CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JAMES
I don't go home after work on Friday. I tell myself it's because I need groceries, which is technically true, but there’s no great urgency to it. Plus, many times when I’m busy, I have my groceries delivered.
I’m not busy though, other than my mind which has constantly been going since Tuesday night when Holly gave me the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk- except it was me. We both it’s me.
The store is busy with the pre-Christmas chaos that used to mean nothing to me and now seems to follow me everywhere.
A woman near the canned vegetables is on the phone, loud voice wavering somewhere between exasperated and fondness.
“I know Aunt Carol loves her green bean casserole, but if she wants it, she needs to bring it. Nobody else eats it so I’m not making it. ”
I don’t have an opinion about green bean casserole, and maybe I should. Christmas has been just another day to me for the longest time. I’ve never done so many holiday things until Holly.
A man near the bakery is laughing with the guy next to him, telling him he can't wait to see them this weekend. His face is open and easy, radiating pure happiness. I envy him.
An older couple, maybe in their seventies, moves slowly down the cereal aisle, his hand resting on the small of her back as she pushes their cart. The sight of them sends a pang through me. This is what Holly wanted. Isn’t this what most people crave? Finding a person they can grow old with.
When did I give up on that and decide to just be alone? I don’t recall consciously making that decision, but I also never went out of my way to form any relationships after my divorce. Holly had been the first woman since then that made me want to take a chance on love again.
I make it through checkout without incident and then sit in my car in the parking lot, simply staring out the windshield as the world moves on all around me.
Saturday is worse. I take my usual run, the same route I've run for years, and somehow every single house on it has multiplied its decorations overnight.
Inflatable snowmen. A nativity scene with a spotlight.
A family loading two kids into a SUV, both sleepy kids in matching reindeer pajamas as the parents smile.
I cut my run short by two miles and walk the rest of the way home, hands shoved in my pockets, refusing to examine why my chest feels tight in a way that has nothing to do with cardiovascular exertion.
By Sunday, I've stopped pretending the timing is coincidental. Dover in December is simply full of people building the exact life I walked away from, and I can't go anywhere without being confronted by some version of it.
Monday at the office doesn't help. The office staff decorated weeks ago and I never paid attention. Now it feels like a punch to the gut. Holly didn’t claim Christmas as her holiday, but with a name like Holly Winters she may as well of.
Seriously, who names their children Holly and Frost with the last name Winters? Hopefully, Holly doesn’t have similar plans to give her children questionable names. Though with the last name Alexander, it would be hard to find anything that wouldn’t sound good.
I freeze in place, staring dumbly at the smooth golden wood of the door, as my brain frantically tries to process why I automatically gave Holly’s children my last name.
All at once, things snap into place. And I visualize Holly a year from now.
Two years. Five. Standing in a church somewhere, or a backyard strung with lights, as I could definitely see her putting her own spin on things, marrying someone who isn't me. Someone who didn't hesitate when she asked if he wanted kids. Someone who jumped all in because they weren’t thinking of how old they would be when the kids were in kindergarten or graduating. A man smart enough to know worrying about the future won’t change it and it robs the present of joy.
That someone who would get to live their life with her, for each day they were blessed.
Seeing her belly grow round and feeling those first kicks.
To be there when the first of probably five children were born.
To someday down the road, be holding hands after many years of marriage and interrogating anyone who was dating their children.
And what will I be doing a year from now?
Maybe still standing, staring at a closed door, wondering why the hell I’m still in the same place.
The thought is unbearable. Genuinely physically unbearable, in a way that surprises me with its intensity.
I think about my father, forty-five years old, mowing the lawn on an ordinary Saturday, with no idea that his time was about to run out.
I think about how certain I've been, my whole adult life, that caution was the responsible choice.
That waiting until I was sure was a virtue rather than a delay tactic.
But my father didn't get to wait. He didn't get the luxury of time.
He just lived, fully, as much as the years allowed him.
I'm forty-five. The same age he was.
My heart is healthy, I’m fit, financially stable, there’s no reason to believe I couldn’t make it into my late seventies or older.
Other men do this. Ordinary men, men with worse odds than mine, men with less stability and less love to offer, manage to be scared and brave simultaneously every single day.
Holly’s father did it thirty-five years ago with no guarantee any of it would work out.
The young man on the train, barely twenty, got down on one knee in front of strangers with nothing but hope and a question, and trusted that it would be enough.
I don't actually need to be certain. I need to decide the way I decided to walk into Holly's shop that first time. Certainty was never actually the prerequisite. It was just the excuse I'd been using to avoid the harder, simpler thing underneath it.
I want Holly. Not eventually. Not once I've sorted out every variable to my satisfaction. Now, completely, with whatever uncertainty comes attached to wanting anything that matters.
If I let this go because I was waiting to feel ready, I'll spend the rest of my life watching someone else build the family I was too afraid to commit to building. And no amount of caution, no carefully managed timeline, is worth that particular grief.
The world keeps going even if I remain stubbornly in one place.
And that’s not what I want.
I knock briskly on the door and walk in to see my next patient, eager to get my day going. Over lunch I have a lot to get done and I don’t plan to waste a single second of that time.