7
Elise
I’ve never just run away from a job like that. It doesn’t even register that it’s raining harder, and I’m just wearing a sweater as I lean against my car and think about the nearly-saved-up-for down payment for a house that I put in my rearview mirror without a second thought.
Usually in town I just go and get groceries, but there’s a small diner I stop in often, and I go in automatically, without really thinking.
The diner’s mostly empty, and it almost feels like a good idea to bury my welling-up feelings under a pile of crinkle-cut fries. And a milkshake. Nothing will heal a damaged heart like a chocolate milkshake.
When you’re within spitting distance of Vermont yet somehow still in Massachusetts, every other place has a little corner of “Vermont Genuine Maple Syrup” sold all in the same exact maple-leaf-shaped bottle. The further up the mountain you go, everything is priced for ski-bro tourists too, because if you’re rich enough to have this stupid, expensive hobby, then you probably can afford a second home in the mountains to summer in, or whatever it is rich people do. Winter, maybe. I don’t fucking know how to use seasons as a verb.
The bell on the door rings as I push it open. There’s maybe one waitress left in the place, sitting at the counter—big hair, dark curls, acrylic nails, and red lipstick.
On one hand, Laura is just the friend I need right now, but the wound today opened is still fresh and raw, and for half a second, I think maybe I shouldn’t talk to her. She’s Logan and Aiden’s cousin. That makes her Shawn’s cousin too. And maybe she doesn’t have anything to do with this, but I can’t help but be wary.
She raises an eyebrow at me, concern drawing down her face, and I wonder if I look as pathetic as I feel, drenched to the bone.
“Honey, what happened?” Laura asks, dropping her pen.
“Bad day at work,” I mumble, sitting down at the diner bar. The seat squelches underneath me. “Put in a chocolate shake and fries for me?”
She nods and waves a hand at the line cook reading in the back. It seems like he heard.
Laura settles in on the other side of the counter. “Aunt Deanna driving you crazy with the wedding prep?”
“I saw my ex-husband for the first time in years today.”
The words make it real, and I feel woozy just saying them.
It’s like clutching my hand over a bad cut, maybe it won’t be as big and gross as I fear it is, but I won’t know until I open my hand to rinse out the blood and examine it. Right now, all I see is the gore; I don’t know if a bandage will do, or if I need someone to drive me to get stitches.
“Oh my god,” Laura says, hushed, awed, wowed, an interest in drama lighting her eyes. “Today is just the day for it, my cousin came through here earlier and let me tell you—”
She stops mid-sentence, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do, the color draining from her face. Her excitement falls away for a quiet horror to match mine.
“It can’t be—Shawn, was it? Oh my god. Girl, no.”
I look up at her, tearing my attention away from the emotional wound I’m trying to clean out. Fuck. Not ten minutes after I told Shawn not to say a word.
My hands grip the counter at first to ensure I don’t fall out of my seat, but then my head feels like it’s spinning. I don’t know how I’m going to do this.
“You can’t tell anyone. I don’t think I can deal with people knowing.”
“I won’t. I promise. Oh, girl,” she says, twisting a napkin nervously between her hands, shredding it to pieces as she stares at me.
I can see that she knows what happened without even asking. She had heard the story of my divorce from me many times over a glass of wine in the cottage, but I could never bring myself to say his name.
“I always thought what they did to her—um, you—was unfair,” Laura offers quietly after a moment. She swallows hard, apology deepening the lines in her face.
For a moment, I don’t know that I can stand to look at her, even though she wasn’t really complicit in it. She’s their cousin, this whole damn town might as well be theirs.
Laura covers my hand with hers and squeezes. She has always been a good friend. It’s sad I won’t know her for longer. I honestly don’t know if I can go back there, not now. I might be packing up my things tonight.
My first thought is to miss Deanna and the boys. I’ve grown close enough to them that I care more about them than just clients.
But the anger I’ve been nursing these last many years wants to throw that all aside. I can’t bring myself to care. Fuck him. Fuck the people who hurt me without another thought.
“Wait,” she says, glancing up at me with a strange look. “That would mean he’s the ex in all those stories you told me about? Whirlwind romance, mystical tit-jobs, donut proposal, and shotgun wedding?”
I didn’t realize the tears were starting to creep down my cheeks until I shudder out a laugh.
“Oh my god. I thought he would have known better than that. Donut proposal, really? He should have gotten you a real ring! We know the funds are there. Ugh, and I’m gonna give him so much shit for the mystical tit-jobs thing.”
Unwillingly, I smile a little at that. I can’t believe I doubted that talking to her was the right thing, even for a second.
She looks at me then, sizing me up briefly and wrinkling her nose. “Ew, girl. You gave my cousin tit-jobs, and I know for a fact he never deserved them.”
I can’t help but giggle in response. Even if she’s just trying to cheer me up, I needed to hear that kind of thing from someone who actually knows him.
Talking to Laura always feels like a masterclass in active listening, her expression attentive and her body language wrapped up in total focus— eyes wide, gnashing into her acrylic nails. I probably wouldn’t have opened up to her so much, and kept going, if she hadn’t been hanging on my every word, urging me to say more every time I nearly finish a story.
