Chapter Eleven #2
Harper looked at her for a long moment before taking a lick of her peanut butter cup ice cream and pursing her lips. “If I tell you, will you answer a question of mine? A little quid pro quo, if you will.”
“You really are a lawyer.” Charlie chuckled and bumped their shoulders to make sure Harper knew she wasn’t being serious as they walked aimlessly through Old Town after their stretch of shoreline went from public to private.
“Was. I was a lawyer. I’m not really anymore.” Harper shook her head as if emphasizing her point.
“You still volunteer at a legal clinic. That’s still being an attorney, isn’t it?” Charlie said, confused. Their arms occasionally brushed as they walked, and she tried not to read too much into it.
“Yeah, but it’s not my career anymore. It’s not how I define myself. I don’t feel like an attorney. As an attorney, I worked about a zillion hours a week to keep those billings up. Now it’s more like a hobby.” Harper shrugged. “Anyway, do we have a deal?”
“I guess so,” Charlie finally said, a little worried about what Harper might ask her.
“Okay.” Harper took a deep breath as if steeling herself to tell her story. They came upon a small public beach that seemed deserted. “Do you want to sit over there for a little bit?” She pointed to a small pier that jutted out into the water for about fifteen feet.
It was the smallest pier Charlie had ever seen. “Sure,” she said, hoping her feet would dangle in the water.
Once they were settled, Harper said in a matter-of-fact manner, “I was married, and my wife died very unexpectedly.”
Charlie hadn’t been expecting that. She had noticed an indentation on Harper’s left ring finger and a faint tan line when the light hit it just right, so she wasn’t terribly surprised that she’d been married, but Charlie had assumed divorce.
She seemed incredibly young to be a widow.
“I’m so sorry, Harper. That must have been terrible. ”
“It was. It’s been three years, but it’s still hard sometimes.” She cleared her throat. “So where’d you come from?” It was a clear attempt to change the subject, and Charlie would accept it. For now, anyway.
“I used to work on Wall Street. You know from my driver’s license that I’m from New York, but I live in Manhattan. Used to. I used to live in Manhattan.”
“What brought you to Key West?” Harper asked.
Charlie chuckled. “That’s two questions, so you first.”
Harper sighed. “Fine. I needed to get away from everything routine. Kelly, my…wife, and I got together in law school. We moved to Chicago—where we’d both grown up—after graduation and accepted offers from the same firm.
After she died, I couldn’t stand being there anymore.
Every place I looked was saturated with memories of her.
Of us. When we’d talked about retirement, I always wanted to buy a sailboat and sail around the Caribbean, but Kelly said that was really impractical because we would run out of money.
She wanted to move to Key West and buy a cute little tourist bar that we could give a legal and queer flare, so here I am.
Living the retirement dream my wife wanted because I couldn’t handle living the life we’d actually shared without her.
” She sniffed and looked out at the water.
Charlie didn’t know what to say, so she placed her hand on top of Harper’s where it lay between them and simply waited.
After a couple of minutes, Harper mumbled, “I can’t believe I told you all that,” before saying in a normal voice, “So that’s my reason for being here, and I’ve been more candid with you than anyone else I’ve met since moving away. Fuck, anyone, period. Now, tell me why you came to Key West.”
Charlie watched the small waves whispering along the beach for a few minutes.
After Harper’s confession, she knew she couldn’t be as evasive as she’d initially been planning.
She certainly wasn’t going to tell her the exact circumstances of her departure from D.
B. Graves, but she could tell her the rest. She closed her eyes.
“After it became clear that my former company and I had to part ways, I was in shock and had no idea what to do. I hopped in my car and started driving. I didn’t know where I was going, just that I had to get the fuck away from New York.
I ended up heading south on I-95 and decided that maybe I would use this opportunity of being unexpectedly unemployed to try to patch things up with my parents.
We’d grown apart for…reasons that don’t seem nearly as important now as they did five or ten years ago.
But when the time came to get off the highway to head toward Gainesville, I couldn’t do it.
Looking back, I think I had a mini panic attack in the car, so I kept driving for another eight or nine hours until I ended up in Key West. Where I stayed. ”
Harper finally looked at her again. “So you just got in the car without grabbing clothes or a toothbrush or anything?”
An unexpected bubble of laughter burst out of Charlie.
“Sounds wild, doesn’t it?” When Harper nodded, she said, “Not only did I not have any clothes, I barely had anything. I had a nearly empty briefcase because my former company kept my phone, laptop, and tablet. The only things I had with me were the suit I was wearing, my wallet and passport, a tin of mints, some ChapStick, and a few tampons. I bought clothes and flip-flops in the hotel’s gift shop, which was not well stocked.
” Charlie started laughing hard as she remembered how she must have looked walking around Key West that first day.
Harper snickered. “That explains the mismatch of the watch and your clothes when you came into the bar.”
Charlie furrowed her brows. “Mismatch?”
“You don’t wear a Timex or a Casio.” Harper tapped her index finger against Charlie’s watch, and Charlie instinctively pulled her arm to her chest and covered the watch with her other hand.
“Sorry,” Harper said. “I didn’t mean to…
I don’t know, make you uncomfortable. I’m a bartender.
I notice things. And I used to live a different life, where Rolexes weren’t out of place, so I knew that watch didn’t match your clothes.
” She shrugged. “I didn’t mean to be offensive. ”
Charlie felt silly holding her arm the way she was, so she released it.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I reacted that way.
This is the only thing that I held on to from my previous life.
This was a gift from my former boss and mentor.
He took me under his wing when I was fresh out of grad school and really helped me advance my career when being a woman in that industry was significantly less common than it is today.
And to be clear, it isn’t common today, either.
He gave me this to congratulate me for my first IPO with a market cap exceeding one billion dollars.
It’s silly that I’m so attached to it. But he passed away a few years ago, a heart attack, probably because of all the stress in investment banking.
So while I’ve divested myself of all the opulence from my previous life, I can’t bear to part with this. ”
“To be honest, that was not the story I was expecting to hear from you,” Harper said, dragging her toe through the water and flicking a few droplets across the surface.
“Right back at you. We’re kind of a mess, huh?”
Harper laughed a full belly laugh. “It certainly seems like it. Have you tried reaching out to your parents since you’ve been here?”
“We’ve been texting. I know my mom wants me to commit to meeting somewhere, but I’m not sure if I’m ready.”
“What’s holding you back?” This time, it was Harper’s hand that landed on hers rather than the other way around.
“I don’t know. I’m afraid, I guess.”
“Of what?”
“Of not being enough. Of being too much. Of them seeing me and being happy we stopped talking. Of being embarrassed because I lost the job they never liked anyway, so it’s like I’m proving them right.
Ugh, none of that makes any sense. I know they miss me, and I miss them, but…
I don’t know. I’m hoping I’ll know inside when it’s time to set something up. ”
“I think that’s fair,” Harper said and squeezed her hand. “But what I can tell you from experience is, don’t wait too long. Life has a tendency to be shorter than you think.”
Harper certainly had a point, given the loss of her wife. Which must have been horrific if she’d been willing to pick up her entire life and move a thousand miles away.
What was Charlie going to do about any of this? Including the hand that was too soft for a bartender’s and the thumb that was tracing a lazy path up and down her wrist.