Seven. Too Much of a Good Thing #2
But Jack’s not put off. “Hoo boy, where do we get this water, Jill?” Oh God, he’s into it. I bet he knows what it means to do a messy Santa.
I spin my stool so Grant, behind the bar, is only in my peripheral vision. I put my hand on Jack’s arm. I swear I can feel Grant’s attention on us. “I don’t know; I think we’re supposed to go up a hill.”
“Oh yeah,” the guy says. Does he have a nursery rhyme fetish? And if so, why am I encouraging it? He might attempt to “hey diddle diddle” me if I don’t watch out. And yet… “How big is the hill?”
I’m aware Grant is looming to the left of us, and I use my most smutty tone to say, “It’s a very big hill.”
Grant makes an extremely fake coughing sound. I turn to see as he drops a box of beer bottles to the floor with a clatter.
“Okay, everyone,” he hollers. “The bar is done for the night! Thanks for your business. I’ll close out your tabs and give you half off for the early closure.”
The women at the table look at one another like they’re unsure what’s going on but like they better just listen to the attractive, irritated man who’s giving them a discount.
One of them tiptoes to the bar, and Grant prints a new receipt, sliding it to her on a plastic tray.
He calculates Jack’s tab, too, but when he sets the bill down, Jack says, “I thought you said half off.”
“I didn’t charge you for her drink,” Grant says, nodding toward me.
“My lucky day,” Jack says, signing the receipt.
I need to get out of this whole situation. I stand up to leave, and Jack-if-that’s-his-real-name gets up with me. “How about that pail of water?”
Grant emerges from behind the bar and steps in front of Jack. “Sorry, buddy, she’s with me.”
My heart does a little thrill jump at Grant’s words and even at the way Jack almost scurries away at his proprietary tone. Yeah, Grant can’t own me, but he can indefinitely rent me out long term, paint the walls, hang whatever artwork he wants, and get real comfortable.
But with the table of women and my creepy suitor gone, it’s just me and Grant in an empty bar.
I don’t want to leave, but I can’t stay this close to him, so I wander over to the photos on the wall.
“These are really good,” I tell him. I walk toward an alcove where there’s a photo of a sunset over a rest stop on I-80.
“Is this from our oasis adventure?” I know it is.
I remember Grant taking it. It was from our first real-ish date.
Which he eventually asked me on after enough of my trips to the bar to stare at my screen and eat his sandwiches while willing him to do more than feed me.
I’ll admit that at first, just given Grant’s good looks, I really wasn’t sure he had much more to offer than his extremely gorgeous face.
And body. And, of course, his food, which he’d kept making me.
But as we talked, I learned he was eternally curious about everything.
He asked great questions. Not just what my favorite movies were but my favorite scenes of movies.
He loves the scene in Goodfellas where Paul Sorvino slices garlic with a razor blade.
I love the scene in It Happened One Night where Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are on a train and he puts up a sheet between them so they can undress at night, calling it the walls of Jericho.
Grant’s brow rose as I described the unbearable sexual tension of a scene where nothing actually happens.
He later told me—well, he told me, along with doing other things that still force me to claw my own thighs if they cross my mind—that he wanted to take me up to his apartment right then and there.
He could talk about food with the same specificity.
We bonded one day over our mutual love of highway oases, with their twenty-four-hour diners and trucker-supply stores and candy you couldn’t find anywhere else.
And Grant told me we had to go to the one on I-80 in Iowa, halfway between New York and San Francisco and billed as the largest truck stop in the world.
He wanted to try the tuna melt, he claimed.
It was the most fun time I’d had with anyone.
You’d think a long drive with someone for a first date would be awkward, but we never ran out of things to say, and even the occasional silences were, if not comfortable (it was a first date, after all), not strained.
Then there was the bonus of getting to be there while Grant tried the sandwich and then sussed out that the diner had used capers and real butter on the bread.
When he’d taken the photo that’s hanging at the bar now, I told Grant that I loved watching his obvious excitement in his work.
He said that he’d been drawn to me for the same reasons.
I wondered if this was what it felt like to be fated to be with someone.
That was when we kissed for the first time.
And made love in his truck right after that.
“Yeah, from our oasis adventure.” He’s right behind me. And even though I already know how badly things would end if anything happened in this moment, there’s a pull in my gut that wants me to turn around to see how things would begin. Again.
But it’s because I know how things would end—again—that I don’t. “I’m leaving,” I say, not looking at Grant.
I don’t leave, though. I stay, and Grant moves away from me to wipe down the bar and clear the empty glasses from the table the three women were using.
