Chapter 30
Lauren
I called Kevin before I even got out of the car. It was almost noon. Four rings, voicemail. I called again walking through the doors. Four rings, voicemail. I called a third time halfway down the first aisle and just stood there, listening to it ring.
I didn’t leave a message. I’d already left six, and at that point, you’re basically just talking to yourself.
I grabbed a cart with a busted left wheel that kept dragging me toward the shelves. As I pushed past the fruit displays, Kevin’s hoodie sleeves slid down over my hands again, so I shoved them up past my elbows and hoped they’d stay this time.
I tossed bread in the cart, then eggs. I checked the price on the eggs twice because $4.79, when your card had been declining all week, wasn’t a sure thing. I was doing the math while I pushed past the coffee aisle, and then I stopped.
Kevin’s coffee was right there, the dark roast in the red bag. He went through one every two weeks. I knew that because I’d been in his kitchen every morning for a month, making the same pot he made.
I put it in the cart.
I took it out.
I put it back in and kept walking. He wouldn’t even know I bought it. I shoved the sleeves up again.
I headed over to produce for something green and was trying to figure out how many dinners I could get out of one head of romaine when I heard her behind me.
“Lauren, dear. How’s that ankle healing up?”
I turned around, and Mrs. Henderson was right there, close enough that I got the smell of hairspray before I got the words. She had her reading glasses hanging from a chain, and her cart was full.
The ankle question surprised me. She actually sounded like she meant it.
“It’s good,” I said. “I mean, almost a hundred percent.”
“Oh, wonderful. Kevin did such a nice job with that.” She smiled, and for a second, I thought she was just being kind. Then she looked at the hoodie I was wearing, at the coffee in my cart, and back up at my face. “How is Dr. Thorpe? We haven’t seen him around town much this week.”
My stomach fell but I smiled anyway. Too wide, too fast, and I was already doing it, so I just held it there while she looked straight through me.
“Fine,” I said. “He’s fine.”
I didn’t even realize I’d used Kevin’s word until it was already out. Fine. That’s what he always said when nothing was fine, and now I was saying it too, standing in produce wearing his hoodie, lying to his neighbor.
I needed to buy lettuce anyway.
Mrs. Henderson tilted her head. “Such a nice man. He really is.”
She meant he deserved better than what he got.
I should have clapped back. I wanted to. I had nothing.
“Yeah,” I said. “He is a nice man.”
He was a nice man. I fucked his best friend on a bar counter while Kevin was in Chicago thinking about coming home to me.
She blinked. I don’t think she was expecting that. Small nod, tight smile. “Well. Tell him Marge says hello.”
“I will.”
She headed off toward dairy, and I just stood there for a while. Then I started walking.
I went to self-checkout so I wouldn’t have to stand near Mrs. Henderson again.
The machine kept telling me to place my item in the bagging area, and the person ahead of me couldn’t figure out their soup situation, so I waited, switching the bag from hand to hand because the handles were too short and it kept hitting my leg.
I scanned everything. Eggs, bread, lettuce, Kevin’s coffee. I tapped my card.
Declined.
The screen turned red. The checkout kid looked over, trying not to stare. I dug through my bag and pulled out every quarter I had. I counted them on the little metal ledge. $3.75. I ran the card for the rest, and it went through. I didn’t look at the total.
I walked to the car with the bag knocking against my leg the whole way, put it in the passenger seat, sat behind the wheel, and checked my phone. No calls, no messages, 14% battery.
I called Kevin one more time. Four rings. Voicemail. I drove home.
The fridge was humming when I walked in. I put the groceries on the counter.
Kevin’s mail was still on the kitchen table. I had his bills in a neat little pile organized by due date, and he wouldn’t even answer my calls. I stopped looking at it.
I’d been ignoring three client emails for a week. Couldn’t find the headspace to care about a startup’s logo while my actual life was catching fire.
Down the street, that dog was barking again, the same one from yesterday that never stopped because nobody was home to let it in.
I stood in the kitchen, wanting to leave so badly I could feel it in my legs.
That was always my move, trash bags and a highway.
I packed out of Logan’s apartment in forty-five minutes flat.
I went upstairs. The house was quiet. I pulled my duffel out of the closet, the one with the broken zipper I’d been meaning to fix for four years, and I packed.
I rolled my jeans, put shoes on the side, laid shirts flat.
I packed fast because it wasn’t the first time I’d packed a bag to leave a man’s house while he wasn’t home.
The ice maker went off, and I jumped so hard I knocked a shirt off the bed. I froze with a pair of socks in my hand, listening. Nobody was coming up those stairs.
I shoved the socks in the duffel, picked the shirt up off the floor, and kept going.
I still needed my toothbrush, my razor, and the travel shampoo under the sink. I walked into the bathroom and stopped.
Kevin’s gray scrub top was hanging on the back of the door, the one with Fairview Medical on the chest. He’d left it there the morning after I told him, the last morning before he went to the hotel.
He’d put it on, taken it off, grabbed a different one.
I heard the hangers through the wall. He left this one on the door, and I’d been walking past it for four days.
It was still just hanging there.
My duffel was on the bed, half-zipped. Everything I owned in this town fit inside it. I was standing in the doorway, and I couldn’t move.
I’m broke. That’s the whole reason I’m still here. I have no money and nowhere else to go.
