26 Xavier
26
XAVIER
T HE NEXT MORNING I took her to breakfast at Donna’s before we both had to split up to go to work.
Donna’s was Mike’s mom’s café. Mike’s younger sister, Janessa, was working.
“Hey!” she said when we came in. Then her face fell the tiniest bit when she saw Samantha. “Oh. Who’s your friend?”
“This is my girlfriend, Samantha. Samantha, this is Mike’s sister, Janessa.”
“Hi.” Samantha waved, looking around. “So this is your mom’s place? It’s so cute.”
“Thanks,” Janessa said dryly.
She grabbed menus and seated us without another word.
Samantha watched her walk back to the hostess stand. “Did you used to date her or something?”
“Why do you ask?” I said, looking at the specials.
“She seemed a little… not friendly.”
I looked up. Then I peered past her to where Janessa stood at the counter taking a phone order. She glanced at me, then turned to give me her back.
I guess she was a little cold.
The truth was Janessa had always flirted with me. I’d never reciprocated.
“No, we never dated,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Many reasons.”
“Which are?” She waited.
“I’m not interested,” I said. “That would be the main reason. I have a very specific type.”
“Oh yeah? And what’s that?” she said, cocking her head.
I went back to studying my menu. “Well, my dream woman is a glass-half-full kind of person. She fights for what she wants and believes in the humanity of others—and she’s usually right. She makes the most of bad situations, deeply dislikes heights. She’s funny. Smells great. A fan of seashells and mustard, hates chorizo. And she never brings the right jacket.” I raised my eyes to hers.
“Interesting,” she said, looking back at her menu. “ My perfect man can speak to animals. He’s very principled. Not a big talker, but is paying more attention than anyone in the room. He became an animal doctor as part of a hero-arc-slash-revenge plot, which is an energy I can get behind. Hates people, loves pets. Wonderful with rambunctious pre-teen kids and frightened memory care patients. Really good at sex. He doesn’t like compliments but he’s gonna have to muscle through that one, it’s too important not to bring up.”
I was fighting my smile.
She set her menu down. “Why don’t you like compliments?” she asked.
“I just… didn’t get a lot of them growing up,” I said.
“Well, we’ll have to get you used to them. I have a lot of nice things to say about you.”
I gazed at her across the table and she smiled at me.
I would never forget that moment when I saw her through the glass yesterday. Looking out the door and seeing her standing there, holding the handle on her luggage, wearing a sweater with a scarf wrapped around her neck. She didn’t have the right jacket.
The memory of that moment was already tucked away. My brain had wrapped around it, storing it in the place I kept my most special things.
My first kiss. My first love. Seeing my dog Winnie for the first time. Seeing Winnie for the last time.
It was where I kept the day I opened my clinic and how I felt walking in there and knowing it was mine and I had done everything my parents always said I wouldn’t.
It’s weird knowing what’s going to be in your end-of-life montage, as it’s happening. But I already knew when my life flashed before my eyes, the best parts of it were going to be about her.
I was so happy she was here.
I was also tired. And not from being up all night with her either.
I’d started picking up shifts at the ER vet’s office on Sundays. Then they offered me the overnight shift on Saturdays too. It was twice the pay. I took it. I was starting graveyards this weekend. I’d do the overnight Saturday, go home, sleep four hours, and then do the noon-to-eight Sunday shift. I was officially working seven days a week. If I counted the volunteering I’d been doing, it wasn’t much different from what I was used to. The overnights would be rough, but it was only once a week. And if I could save enough, I could see her more. Maybe even go twice a month, or at the very least have the funds for better flights or nicer things to do when I got there. It was worth it because nothing made me feel as good as this. Nothing.
I loved waking up with her in the morning and that I would get to come home to her tonight. I loved going out to eat and talking about our days and making plans for tomorrow. I loved that she was going to use my shower and my pillow would smell like her hair. Being alone in a room with her.
And I hated that I couldn’t have it all the time. I already felt the loss of her leaving and she only just got here.
Janessa wordlessly filled our coffee mugs and left.
I peeled the tops off three vanilla creamers and slid them to Samantha one at a time. Then “Come On Eileen” came on over the café’s quiet speakers. We locked eyes and immediately started laughing.
It occurred to me that nobody else in the entire world would get why this was funny. If we’d been having breakfast with friends, they’d think we’d lost it.
This was the parallel life. Some of it anyway.
My smile fell and I focused on drinking my coffee.
“What?” she said, noticing I’d gone silent.
I set my mug down.
“Nothing. I just like being here with you,” I said quietly. “This is how it could have been. If you didn’t leave.”