It does for me a lot of what I thought therapy would do, except that no therapist has enthusiastically nodded, saying, “What a piece of shit!” to my ranting. My last one could learn a lot from her.
After an hour, I still feel like my chest has been cracked open, but at least all the debris has been cleared out. The wound is clean, and it still stings and burns and aches, but maybe one day it’ll heal.
My milkshake is empty and there’s just a smear of ranch left of the fries. My stomach is gurgling with an intolerant storm.
Laura’s nearly gnawed the acrylic tip off her ring finger in the last ten minutes. “And you don’t know why they never wanted to meet you?”
I shake my head. And then pause. “Do you?”
She shrugs a little, her attention in the glass of ice cubes she swirls a straw around in.
“I believe there were some, uh, specific qualities they were looking for,” she says. For my benefit, she doesn’t repeat them.
“It’s probably because then I was working my way through college and here he is from some WASP-ass family and a stupid, big house and, y’know what, they probably paid for his student loans. I bet he never actually had student loans,” I ramble, a little drunk on emotion.
“I don’t think you can be Catholic and white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant,” Laura puts in quietly, and I can’t resist the eyeroll that takes me.
“WASC, then. Whatever.”
I vaguely remember there being some concern about me not being Catholic enough for his dad, but that didn’t seem like enough of a thing to disown family over. At least, not in this day and age.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Maybe things could have been different if they hadn’t put you through that,” Laura offers, and I sober instantly.
“Yeah, well. I’m not. I’m happier without him.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but there’s a thud outside against the diner’s back wall; I can see how a picture frame shakes with it. Laura looks a little alarmed and goes to the back to see what it was.
I finish off the last, too-warm dregs of my milkshake. Laura returns, shrugs it off, and totals the check. I dig through my coat pockets for cash. When I check my phone, there’s a few missed calls.
My gut twists, in a non-food sensitive way. For a second, I’m not sure who I want a call from less—Shawn or my mom.
But it’s Deanna’s phone number. I hadn’t expected it to be her. Guilt and ten other conflicting feelings sit uneasily with the milkshake and fries.
I look at my empty plate and glass and sigh. I should probably figure out what I’m going to do soon. I sure as hell can’t stay in this diner forever.
“I should go,” I tell Laura after a bit. “I have to deal with the fallout.”
“You don’t need to go back yet. I mean, if you need to be around people, you can stay at my apartment, I’ve got a couch—”
I shake my head. I know her terrible pull-out couch from our movie nights, but it’s sweet of her to offer. “I’ll let you know if I need it.”
The drive back to Aconite Ales Brewery is more automatic than I would like. My head is in such an emotional fog; I’m so used to driving back and forth for endless last-minute grocery trips that I barely register most of it. I pull into the back loading bay like I usually do and turn off the engine, but that’s as far as my body carries me. I clutch the steering wheel. What am I going to do?
Sit in the car for several minutes, apparently. I don’t have the courage or recklessness to say fuck it and just get things over with.
It’s strange to not be greeted by Aiden when I go into the brewery. Instead, I have to carry in a half-dozen trays of prepped food myself. It leaves me feeling off kilter.
I grit my teeth just to hold it together. I’m emotionally raw. It would be so easy to just fall back into what our dynamic was before, just friendly clients and caterer. But I can’t just gloss over the fact that she was the woman who haunted my marriage, the mother-in-law who hated the thought of me.
On the one hand, I’m sure it’s no easier being on her side of the phone, not knowing why any of that happened. On the other, I take some relish in knowing our true relationship, when she doesn’t. I never got any closure for why she disapproved of me.
Feeling seizes in my chest. As much as I hate who she is, I can’t ignore that I genuinely liked her. I liked that she thought my recipes were creative, that she praised my cooking, and that we could chat for a while. She likes me in the way I wanted someone my mother’s age to like me. She thought I was a cool young person with genuine talent, instead of mildly disappointing.
And as for Aiden and Logan, they’d been like what I always imagined having brothers would have been. I felt safe around them and like they would look out for me.
Maybe that’s a weird relationship to have with your clients. It just kind of happened.
Someone must have brought over the trays Aiden took into the Hayes’s kitchen this morning, a cool condensation on the counter around them, indicating they’re still cold. Somehow it feels like it happened a year ago.
It’s hard not to notice there’s also a bonus check left for me on the clean, stainless-steel kitchen island.
“For the wedding catering. It wasn’t part of your original contract. I wouldn’t want you to go uncompensated,” Deanna says from the doorway while I was eyeing the extra zero.
She’s always been generous, but I imagine today’s offstage drama affected her decision while writing it.
I doubt she would have put it here if she’d known I was her ex-daughter-in-law.
I stare at the check, wondering if it’s worth staying here, to slip back into that life of having it held over my head that I just wasn’t worth it to him. I doubt I’ll find the answers I wanted eight years ago, but maybe it’ll be worth it just to watch Shawn squirm.
Closure is a well-paying dish, it seems.