I sat on the bed for a while, then went downstairs to the couch. I left the bag upstairs. My phone was at 11% on the cushion next to me, and I didn’t plug it in because plugging it in looked like staying.
My phone buzzed. I grabbed it so fast I almost dropped it, but it wasn’t Kevin. It was Jackson.
How is he?
I didn’t even know where Kevin was sleeping tonight. I typed back.
Still won’t answer.
I put the phone face down on the cushion and pulled Kevin’s hoodie tighter around me. The sleeves fell past my hands again. I left them.
Abuela texted that morning. Mija, I’ve been waiting. I’d been putting off that call for six weeks because I still didn’t know what I was going to say. I typed back Soon, I promise and set the phone face down, feeling like a coward.
Kevin
I came through the garage and sat in the car with the engine ticking. I’d spent an hour and sixteen minutes on I-70 rehearsing what I was going to say, and nothing stuck.
I went inside.
My house smelled like my house, almost. Her shampoo or her laundry detergent or just four days of someone else in my rooms. The hotel soap on my arms hit the kitchen air wrong.
I rounded the corner and saw the bag first.
It was my KUMC duffel from the top of the closet. It was on the floor by her feet, the zipper straining. She’d packed her clothes into it.
Then I saw Lauren.
She was on the sectional with the blanket bunched at one end. There was a water glass on the coffee table with a ring in the wood. The Cuisinart was on, half-full. My mug was upside down in the drying rack.
She was halfway off the couch when I came around the corner.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with my overnight bag.
“You’re still here.”
“I was just leaving.”
“Don’t.” I didn’t move from the doorway. “It’s my house. I should be the one to leave.”
My mother’s clock was ticking on the wall. I’d never noticed how loud it was until right then.
“I’m so sorry.” Her hoodie sleeves were past her hands. She’d been saying it to the walls all week.
“I know.”
She didn’t flinch. She’d braced for it.
The fridge kicked on behind me.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
She looked at me. “Do what?”
“Be in the same room as you and not—”
My throat closed. I stood there with the sentence half out and the rest just gone, and I could feel my face doing something I couldn’t stop.
I yawned. Big, jaw-cracking. Lauren watched me yawn. I watched her watch me.
I dropped the overnight bag by the kitchen door. The mail was on the hall table. I took the stairs without looking back.
Lauren
I was standing outside Kevin’s bedroom door with a plate of sandwiches. Two of them. One for him, one for me.
The hallway upstairs was warmer than the kitchen. I could smell his soap through the door, cedar and clean laundry, and the pipes were still settling from the shower.
I knocked.
He pulled the door open. Clean T-shirt, damp hair. The bathroom mirror behind him was still fogged up. He looked at the plate, then at me, and I couldn’t tell what his face was doing, so I just held it out.
He took it. Walked back to the bed. Sat on the edge.
I followed him in and went straight for the floor.
The bed was three feet away, and I wasn’t sitting on it.
My knee cracked when I crossed my legs, and it was so loud in the quiet that I wanted to die.
I sat with my back against the wall and put enough space between us that nobody could misread this.
He picked up a sandwich and started eating. I grabbed mine, and my stomach picked this exact moment to be louder than either of us.
The sun was coming through his window. A lawnmower started up on the street, and it was the most normal sound in the world.
He was eating the sandwich. I watched him chew, and then I saw the cheese. I put Swiss on it. He didn’t like Swiss. He liked provolone. I knew this. I’d been making his lunch for three weeks. I’d grabbed the wrong cheese and didn’t catch it, and he hadn’t mentioned it.
“Do you love him?”
I had bread in my mouth. I had to chew and swallow before I could answer, and my throat was so tight the bread barely went down.
“I don’t know.”
His jaw shifted. Not a flinch. More like he expected it.
“That came out wrong.” My voice was too high. “I mean, I do care about him, but it’s not like I…”
“Stop.” He was quiet. “The first answer was honest.”
I had mustard on my finger from making the sandwiches. I wiped it on my jeans.
I should have known. I’d been sleeping in his basement for three weeks.
I slept with Jackson. I should have been able to answer that.
And I couldn’t. The best I had was “I don’t know,” and it sounded like I didn’t care enough to have figured it out.
I did care. I just couldn’t find the edges of it yet.
I tried again. Not the love question. The apology.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear this again, but I’m…
” and it went sideways. I started talking about the fridge.
How the bread hadn’t moved since Monday and the milk was in the same spot.
I could hear myself saying it, and I knew what it sounded like, like I’d been keeping inventory from downstairs. I stopped, but it was already out.
Kevin looked at me. Actually looked at me.
My phone buzzed on the floor between us. The screen lit up. Jackson. We both saw it, and neither of us said anything. I flipped it face down.
Somewhere in there, Kevin got off the bed. I didn’t see him decide to do it. He was just on the floor across from me with the plate between us. His back against the bed frame. My back against the wall. The sun stripe on the carpet between us like a line.
I pulled the hoodie sleeves over my hands.
“I don’t want you to leave,” he said. He was looking at the window. “The house. I don’t want you to leave the house.”
I waited.
“The basement. Like before.”
Three weeks ago, I was a stranger in a doctor’s basement because I had nowhere else to go. Same room. Everything else different.
“Okay,” I said.
I stood up. Took the plate. I was at the doorway when he said it.
“I don’t know if I can. Not yet.” So quiet.
I carried the duffel down the stairs and sat on the couch thinking.