She looked at the contents of her mug. “I know. I was thinking the same thing.” She peered at me. “When I was on my way here, I think it hit me how far away you are. It scared me a little.”
I felt my pulse pick up. Like she was about to tell me it was too much for her.
“You could have a girlfriend who lives here, you know. I’m sure Janessa isn’t always crabby.”
I scoffed.
She put her mug to her lips, smiling.
“I got my tickets for next month,” I said.
“Oh, cool. When?”
“November eighteen through the twentieth.”
She pulled out her phone. “So four weeks from now. Then I won’t see you until I come out for the cabin, six weeks after that. Okay.”
“I booked a red-eye,” I said. “I get there at five thirty Saturday morning. I can get an Uber.”
“No, I want to pick you up,” she said. “I don’t want to miss any time with you. We have to do dinner on the eighteenth with my family though,” she said. “It’s my mom’s birthday.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said.
She gave me a playful look. “You haven’t had enough of my people yet? You haven’t even met Grandma. That’s a whole other experience.”
“I don’t mind.”
I wanted to meet everyone. I should have insisted on it the last time I was there. I wanted to get to know all her family. That way when she talked about them, I knew who they were. I could put faces to names.
“Mom can’t leave the house so we’re all cooking a dish,” she said.
“So chorizo from Tristan?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Probably. He got a new job,” she said, picking up her coffee. “He’s apprenticing at a tattoo shop.”
I arched an eyebrow. “He can do those?”
“Oh, yes. He’s as gifted as he is annoying,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Oh!” she said, lowering her mug. “I wanted to ask you this couple’s question I saw.”
“Okay.”
“If you could be an egg for a year in exchange for a million dollars, but you’d have to find someone to keep you safe during that time and not break you, and if they do break you they get the million, who would you pick?”
“You,” I said without thinking about it.
“Just like that? You’d trust me not to break you for a whole year?”
“Of course. I’ve seen you with Pooter and your mom.”
“I’m going to go so far as to say that if you’re dating someone you wouldn’t trust to not break you as an egg, they’re probably not the one,” she said.
“So you’d pick me?” I asked, smiling.
“Totally,” she said. “We wouldn’t get to talk to each other for a whole year though. That would suck. But the million dollars would be nice.”
It would be nice. It would be the answer to all my problems actually.
If I had a million dollars, I’d pay off the clinic. Then I’d hire another doctor to run it and I’d leave for California so fast my head would spin. I’d open a second practice there, somewhere close to her house. Then I’d have two. And I’d have her.
It’s amazing how easily I knew this. How quickly I’d leave everyone and everything behind for her.
The only thing that would change my plans would be if she wanted to do something different, because the money would be hers too.
“I bet I know what you’d do with the million,” she said.
“What?”
“You’d pay off the clinic. Probably open another one, because it would stick it to your parents if you had two.”
The corner of my lip went up. “I’d open the second one in California.”
She grinned.
“What would you do with the money?” I asked.
“The same thing. Pay off your clinic. I would also like to stick it to your parents.”
“There’s nothing else you’d do with the money?”
“There’s nothing else that would make me happy. There’s no cure for dementia. Even if you have a million dollars.”
“If there was, that’s what I would use the money for,” I said, meaning it.
Her eyes went soft. “I know you would. That’s why I like being alone in rooms with you.”
We talked through breakfast. When it got as late as we dared before both of us missed work, I put her in an Uber. I wanted to drive her to her office, but it was in the opposite direction and I would have been late and she refused to let me. So I kissed her goodbye at the curb and watched her drive off, then I went back inside to pay the bill. Janessa was ringing me up.
“Soooo I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said, swiveling the iPad to the tip screen.
“What about?” I said, hitting the 25 percent option and putting my card back in my wallet.
“The other day your parents were here.”
I froze. “Okay…”
“I just thought you’d want to know. They were with another couple having lunch. Your mom asked about you.”
“What did she want to know?” I asked.
“She asked if you still come in. She told her friends your best friend’s mom owns the place and that you’re a veterinarian. It was sort of braggy actually, kind of pissed me off.”
It pissed me off too.
What was the point in her talking about me? To stake some claim on my successes? To act like she had anything to do with them or that I was somehow the result of her parenting when she hadn’t so much as sent me a birthday card in twelve years?
“Thank you for letting me know,” I said.
“Yeah. Xavier? I know how shitty your childhood was. I mean, I know we weren’t close, but I saw enough. I wasn’t nice to her—and I might have served them old coffee the whole time they were here.”
I scoffed. “Thanks.”
“Anytime. You know, you can call me if you ever want to talk, or go get a drink or something.” She looked at me hopefully.
