Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
“Okay, fine. Don’t talk to me on the train tonight so I can answer emails. Don’t make me drink or stay out late tonight either; I have to run in the morning. And don’t try to convince me to go get Saturday brunch rather than run. If you follow those rules, I’ll go.”
Ever the lawyer, Quinn considers my negotiation and counters, “Don’t complain about how tired your legs are. Don’t make us late for kick-off. And don’t leave me to drink alone at the tailgate.”
“Deal,” I agree, and Quinn puts my sweaters back in my bag.
“How’s Ms. Helen doing?” Daphne pants into the phone. “We miss her at Mercy.”
“No, you don’t,” I say with a laugh. When I walked my mom out of Mercy Community Care for the final time, I overheard one of the male attendants tell another, “Now I can work on rebuilding my self-esteem.” It took all my willpower not to return to the reception desk and tell him that, in fact, my mom is right: No worthy woman likes a man in Crocs.
“The mom across the street looks like she’s twelve and drinks nonalcoholic beer!
” I hear Lisa yell toward the phone as she strides next to Daphne.
“Have you tried that shit? It’s foul.” I can’t even think of something to say to her to make her miss me less, because sadly, not for Lisa’s lack of trying, the woman now occupying my house not only doesn’t appreciate Lisa’s T-shirt collection, but also has turned out to be a total dud.
“Hand the phone to Maureen; I have to ask her something.” Behind Maureen’s back, the three of us decided that it would be best if I was the one to inquire about what is going on that she’s not copping to.
After being the ultimate mastermind to bring Porter and me together over dinner in Sacramento last December, there is no way she can tell me to mind my own business from New York.
Daphne is convinced that Maureen is sleeping with a man she met at a pickleball clinic she joined over the summer when she claimed she needed to find more friends in her age bracket.
The signature AARP move of picking up pickleball is also how we found out that Maureen is turning sixty next year.
The surprise-party planning has already commenced, and I will be flying in for it.
“Did you remember to put electrolytes in your water this time and bring some gel? That bonk last Saturday was not pretty,” Maureen reminds me as the fallen golden leaves on Princeton’s Ivy Lane crunch under my feet in a twelve-minute-mile pace synchronized with my across-country teammates.
“Hold on one sec, Maureen,” I interrupt our club nutritionist in the middle of her sermon on whole-grain carbs as fuel and squat down to retie my left running shoe into a double, then triple, knot. Laces on new sneakers tend to be slippery and come undone the first few runs.
“Hi, Cal-lee.”
Startled, I fall back onto my butt, hearing my name drawled out loud on the Princeton campus.
Shielding my eyes from the unseasonably strong October sun, I mutter into the phone, “Uh, ladies, I’m fine, but I have to go.”
“Tell Porter I say hi,” Maureen sings into the speaker, accompanied by a chorus of giggles from my running mates.
“Here, let me help you up.” Porter extends his hand, and even though I don’t need it, I take it.
“Wh-what are you doing here?” I stutter, and look around to see if Chap or Rose or anyone is with Porter.
He is alone, making us the only two people on Ivy Lane.
Football fans have not yet begun shuffling their way to alumni tailgating spots or to claim favorite seats.
A cloud passes over us, and I shiver. Whether it is from the chill of sweat or a ripple of déjà vu, I can’t tell.
Nor can I recall the number of times Porter and I walked this path, hand in hand, feeling like we were the only two in the world. And today, right now, we are.
“I took a job as wide receiver coach. There was an unexpected retirement in March, and I applied. Thought it was time for me to take a chance on something new. Well, something old, but it feels new again.”
“I didn’t know you could do that. Go from high school to college coaching?”
“We had a hundred-and-two-game winning streak when I was at Regis, so yeah, I can do that.”
I smile as my memory slips back to the first meal I shared with Porter in the Rockefeller dining hall after our Rewriting the World literature class.
Porter had shared that on top of being a big reader and a pretty good football player, he had a perfect SAT score. Winning is clearly still his thing.
“I’ve also stepped in last minute for a teaching assistant in an American Literature survey course in McCosh Hall. She went home for the rest of the semester with mono.”
“That’s where we met.” I sigh out loud, my mind caught in the memory.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I realize I have become the ma’am he referred to me as that first day we met.
Though we are now both standing upright and next to one another, I have not let go of Porter’s hand, nor has he let go of mine.
“I’ve also just finished the first draft of a book that’s been rolling around in my head. I started it the day after our dinner in Sacramento.”
I find myself teasing Porter. “I thought I was the writer of the two of us.”
“You were. You are. But I thought I would give it a try.” Porter averts his eyes downward, shyly.
“What’s it about?” I ask.
Porter grins widely with my interest. “I’d call it a modern-day retelling of The Odyssey.
It’s about a young king from rural South Carolina who finds himself at home up north on the Princeton University campus.
