Chapter Eight
August became September. It was still unusually hot and I walked Ollie in the mornings before class and the evening close to sundown.
I hoped to see Lisa, but I didn’t. Everything felt different after we’d talked the other night.
I didn’t think that needed to mean we’d never speak to one another again, but I was beginning to worry until nearly a week later when I saw her edging her lawn as we came down the block.
She started it. “Hey!”
“Hey.” I smiled. “How’re you doing?”
“Fine.” She gave me a crooked smile back. I could tell she was still a bit embarrassed about the other night, but that just made me smile bigger. “Can I join you guys? Or you were probably heading home.”
“We can go another loop around.” Ollie was lying on Lisa’s lawn like he was already done, but I knew he could find a second wind. Anyway, he liked to double back on the spots where he’d peed.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“Let me put this in the garage.”
A moment later, we were on our way. We were quiet for a while aside from laughing about how Ollie looked back at Lisa every few paces to make sure she was still there.
She was very patient about waiting for him while he sniffed and snuffled.
Ollie did try to head up the driveway when we came to my house, but I nudged him along and he continued fairly amicably, with just one fuck you look in my general direction.
“So how’ve you been?” I finally asked.
This time, she thought about it. “Lonely, which makes me mad. I just wanted him out, but it’s so quiet in there and I can only mop the floors so many times.”
“I understand.” I’d never lived with a girlfriend, but I hadn’t realized how much time I spent with Veronica until it wasn’t happening anymore.
“Who do you hang out with? People from work or…?”
I shrugged. “I talk with people at work and I go to football or basketball games sometimes with Vera, but she’s the head of the department and it would feel weird hanging out for real. Most of my friends…” I stopped short.
“What?”
Ugh. My friends. We had started out as a bar crowd, but we’d all pretty much grown out of that, although some of the guys still went clubbing.
Lately, we’d hung out in smaller groups or had big backyard barbecues.
Well, we had until Veronica supposedly left town.
Or, rather, I had, past tense. “There’s a big group of queer people I sometimes get together with,” I said vaguely.
“I haven’t really seen them in a while though. ”
“How come?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“We’ve got several more blocks if you’d like to tell it.”
I didn’t. “I kind of broke up with someone and I suspect she still hangs out with them.”
“And it’d be awkward. How long were you together?”
“Five years.”
“Jesus…That’s practically a marriage. May I ask what happened?”
Then I did it. For some reason, the words came out uncensored, and I spilled it all. How Veronica had pretended to leave town. How I’d seen her at the grocery store. How she was dating Ally, who had been our friend.
Instead of leaning away with a dropped jaw, sorry she’d asked, Lisa cocked her head at the sidewalk in front of us and listened quietly, with barely a murmur a couple of times. When I shrugged to suggest I was finished, she finally nodded. “Well, that’s something else.”
“It’s quite fucked up.” I kept my voice nonchalant, but hearing the story out loud for the first time since I’d told Catherine made my stomach hurt.
“That actually sounds like an awesome premise for a book, but—”
“My editor would totally reject it because it’s crazy.”
Lisa grinned. “I was about to say. So do you know why she did that instead of just breaking up with you?”
I really didn’t want to get into that. “I apparently have a reputation for not taking things so well.”
“Huh.” She still did not seem at all horrified. “It sounds more like she doesn’t have the balls to deal with anything tricky.”
“She’s a lawyer. She’s got balls.”
“Well, apparently not in real life.”
I smiled. “I guess.”
Lisa nudged my elbow, grinning. “You seriously suck at softball?”
I’d mentioned that, too. “I’m terrible.”
“I played in college. I could coach you.”
“Please don’t even try.”
Now, she laughed out loud. “Point taken.”
“So who do you hang out with? The furry teacher?”
“Sometimes. The preschool crowd is going to dinner tomorrow night.”
I felt a pang of totally inappropriate jealousy and squashed it best I could. “That’s good. A nice bitch session is always good.”
“Yeah. We haven’t been for a while.” We were back to Lisa’s house by then. “I guess I should probably finish this.”
“Yeah, Ollie would kill me if we made another loop around.”
Lisa bent to scratch Ollie behind the ears. “You did a good job, old man. You need a nap now.”
