Chapter 3 – Dylan
Chapter Three
DYLAN
“ O h hey, Julie.” Reluctantly, I open the door to my drunk and disheveled ex. It’s one in the morning, and I tried to ignore the incessant ringing of the doorbell, but when the dog next door started barking, I hauled myself out of bed.
“Why?” she cries, launching herself into my arms. The smell of booze and stale smoke fills my lungs. I half-carry, half-drag her into the living room and drop her onto the sofa.
“Julie, we’re broken up now, so you can’t be showing up at my house at all hours of the day and night. You shouldn’t be showing up at all. People that break up go to their own houses. That’s the whole point of breaking up.” I shove a hand through my hair. Julie decided she wanted to stop dating a few weeks ago, which I was fine with.
“We don’t have to be broken up. We can date again. I still love you. You just need to go back to law. It’s your calling.”
That’s one way to put it. Albatross would be another.
“You’re going to be thrilled to know that I’m wrapping up my last two cases this month and then closing the law office for good.”
“Noooooo,” she wails.
A weeping woman is a nightmare. A weeping drunk woman who is trying to shame me back into an active law practice is the precipice to hell. This is punishment for being a dick to women in the past. I leave the crying Julie to fetch a glass of water and aspirin. When I return, snoring has replaced the tears. I set down the water and pills and lay a blanket my mom knitted over Julie’s passed-out body.
I should kick her out, but I feel guilty over not caring that she broke up with me.
To be honest, I hadn’t realized we were dating in the first place. I was at a park, staring at the grass wondering what was so great about getting in touch with nature, when this woman started talking to me. She was a fitness fan—yoga and Pilates specifically. She talked about how flexible these exercises made her. I nodded along because my mom had just been diagnosed with cancer, and I could hear her telling me it cost nothing to be polite. She was wrong. It actually took a lot of effort to appear interested in things that aren’t interesting.
But my efforts to be a better son and my lack of focus on anything but helping Mom beat cancer resulted in gaining a girlfriend, losing my desire to practice law, and picking up a hobby my mother loves.
Julie seemed nice, and she’d explained over one of our dinners that she was coming off a bad breakup with a guy who cheated on her. They’d lived together for two years, and the whole time, he was sleeping with his married coworker. She dumped him, found a new place to live, and a new love.
It took me the whole dinner to realize that “I” was the new love. How we arrived at love when we hadn’t held hands, kissed, or been anything more than people breaking bread together, I’m not sure, and I also wasn’t sure how to break up with someone who thought a few meals meant happily ever after was right over the horizon.
It was with great relief that she broke up with me saying that turtles had more ambition than me. That’s probably an insult to turtles.
I had spent years chasing the best degrees, best internships, best jobs, best cases, and I missed that the person I loved the most in the world was growing sick. Mom kept her cancer diagnosis from me because she didn’t want to interfere, she said. And I, so busy with my career, didn’t even notice that she was thinner and more pale with each passing week until it was nearly too late.
She’s on the mend now, but her heart is broken that she’s too weak to knit, not to mention her eyesight is screwed up from all the chemo and radiation. So I knit for her. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but Julie was appalled when I told her the stash next to my living room sofa was mine and not my mom’s. She said that knitting was unmanly, as if somehow holding metal sticks in my hands that were sharp enough to pierce someone’s jugular actually made my dick fall off.
My sizeable dick still hangs between my legs despite the fact that I’ve made a scarf, a hat, and a sweater. Damned proud of the latter one, but it’s too warm for sweaters, so it’s tucked away until the snow comes.
Maybe my dick will fall off when I put it on, like the swan’s wings in the old Grimms’ fairy tale about the sister and the seven brothers. Hopefully Julie won’t be around for that. At some point, she has to stop crashing here. Right?
I contemplate pouring the glass of water on her face and forcing her out into the street, but that would actually make my mom cry if she heard I did that, so reluctantly, I leave the passed-out drunk on my living room sofa and go to bed myself.
Julie is the perfect example of why I hardly ever date. Once a woman latches on to you, it’s almost impossible to get rid of them.