But he must go out into the world and fight his internal struggles and overcome his demons to ultimately recognize the gifts life has given him.
He strives to find his way back to his true home and to all that he has loved and felt loyal to in his life. ”
“But when Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca, his wife, Penelope, his great love, she doesn’t recognize that man,” I remind Porter, hinting that the person I see before me is both very different and very much the same as the young man I once knew.
“Am I supposed to be Penelope? And if I am, will you be killing off all my suitors to regain my trust?”
“Do you have suitors?” Porter asks, deadly serious.
I can’t help but chuckle under my breath at the fear in his eyes. Fear that perhaps he has screwed up yet another opportunity with me. “Not at the moment,” I assure him, and Porter’s grip on my hand relaxes once again.
“I was hoping you’d say that, because I’m still working out the ending, but I’d love for it to resolve like Homer’s original: Odysseus proves his worth to Penelope; they reunite and live happily ever after.” Porter locks his eyes with mine, daring me not to look away from his bold proclamation.
In this moment, I realize that what Porter hopes to regain with me, he never truly lost. I match Porter’s gaze but veer the conversation off the two of us and back to him. “So in your retelling of The Odyssey, Odysseus is a farmer not a fighter. Is that it?”
“He’s had to be both in his life,” Porter professes.
“I went through with it, you know. I’m working in New York again.
” I want Porter to know that I, too, have been fighting to get back to me.
The last time I saw Porter was when I left him on the dance floor at Alice’s wedding.
We had fallen into each other and perhaps fallen a little bit back in love, but in the end, I needed to focus on myself and follow through with my plans.
“I know.” Porter nods with a half smile.
“You do?”
“Chap and Maureen. But mostly Quinn.” Ah.
No wonder she was so desperate to get me to come to Princeton and be on time for kick-off, which, now that I think about it, would have been a first for the two of us.
I should have been suspicious when her fanaticism for Princeton football returned with a vengeance this fall after she had long ago buried it.
“Why’d you come back to Princeton? I thought you loved California. I believe you called it ‘less complicated’ for you than the East Coast.” Porter nods in agreement but doesn’t add any further explanation. “And Chap’s there too.”
“He’s got himself worked out pretty well, and his mother’s close by. Besides, no way is Maureen going to let him fall again.” We both laugh at Queen Maureen and her need to make sure everyone and everything is as she believes it should be.
“But Princeton?”
“It was always my place. My Ithaca.”
“Yes, I guess it was,” I agree as I clear some damp leaves on the walkway with my right foot.
“And it was always our plan.”
“Our plan?” I look up, confused. I thought I’d made it clear at Alice’s wedding that there was only my plan, and that entailed me in New York working at Juice.
“You in New York working in journalism, me in Princeton with my books until I got up the gumption to move to New York.”
“No one says gumption anymore,” I kid.
Porter throws his head back and lets loose a wholehearted laugh. “Ha! Sounds like you’re already on board to be my editor. I’m going to need one.”
“I’m happy for you, Porter. I really am happy that you’ve returned to the place where we both have such fond memories.”
Porter picks up my other hand and clasps them together between his rough palms that still tell the story of a farm boy turned professional football player, turned mentor of young men, and now writer. He pulls me in close to him, so that our fists rest against his heart and mine.
“Do you have a title for your book?” I gasp at our closeness.
“I do. Callie, do you remember what I used to say when you were running behind?”
“Of course. ‘Better last than never.’”
“What if we changed it up a little?”
“You, of all people, Porter, are suggesting changing up our long-standing motto?”
“Just this once. And only for us and our story.”
“What do you have in mind?” I ask, equal parts skeptical and burning with hope.
Porter chews on his lower lip for a moment before sharing his thinking. “How about ‘Better at Last Than Never?’”
“‘Better at Last Than Never.’ I like it. But it’s a little wordy. I think you can do better. I know I can do better.” I roll onto my tippy toes, and my new shoes make the familiar squeak of only a few dozen miles’ run in them.
Porter brings my hands to his lips and gives them a lingering kiss. A wave of heat and wanting rises, and a belief that the best of my life is yet to come roils through my body. “What about ‘It Better Last Forever’?”
I move my hands from Porter’s lips and place them securely on his jawline.
That profile is the first thing I noticed about him when he walked, arms full of a box of books, under my freshman-year dorm room in Campbell Hall, square and set and determined.
Even then there was little question about what Porter wanted as he stepped foot on the Princeton campus.
It was a life of learning, literature, and words, and here he was, decades later, still trying to construct the perfect phrase with me beside him.
It all felt strangely familiar, and absolutely right.
Holding his face in my hands, I brush my lips against his ear and whisper with all the breath I’ve been holding for thirty years, “Closer. But I’d still tweak it a bit. Make it simpler.”
“What d’you have in mind?”
“Better. Last. Forever.”