“Yeah, he’ll get up on the bed and ignore me all evening. Hey…”
She looked back up at me quizzically. Apparently, my tone was more serious than I intended. “Yes?”
“If you ever want to come over or go on a walk or something let me give you my number.”
“Sure, that’d be great.” Lisa slid her phone out of her pocket and punched in the digits as I gave them to her. “Now you take mine.”
“Thanks,” I said. We hesitated there, both focused back on Ollie, who grinned around his droopy tongue like he knew he deserved the attention.
“Well.”
“Well,” I returned. “I’ll see you later, I guess.”
Lisa nodded, smiling back. “See you later.”
I fell asleep at the usual time but woke up around three and couldn’t get back to sleep.
My mind was racing and I tossed and turned for what felt like forever.
At first it was about the usual stressful things like bills, but after a while, I realized I was replaying my walk with Lisa, trying to remember it word for word.
She’d said she was lonely. She’d asked who I hung out with.
But it felt like she’d sounded surprised when I gave her my number.
Was that too forward? Had I made her uncomfortable?
I thought we’d had a nice time the other night when we split a bottle of wine and she got over the initial upset of talking about the divorce and confiding in me.
We’d talked about work, mostly. We’d laughed over stories about her four-year-olds and I told her about some of my students and how I sometimes felt like I was really making a difference.
Hadn’t it been nice? Or had she intentionally been hiding from me since?
She was the one to initiate our walk, I remembered. I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary like passing her house extra times or huddling in the bushes down the street until she finally came out to do yard work.
Yeah, she was okay with being friends. I found myself smiling at the ceiling, and hurriedly closed my eyes and rolled over, burying in the covers.
If we were going to be friends, I needed to stop crushing on her.
I couldn’t say something awkward and ruin things.
I rolled over to the other side, and accidentally kicked Ollie, who was asleep at the foot of the bed.
He huffed and stretched his legs out into my space.
Instead of moving over to give him more room, I got out of bed entirely and threw on underpants and a T-shirt. Ollie didn’t even lift his head.
I hadn’t tried to write in the middle of the night while taking my meds for a long time.
Instead of turning on the overhead light in my office, I switched on a lamp across the room and opened up my laptop.
A chapter of my unfinished book was staring at me.
Instead of working on that, I opened a new document and started fresh.
Words came slowly, but they came. They weren’t part of my murder mystery, though.
In an hour, I had part of a completely different scene, a sweet one between two co-workers in a brand-new, delicate friendship tinged with the tiniest bit of awkward electricity.
I hadn’t written a romance in a while, but it was like I had something brand new to me: a muse.
Hey. How’re you doing?
I’d thought that for sure I’d overstepped by giving Lisa my number, and that she’d never actually use it. She’d waited two days, granted, but here she was, texting. I had finished dinner and was going to dive into grading papers for Comp One, but I could toss those aside in a heartbeat.
Okay. You?
She texted back right away. Fine. Are you busy?
Not really. Just about to grade essays.
There was a pause. Would it bother you to have company?
Not at all. I can do the papers later.
No, no, I have lesson plans to work on. Like maybe we could sit together?
That was interesting. Sure. Here or your place?
Maybe your place would be easier with Ollie?
Ten minutes later, Lisa was settled on the sofa and I was on the loveseat.
She’d come with an armful of binders, folders, and colorful books.
It was fascinating compared to what I had: my laptop, a manila folder full of papers, and a gradebook.
I wanted to sneak the top book, Hop Little Frog, and read it myself, or even better, to read it to Ollie, who was sleeping under the coffee table.
I expected to be self-conscious, but our parallel play worked well.
I marked up papers, scribbled in grades and some short thoughts into my book, then set them on the coffee table.
Lisa worked with a pen in a notebook, paging through binders, sifting through folders.
Every once in a while, she would pull out a sheet from one of them and use a paper clip from a pouch in one of the binders to attach it to what she was writing.
I’d finished my morning class’s essays when I realized she was mouthing words to something and making hand motions. It looked like something was hopping. It was about the cutest thing I’d ever seen. While I was watching, she looked up, mid-hop. “You’re going to ask me what the hell I’m doing.”
I shrugged. “I assume it goes with the frog book.”
“It does. We’re studying amphibians. I promise not to sing out loud.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’d care, trust me. It drove Corey crazy.”