Chapter Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
Callahan
When we picked up the goose from Beau’s apartment, I had a coffee table and two paintings in the back of my Suburban to drop off at a customer’s house the next morning.
So Annie and I wound up loading it into the backseat instead of the trunk.
It didn’t seem worth it to move such a heavy, unwieldy thing again, so it still sits back there like a toddler I’m transporting to daycare.
“So,” I say somewhere around the Delaware state line when I lose my preferred radio station and can’t find anything else my brain finds distracting enough to keep me from spiraling, “how’s your day going so far?
” I pause, then respond to the silence with, “Oh, mine? It’s been all right, I guess.
I woke up alone this morning when I didn’t expect to.
But it’s fine. I’m pretty sure…that it’s fine. ”
Annie left sometime in the early hours of the morning, a note that said “drive safe” and the scent of her shampoo on the pillow she’s been using the only things greeting me when my alarm went off at seven.
I’m trying not to read into her sneaking out before dawn, but I’ve been failing miserably as I replay our conversation from last night.
Was it wrong to ask her to stay in Baltimore? In the moment, it seemed like something we both wanted. She said she’d think about it. But maybe she did, and the answer she’s settled on is no?
“Annie—you’ve met her, the one with the gorgeous brown eyes and smart mouth—she and I have been…getting closer these last couple of weeks. To put it more bluntly, we have been having sex. I hope that’s not too shocking for you.”
I glance in the mirror and find the goose unexpectedly staring back at me with its lifeless dark eyes.
The ugly quilt that we threw back over it once it was returned to us and restored to its display case has slipped most of the way off—probably when I had to brake hard after some asshole cut me off near the Aberdeen exit.
I’ll have to fix that when I stop next, but for now I guess it’s kind of nice to be talking to something with a face instead of a fabric-covered box. Marginally less absurd.
Very marginally.
“Before Annie came along, I hadn’t been with anyone since my ex-girlfriend, Nicole.
Oh, you’ve met her too. She was the one who found you in her attic.
I’m sure you remember. Anyway, we dated for a long time.
So long that I never had to even think about the possibility of dating anyone else.
When she broke up with me, I wasn’t sure what to do.
The idea of rebuilding what we had—something years and years in the making and rooted in so many firsts and formative memories—was so, well, intimidating.
Probably impossible. But it felt like either find something exactly like what I had with Nicole again, or resign myself to being alone forever. ”
I put on my turn signal and change lanes to get around an annoyingly slow sedan.
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “It’s silly. But it’s kind of like having an old chair that’s worn in just right, and even if it doesn’t match the room all that well anymore, you’re devastated when it breaks beyond repair because even if you could go out and get a new one, it isn’t going to feel the same.”
I pause. “Maybe Annie’s right about the whole thinking-of-relationships-as-furniture-shopping thing.
Though, to be fair, I find most furniture more interesting than I find most people, so it’s intended as a compliment.
I wrote an entire master’s thesis on the influence of colonialism on chair design and manufacturing in nineteenth-century America, you know.
Or maybe you don’t. I can’t imagine you would have access to JSTOR.
” My eyes shift to the rearview mirror again.
The goose, predictably, does not find this amusing.
“I got really stuck for a bit, dwelling on how much I missed being able to sit down and immediately feel at ease. And regretting that I took it all for granted when I had it. Not just with Nicole, but…but with Graham. My mentor. The closest thing I ever had to a father. Losing him…I think that was the whole back of the chair falling clean off without warning. And then I kept trying to sit there like it was still whole, pretending I was just as comfortable as before, only to fall on my ass when the legs finally gave out beneath me.”
I consider my metaphor further, and continue, “But then Annie came along and showed me that objects—or, in this case, lives—can evolve into new things that have just as much value. I admit that I was skeptical when she first arrived. I couldn’t abide by someone intentionally breaking things further instead of trying to restore them as close to the original as possible.
I got to watch her work on a piece the other day, though—this table that she’s making—and I suddenly understood the magic of what she was doing.
Because Annie’s gift is taking pieces of the past that would never fit together again and giving them a future.
And…well, maybe that’s what I need to do too.
Except, you know, with myself.” I pause.
“Hm. I wonder if that’s what Fran meant by judging the cookie on its own merits? ”
The goose continues staring at me from the backseat, expression unchanging (obviously). “You’re a good listener,” I say, moving my eyes back to the freeway ahead. “But you never really have anything helpful to contribute, do you?”
I sit in silence for a few moments with my thoughts, trying to reconcile the chair metaphor and the cookie metaphor to get a better grasp on my epiphany.
When I next glance into my rearview mirror, I see the goose, yes.
But I also see red and blue lights a moment before I hear the whoop-whoop of a siren starting up directly behind me.