Chapter Forty-Four
Christopher
I walk through the farmer’s market by myself while I try to clear my head.
Even if Hannah is right, I’m not sure I have it in me to face that particular fear. So, I guess by her logic, that means she is right.
I try to imagine calling Julie and telling her how she hurt me, how she affected my relationships and ruined my ability to trust, but when I do I picture her doing that thing where she holds back a superior smile and I want to gag.
A part of me feels like admitting the pain to her would be a failure on my part; that it would be handing her the win and telling her that she got the better of me.
There’s that bitterness that Hannah was talking about.
I stop at the booth of the young farmer, and a relieved smile breaks out across his face. “Hey, there! So, are you a papa?”
I throw back my head and laugh. “Oh, man.” I lean against his booth, looking at his vegetables and fruits with all the focus of a professional chef. “I am. Well, at least I am going to be, anyway,” I admit, looking up at him from underneath my eyebrows.
He slaps his upper thigh. “Hot dog! I knew it.”
“Oh, yeah, and get this.” I press my fingers and thumbs together in a gesture to show that I’m about to drop a bomb.
“Twins.”
His eyes widen, the blue-gray shining as he digests the words. “Oh, aren’t you a lucky man?”
“I didn’t feel so lucky at first, but truthfully it’s growing on me.”
“The truth has a way of doing that, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll take a bunch of strawberries, and hey – if your wife hadn’t gotten a job out here, do you think you would have stayed in Pennsylvania forever?” I ask him, handing him a crisp $20 bill.
“Maine,” he says without even a thought as he hands me my change.
I shake my head at him, jiggling my palm back at him so that he takes it back. “Maine, huh? Why Maine?”
“Oh, the most beautiful state in the country.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes, I really believe that. Not a question in my mind about it. And of course, the freshest seafood you’ve ever had in your life.”
He presses his palms together in silent prayer as if recalling both the lobster and God together simultaneously.
“Maine. Okay, then. Hey, thank you for everythingng. Although I’m not completely sure you didn’t manifest that pregnancy.”
He laughs out loud, stroking his beard with his hand, tugging on it like a wizard. He hands me the cartons of strawberries. “I threw a couple of extras in there for you.”
Wordlessly, I lift up the cartons in a sign of gratitude and walk back toward my car, having decided what I need to do next and where I need to do it.
I swing the bag of strawberries at my side, thinking of dipping them in chocolate and feeding them one by one to Hannah while I tell her all the ways I’ve solved every little problem we’ve ever had and she glows like a woman treated right, her freckles golden and her eyes sparkling.
I eat one and it’s tart, nearly sour. I eat another and it’s sweet and easy, perfectly ripe.
I pull out my phone as I chew on the strawberry, letting the juice fill my mouth with its sweetness.
“Hi, Chris,” Sarah answers. “Do you have good news for me?”
I press my tongue into the bottom cheek of my mouth. “No, Sarah, I don’t.”
I expected to feel bad, guilty even, telling her that I couldn’t give her her her job back. Instead, I feel a sense of calm knowing that this is what’s best for everyone, even if it hurts right now.
“Ah,” she whispers from the other line.
I spit out the top of my strawberry, watching the fuzzy green sail through the air in an arc.
“Sarah, I think I was tempted to have you come back given our long history and the fact that you seemed truly remorseful. But, having thought it through, there’s really nothing you could do at this point to make me trust you again. And there’s just no way around that. I can’t have you working for me if I can’t trust you. I hope you can see that.”
“You can trust me, Chris. I want to make it up to you.” Her voice is begging, something I haven’t heard from her in all the years she’s worked with me. She’s always been so calm and collected. It hurts that she hid her real self from me all this time, only to show some vulnerability when trying to manipulate me.
“Well, you can’t make it up to me, Sarah. Instead, I suggest you think about how you plan to make restitution. I won’t put my business on the line again, so we won’t be having any further conversations. Rest assured, though, you’ll be hearing from both my lawyer and law enforcement.”
I hang up, breathing a sigh of relief so hard it sucks the air out of my lungs.
I squeeze the grass under my hands and feel the blades tickle between my fingers. I turn my face to the sky and let the sun shine on my eyelids for just a moment before looking for Julie’s number in my phone.
I sift through my call history, looking for the number she called me from the other day.
