26. Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Six
M y meeting with Perry had disastrous consequences. I showed up to work after the weekend with Tina in full panic mode. Her wonder investor from the Rotary lunch backed out. It made me wonder if Perry was going to buy an entire printing business to purchase my loyalty to his side. When I wasn’t going to easily stab Chris and Claire in the front, I was no longer an ally. In fact, my fictional slutty ways may have usurped Chris from the antagonist role.
When Tina reported that starting the next pay cycle, I’d definitely have reduced hours and needed to be mindful of the next open enrollment period with health insurance, I blocked the gibberish out. It would be foolish to head toward the city.
To Beau.
Beau had his audition before the weekend, and I had no idea how it worked out. I was tempted to send him a text, but with the way I ended things, I’m sure his response would be Leave me alone .
Maybe I should do what I should’ve done in the first place after the divorce, head back to the Midwest with my tail between my legs. Fiona would enjoy it. She could pawn Mom and her problems off on me. I could even save a hefty sum living with Mom for a while. It was even possible in the Midwest that a loser like me could actually own a home and didn’t have to once be in a sexual relationship with her landlord for some rent control.
Tina hugged me and cried, whimpering about how she ruined my life.
Her tears stained my dead possum apron. “You’re handling this so well.”
“I…”
She buried her face in my canvas adorned bosom, ugly crying. I hugged her back, as tight as a hug from Beau. Those close hugs in which you’re not sure whose heartbeat was whose.
Everyone thought I took everything so well: the loneliness I found in my marriage that drawing my existential crisis critters chased away and the pain of losing one pregnancy after another and another. I handled it with a shrug and a joke. Maybe if I was supposed to have a kid, I wasn’t supposed to have a fucked-up uterus.
I breathed in Tina’s scent, a powdery floral perfume mixed with the ever-present smell of ink. I didn’t fight the divorce. Because I assumed I had a healthier viewpoint than Perry, I wasn’t going to hold a grudge and be out for revenge.
But my lack of fighting was something else. I didn’t think the love I offered was worth fighting for or worth feeling the disappointment of rejection. I had stopped creating cartoons because I was making a cartoon of myself—one foot in the door, the other turned to make an exit. I ran away from the Midwest, but I also ran away from my feelings.
I didn’t like how Beau called me out like that. On the next exhale, I joined Tina sobbing. By the time we finished, I’m sure I had made my past therapist proud. I made room for my feelings. It even cleared my head a bit .
I was going to be okay with reduced hours. I wasn’t going to be cut off yet from the alimony, which gave me time to consider my second act. I went home that evening, ate a few crackers with peanut butter, sat at my easel, and drew. I warmed up with a Dead on the Inside and the Outside dead possum. I redrew the drawing of Beau as a physical therapist except I drew the spine model he held up like it had been freshly ripped from a human body, ink blots of blood everywhere. Juvenile but I was getting warmer.
From the comedic blood, I thought of the blood from my miscarriages. I drew a cartoon version of myself, curled on the floor of the bathroom, head resting on my knees. I added a thought bubble, Don’t look in the toilet . The next image, Beau holding me in the bathroom. The cartoon says, Sometimes big kids make the best moms . The next drawing got meta. A drawing of me drawing.
The next frame, a baby popped off the page. It walked, stood fully upright, and talked. “You stole this idea from Ally McBeal ,” the baby announced.
“Alright, kid,” cartoon me said, “ let’s fuck shit up .” My final drawing of the night was me and the baby dancing in my kitchen, flipping pancakes in the air and on all the surfaces .
I woke up in the middle of the night, my condo so quiet I could hear the gurgle of the hot tub outside. Ink stained my cheek, but from looking at the scattered images, I knew what to build out of my empire of mediocrity.
Already the winds were changing. I had to double dose my allergy medicine to make it through the bursts of pollen in the air. Apart from the romantic wound I had been nursing, I missed cycling, the music, the high fives from the woo ladies. I made up for it with brisk walks, walks I soundtracked to my elder millennial angst of alternative rock and even that pop punk drivel I was too cool for. I still was a contrarian shit.
The stretches and core workouts I stopped getting under the guidance of the EverGreen & Fit Studios, I performed in the comfort of my living room right before I sat down and drew my stories. Instead of ink, I returned to drawing on my digital pad. I drew vignettes from my life such as the one about sleeping with my decade-younger personal trainer, dealing with run-ins of Chris and Claire, the jellyfish sting of every conversation with Perry bringing up any painful memory. With enough accumulated in my collection, I dusted off my old social media account and uploaded the tale of winning a drawing, which led to the shittiest initial experience at the gym. The last image was a shining, perfect drawing of Beau, savior of souls.
I marked it with a handful of hashtags to make it findable. I’m sure Perry had some kind of search engine optimization he’d recommend. But I needed to do this for myself. Maybe the only people who’d see it were Fiona and me. But maybe someone out there wanted to find solace in my silly, little drawings.