I put my wallet away. “Tell Donna hi,” I said, and I left.
The thing with my parents bothered me all day. There was something unnerving knowing they were lurking in my spaces. Getting more comfortable with adjacency to me. It was one thing to see them watching my stories or to get guilt phone calls from their friends, but it was something else for my parents to be somewhere they could actually bump into me.
I had a humming under my skin that I was so unused to, it took me half the day to even realize what it was. Anxiety. They’d shaken me up enough to make me anxious. The way I used to feel twenty-four-seven living with them, like something bad was going to happen and I didn’t know what and I had to be braced for it.
Back then the sound of the front door opening or a floorboard creaking could send me into a panic. It took years to unlearn that response. And now it was back.
I was almost thirty, I was six two. I was not a scared little kid or a lanky teenager, I was a grown man and they were two pathetic excuses for humans. I’d seen people ten times more intimidating than my parents in my line of work and I’d had to call them out for animal abuse or neglect and I had zero problems with that. But something about my parents shrank me. Made me feel five years old. And I hated it.
Later that night Samantha got home ten minutes after I did.
“How was your day?” I asked, kissing her hello.
“Ugh, exhausting. I found out the real reason they wanted everyone in the office,” she said, taking off her blazer. “They’re merging with Kraft Heinz.”
I drew my brows down. “They sold?”
“Yup.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, taking her jacket to hang.
“It means they didn’t like that we were cornering the organic mustard market. We outsell their organic brands. So they made the family a very good offer that they couldn’t refuse.”
“And your job?”
She shrugged. “Not changing. They said nothing’s really going to change except maybe our benefit package will get a little better.”
“Okay. Well that’s good.”
She pulled her hair into a ponytail. “How about you? How was your day?”
I blew a breath through my nose. “Let’s figure out food first. What do you want to eat?”
She wrapped her arms around my neck. “I want to eat whatever you would eat if I wasn’t here.”
I arched an eyebrow. “So whatever food Maggie and Tina have sent home with me?”
She laughed. “Okay. Your favorite restaurant, then. And can I wear one of your hoodies?”
“You can have anything of mine on your body, anytime.”
“Oh, I will absolutely take you up on that.”
We drove to Champlin and went to my favorite hole-in-the-wall sushi place, Ginza. I ordered us my favorites: gyoza, the hibachi, and an Old Man & the Sea, and a mango roll. Once we ordered our food, I told her what Janessa had said to me about my parents. I also told her how I was feeling about it.
“I don’t know why they still get to me,” I said.
“Because they’re your first bullies. For some reason you never grow out of the way you feel about the people who hurt you when you were a kid,” she said. “I’m still low-key terrified of Shannon Horwedel from the third grade. She made fun of some white shorts my mom had washed with a red shirt and it turned them pink. She called me Pinky the whole rest of the school year and got all the rest of the kids to call me that too. I hate her to this day. I saw her once at the Grove and I did this tuck-and-roll thing behind a bush.”
I snorted.
“You have way more reason to hate your parents than I have to hate Shannon,” she said, eating some edamame.
“I didn’t like how she was throwing around my profession. Like she was taking credit for what I’ve done with myself,” I said.
“Uh, she is,” she said. “Narcissists are the fucking worst.”
“You think she’s a narcissist?”
“Oh, totally. She hasn’t spoken a word to you in over a decade but she has zero problems holding up your credentials like a trophy. And you know what’s sad? If you weren’t what you are, in spite of her, she’d do the opposite. She’d tell everyone what a failure you are and how she didn’t raise you to turn out like that.”
“She would definitely do that,” I mumbled.
“Of course. Because that’s the prophecy they foretold. And instead you’re this. You win.”
Yes. I guess I did.
Still.
Samantha reached across the table and took my hand. “It should give you a bottomless sense of satisfaction to know that they are aware of who and what you are now, Xavier. And no matter how much she wants to brag about you, that’s all she’ll ever get. She won’t get to introduce you to people, or show them pictures of you with them on holidays. The facade won’t hold up. But just know that when it doesn’t, she’ll probably fabricate some reason for you to be the bad guy, because that’s what narcissists do. She’ll blame the lack of a relationship on you and say it’s something you did so they can be the victim because narcissists love that. But nothing they ever say or do will take away the fact that you are a doctor . Okay? They don’t matter.”
I nodded like I agreed with her. But the truth was, in their own way, they did matter. I wished they didn’t. I wished memory was selective and you got to pick and choose what to forget.
My two days with Samantha went by in a blur. Before I knew it I was kissing her goodbye at the airport. Then I spent the next four weeks working myself into the ground to get back to her.