I count myself lucky that I don’t have her number in my phone and that it’s a search through a slog of numbers instead; that it’s a number that doesn’t even stand out.
There was a time that knowing I have Julie’s number in my phone would have given me heart palpitations, would have been something I thought about every minute of every hour.
I can see myself checking the log over and over and considering touching it, letting it ring with my breath caught, wondering if she’d pick up.
I finally find it and begin to touch the number, so that I can do what Hannah says I need to do and call her, tell her how she’s damaged me, how she irreparably changed the course of my life, but my finger hovers over the number for a moment.
Instead, I opt to block it and delete it out of my received call number list. Now, she can’t call me, and I can’t call her. We are separated by logistics only, though, and if I ever run into her, I’ll tell her exactly what I mean by blocking her:
I don’t need that closure from her. I never did.
At some point, it might have felt like it, but I realize now that that was a dream of a much younger man.
There is no such thing as closure with people who hurt you purposefully, and I’m done thinking the same person who broke me can put me back together.
The Julie I thought I knew didn’t ever exist. I don’t think I ever truly knew her, not really.
There’s only Hannah.
Just a few weeks ago, it would have been hard to imagine my life’s issues being resolved in an afternoon, but now I’m feeling like a man with only answers in front of him; answers that light the way toward the future I’ve always wanted, whether I understood what that future would look like or not.
As I drive down the busy LA streets, I make my final call of the afternoon, and I make it a good one.
I call Hannah and hear her voice, syrupy but somehow serious, too. If some women have honey voices, Hannah’s is biscotti dipped in chocolate.
“Hey, Baby,” she says to me, and I can hear her typing in the background, a quick succession of clicks that seems impossibly fast. Myself, I’ve only ever been able to type with the hunt and peck method.
“Hi there, Hannah Banana.” Her name comes out like a sigh or the tail end of a song lyric. “I thought about what you said. I’ve realized that you were right, so I called Sarah and told her it isn’t happening.”
“Oh, I’m so proud of you. Wow, and you did it so quickly.”
“That’s the only thing I do quickly.”
She laughs a tinkly little laugh at my joke and says, “Okay, Tiger, well, I’m working on something, so I’m going to let you go, huh?”
“Fine, but listen, I decided on a location for the new gym. Maine.”
“Maine, huh? Interesting. Why?”
“I got word that it’s the most beautiful state in the country. I’d like a slice of that. If we have a gym there, I’d get to see it on occasion. We could eat lobster rolls, go sailing. Doesn’t that sound nice?” I ask her as I pull into the parking lot of the store and step out, closing the car door behind me.
“Kind of the opposite of California, isn’t it? Cold, dark Maine?”
“Sure, but variety is the spice of life, isn’t it? That’s what they say. Can’t you just see Lucy in a little sweater, holding a stick under the snow?”
I open up the door of the store and the bell rings above my head. I look up at it and smile at the woman behind the glass case.
She smiles back, and I point at the phone in my hand. She nods at me and waves her hand, granting me permission to continue my conversation. The store is otherwise empty, and I’m not bothering anyone.
“That would be really cute,” Hanna acquiesces. “Do you want to wear a little sweater?” I hear her ask Lucy.
I can imagine Lucy wagging her tail at that, looking with a tilted head the way she does that makes her look like she really understands.
“Okay, I’ve taken two seconds to imagine Lucy in a little sweater, and I’m on board.”
I laugh out loud, catching the smiling gaze of the saleslady. “I’ll keep that trick in mind next time I want something. Get…Hannah…to….imagine….Lucy….doing it. Okay, got it.” I say it like I’m writing it down for later use.
“When will you be here? What are you doing, anyway?”
“I’ll be there soon, just got one more errand to run, okay?”
“Sure, don’t be long, though.”
“In more ways than one,” I tease, and she laughs in a way that tells me she’s rolling her eyes.
We hang up, and I walk over to the woman behind the glass case. Her severe brown bob shines under the hanging light that’s positioned directly over her, throwing a glare across her lenses.
“So, tell me about the lucky lady,” she says warmly, her brown eyes on me as I kneel on one knee to look closer at the different engagement rings.
“Hannah,” I tell her, looking up and smiling, my hands pressed against the glass, transferring fingerprints to it.
“She has changed everythingng about my life. I can’t wait to marry her.”