made the donation he gave Pooter all that more generous.
I guess I always thought “doctor” equaled money. I didn’t consider the realities of it, that medical school is expensive and practices cost hundreds of thousands to open and get up and running. He was a small business owner. That was risky and difficult. He was a hard worker—maybe one of the hardest workers I’d ever met. I don’t think he knew how to stop. When he wasn’t working, he was giving his time to rescues.
And now he was giving his time to me.
A long-distance girlfriend probably hadn’t been in his five-year plan. I got the sense he’d intended to put his nose down and grind for a while before he got into something serious.
And now he was in something a little serious. And it wasn’t going to be easy to navigate.
On one hand I felt bad for derailing his plans. On the other hand, he had come here under false pretenses to trick me into going on a date with him, so the guy had this coming.
My phone vibrated again.
“Who’s that?” Jeneva asked, watching me grin at my screen.
“The smoldering veterinarian of my heart,” I said. “My boy friend.”
It was a selfie of him with a floppy-eared baby bunny. He was holding it against his chest.
“Are we dumping this or what?” Tristan said, looking annoyed over by the sofa.
“Sorry,” I said, sending Xavier a heart emoji and then setting my phone down.
My sister and I took one end and Tristan took the other and we carried it out to the curb. While we were walking, something slipped out of the bottom of the sofa and bounced down the driveway. I gasped. “Mom’s ring!” I set my side down and ran to pick it up. I held it, beaming.
“No way ,” Jeneva said. “I searched this thing like a thousand times!”
“It must have really been in there. What if there’s more?” I said.
Tristan crossed his arms. “We should probably cut it open. Make sure there’s nothing else.”
And this is how we ended up knifing a pee-soaked sofa on the front lawn.
We didn’t find anything else.
When we were done we put the couch on the curb. Tristan and Jeneva went back in, but I stayed outside, sitting on the porch with Mom’s ring on my thumb, scrolling back through my text messages with Xavier.
I missed him.
I wished I could go to him instead. Give him a break. He’d flown here twice already, I wanted to let him catch up with his bills. But it was hard enough to leave everyone to deal with Mom, and to make them juggle the remodel stuff too just so I could see my boyfriend? I couldn’t do it.
Also, the travel wasn’t exactly in my budget either.
The remodel had gotten bigger than anyone anticipated and it was getting bigger still. At the time we’d all agreed to split it, the loans weren’t a burden. I didn’t have a car payment or any social life. I had the money, so why not spend it on a place I loved so I could use a dishwasher that wasn’t from 1972. But now I didn’t have extra to be flying back and forth to Minnesota all the time.
Xavier hadn’t been in my five-year plan either.
Dad pulled up. I watched him get out of the car. “Hey,” he said. He took a seat next to me and set his messenger bag down.
He looked so tired.
I nudged him. “How you doing, Dad?”
“Fine. Is there a reason the sofa is massacred on the curb?” He looked at me.
“Yeah, about that. Mom had an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“An accident, accident.”
He nodded and peered wearily out at the orange tree next to the driveway.
“There is good news though.” I held out my thumb. Dad stared at the wedding ring he put on Mom over three decades ago. He pulled it off my thumb and held it in the palm of his hand.
He studied it for a long time. “She never took this off,” he said quietly. “Not ever. Not even to wash dishes.”
He stared at it another long moment. Then he closed his fist around it and without another word he got up and walked into the house.
An email pinged on my phone and I sighed. Back to work.
It was from Murkle’s. Marked urgent.
It was a notice for an on-site meeting at the corporate office to discuss the Dijon launch. They wanted to fly me to Minnesota. Next week . I got up and did a happy dance on the porch.
I had been given a blessing from the benevolent mustard gods.
I couldn’t leave my family for some bs reason, but for a mandatory meeting? I didn’t have a choice. I had to go to Minnesota. And work was going to pay for it!
I got tickets for the following Monday to Thursday. I debated whether to tell Xavier I was coming. I decided not to tell him. It’s not like he needed to take time off to see me—it was a work trip so I’d be working when he was, no point—and I wanted to surprise him.
Three whole nights with him. I was beyond excited—right up until I landed.
I don’t think I’d processed how truly far away he was until I stepped outside baggage claim and I realized it was thirty-five degrees outside. I’d lived here for four years, I knew what Minnesota was like in October.
But somehow this place in relation to Xavier had been suspended in my mind. He was summer. We were summer.
It was almost jarring to realize he was living in fall.
Xavier was on a different rotation around the sun than I was.