He locks the register and flips a switch so that the only light left is from the fixture above us.
He comes back to the center of the bar, where I’m standing, feeling like I’m waiting for something, though I’m not sure what.
“I just closed the bar so I could drive you home.” In the shadowy light, his voice is kind and soft.
“I didn’t need you to do that,” I say.
“You really did, Jill ,” he says, and I’m a little pleased my nursery rhyme escapade got to him. He puts a light hand on my shoulder. “It’s cold.” He walks me toward the door and lets go of me to hold it open. “After you.”
Outside, we walk around the corner to where he’s parked.
He opens the passenger door of the pickup truck and helps me climb inside.
He hops into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and lets the truck warm up.
Neither of us says a word. I keep my hands folded around my purse and stare out the passenger window.
Finally, Grant pulls away from the curb and turns onto Ninety-Fifth Street.
“So, were you planning to go home with that guy and see if he lives in a shoe? Or has Mother Goose trapped in his basement?”
I roll my eyes. “He was harmless.” I jut my chin out. “At least he was committed.” I regret the dig as soon as it’s out of my mouth.
Grant huffs and squeezes the steering wheel. “Okay, whatever.”
“I’m not trying to start a fight,” I say, even though that’s exactly how it seems.
“I asked you to go with me. To New York,” Grant says, and he sounds angry.
“That’s not how I remember it,” I say. “If I recall, you’d already made up your mind to go whether I was coming with you or not. You dropped it on me like you wanted to see if I was up for ordering Taco Bell.”
“I’d gotten a huge opportunity!” he says. “We’ve already had this fight! You told me to go. You barely considered coming.”
“If things were flipped, you wouldn’t have made the move for me.
If it had been me wanting to go to LA,” I say.
We did have this fight. Or a version of it.
The fight we had at the end was mean and miserable, but the worst part was knowing that all along, I really wasn’t the right person for him.
I was so invested in our bubble that for a minute, I let myself believe it would never burst. When he announced his new job like it was no big deal he’d be moving, I realized he was never in love with me the way I was with him.
“You did go to LA, though,” he says now, the glow of streetlights creating shadows along his jaw.
“Yeah, once you evaporated into thin air,” I say in a whisper. “You never even called me again.”
Grant exhales. “That’s not how it went down.”
“Oh? Tell me how it went down.” I say it with conviction, but as the words leave my mouth, I feel both nauseous and like I might cry. “Actually, forget it. Let me out here. I want to walk.”
“I’m taking you home.” I know Grant, and he’s too chivalrous to dump me on the sidewalk even if he hates my guts.
But he has to stop at a red light. And that’s where I push open the door and leap down from his truck onto the street, slamming the door behind me.
Grant rolls down the window. “Don’t be dumb, Jill. ”
“The only dumb thing I did today was come into your bar in the first place,” I say. I hold my phone in the air. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll call a car. Just go.” I quickly tap open the Uber app and wave it so he can see. “I’ll be fine. Go.”
Grant doesn’t say anything. His expression is defeated as he turns his attention back to the road just in time for the light to turn green. He drives away. Leaves again. Just like before.
The tears come fast and hard and freeze on my eyelashes.
I hunch my shoulders and fight against the wind as I trudge down the sidewalk.
I don’t want to go home like this in case Mom is still up.
A few steps ahead of me is the Powell Park Green and the big wooden Santa sleigh decoration in front of the tall Christmas tree.
The lights from the tree are blurry through the tears that keep falling as I move toward the display.
My stomach decides now is the time to remind me I mixed tomato sauce, CVS wine, cookies, and bourbon.
I swallow down the vomit that threatens to emerge and heave myself into the seat of the sleigh, letting the tears burst from my eyes.
Beneath the boughs of the big evergreen tree, I’m shielded from the wind as I stare blankly ahead.
The tree’s lights blur and smear across my vision in broken rainbows, but it feels good to sob, as if I can clear myself of every bad feeling and memory in liquid form.
There’s a blanket folded over the back of the sleigh that must be a prop for when Santa shows up for the Powell Park Green’s Christmas fair next week.
I pull it over myself and nestle into a corner of the sleigh.
I can’t stay here all night, but I can at least wait long enough for Mom to have gone to bed.
With my elbows on my knees, I press the heels of my hands to my eyes, telling myself I can make it through the rest of my visit.
A familiar splash of sleigh bells jingles somewhere just behind me. I swear someone says, “Open your heart,” and I try to place where I’ve heard that phrase before as I lift my head from my hands…