In Southern California you decorate for holidays that take place during seasons you never get. I remembered the first time I saw autumn in Minnesota. The fake orange and red leaves that we’d used on our Thanksgiving table in Glendale were actually on the trees here. Then in the winter the mistletoe and the red berries and the snow. Light green pushing up in the spring, seas of dandelions and white blossoms on the wild pear trees. You earned your flowers in the Midwest. You waited for them for eight months. In California you had lemons in December.
His world would change around him and mine would stay the same. There would be a day two months from now when he’d be wearing a jacket and snow pants in negative ten–degree weather, a full beard, and I’d be in shorts buying cucumbers at a farmers market—that’s how far away we were.
How could this possibly work?
We were delusional.
We felt doomed all of a sudden.
It was so ridiculous but seeing Minnesota in autumn sent me on an existential spiral the whole Uber ride to his clinic. He was two thousand miles from me.
Two thousand miles.
I could drive to Vancouver, Canada, and be in a totally different country and it was still eight hundred miles closer than Xavier was to me at any given moment. And we thought we could make a relationship work? This was unhinged. My boyfriend was living in a whole different universe—an eight-hour trip away door to door—with no possible end in sight.
Tristan called me while I was in my Uber, deep in the throes of my silent panic attack.
“Uh, your skid mark of a cat is out of the garbage you feed her? What am I supposed to do about that?”
I rubbed my forehead. “I forgot to go to the store. Sorry. Just go buy her some. I’ll pay you back.”
Silence.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, like he was annoyed he had to ask it.
“Nothing.”
“Okay, did he have some bitch there when you got there? Because if he did, I’m enlisting his ass in the navy.”
I scoffed. “You can’t do that.”
“Oh, really? Because my ex is in the middle of the Pacific right now.”
He got a laugh out of me. Also, I was pretty sure he wasn’t kidding.
“No, he didn’t have a girl there,” I said, putting my forehead into my hand. “I’m not even there yet.”
“So what’s your problem, then?”
I let a breath out through my nose. “He’s so far away, Tristan.”
He scoffed. “And? This isn’t 1851. You’re not waiting five months for a handwritten letter coming on a steam train. Get your shit together.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.
I heard the sound of car keys on the other end. “Watch shows together, get a ring light, text him nudes, go see him. It’s not that fucking hard. I’m going to get your cat food,” he said. “Call me if you change your mind about the navy. Bye.” He hung up.
The pep talk did help. A little.
And not a moment too soon because we were almost there. I had the driver pull around the side so Xavier wouldn’t see me getting out of the car.
I got my bag, took a deep breath, and forced myself to walk around the building to the door in the blustering Minnesota air. I saw him the moment I rounded the corner.
He was in the reception area. I could see him through the glass. I stopped to watch him. He was crouched with his back to me, talking to a golden retriever—well, talking to the golden’s dad, but looking at the dog. The blue scrubs. No white coat today.
I could see just enough of his face without him seeing me. His beard was fuller than last time. I liked it, it looked good on him. He was ruffling the dog’s ears and smiling at it.
My heart swelled just looking at him.
All worry and doubt I had fell away.
And then I realized. None of the fear and worry I had was because I didn’t think it would work. The fear and worry was because I knew it would .
I was going to fall in love with this man. I was already halfway there.
And he was going to live where the seasons turned, and I was going to live where they didn’t and somehow we’d still have to try to be on a parallel line.
There would be weeks upon weeks of boring gray without him and then two or three days of color.
And that would be what we got.
I could break up with him and suffer. Or I could date him and take what I could. Make memories when I could.
With everything in life, it’s what you can live with. It always is. And this was still better than nothing.
Xavier stood, still talking to the man. I watched my boyfriend gesture to an exam room and the man and his dog headed toward it. Then Xavier glanced at me, standing outside his door. There was a split second of blank. The blank I got from Mom. The nothingness. Then a wave of beautiful recognition moved across his face.
I’d taken recognition for granted my whole life. The way it lights someone up, how it can speak to you without a word across a crowded room. That split second of raw reaction when you’re seen and known . Relief, joy, happiness at locking eyes with someone you were looking for or seeing someone you didn’t expect.
I’d never see that on Mom again.
But I’d see this moment over and over in my memories for the rest of my life. Xavier holding my gaze through a pane of glass. The grin that spread across his face. The unmasked emotion coming off him because he was as excited to see me as I was to see him. Him bursting through the door, grabbing me, and pulling me into a warm hug that instantly voided the chill in the air
I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself feel it. I wanted to feel how it felt to come home.
So this was going to be my life now. Long droughts without him, with short bursts of this .
This was worth it.