Chapter Six
Kelly
January
Kelly had a tuna sandwich in one hand and was scrolling her phone with the thumb of the other. She had five new emails, four of them junk. But the last one … no way. She froze, the sandwich halfway to her mouth. It was from Faith Richards.
Warily, Kelly lowered the sandwich and clicked to open the email.
Hi Kell—it’s been a long time. I still feel terrible about what happened.
I’m at the point in my life where I’m trying hard to make amends with people for some of my past mistakes.
I think about things I did to you all the time and I feel sick about them.
I would like to meet you for lunch, and I have a gift I made for you myself. Would you please accept my invitation?
—Faith
Kelly sighed. She was on her lunch break at work, a tiny sliver of time, twenty minutes if she was lucky, in between grading and kids stopping by with questions. She was trying to wolf down the food she hastily made that morning. She had to get ready for fifth hour.
Teaching high school Spanish was exhausting, especially when you had to deal with kids who were forced to be there because it was a requirement and couldn’t give two shits about Spanish.
She didn’t have the mental energy to deal with Faith right now.
Plus, why was Faith even reaching out to make amends?
Didn’t she have enough friends, as loved and adored as she was in Detroit?
But the bigger question was why should Kelly go anywhere with her, given their history? Faith had two strikes, two big, giant ones, plus Kelly was busy—new house, this new teaching job, Joel—and felt she didn’t need drama in her life.
After packing up her lunch box and putting the leftovers in the staff fridge, Kelly headed back to her classroom.
She had to go over complicated verb conjugations with the class in prep for a test in a few weeks.
This required her full attention, so she compartmentalized Faith into a closet in her brain and focused.
After the last bell rang and the nonstop banging of metal lockers in the hallway finally subsided, Kelly sat in the stillness of her classroom.
It was her favorite time of day, a chance to organize her lesson plans and take a deep breath or two.
In yoga they preached taking “conscious breaths,” but Kelly found she only had time for a conscious breath after the school day was over.
Her thoughts drifted back to Faith. Kelly decided she would ask Joel for his opinion.
He knew all about Kelly and Faith’s shared history.
Heck, both Joel and Kelly could have been reminded of Faith every night if they watched Channel 9, but long ago they had switched to Channel 2 to avoid seeing her.
Kelly didn’t need a nightly dose of her old college roomie, not after the shenanigans Faith had pulled back at the dorms and again years later.
At 5:45, Kelly was home, heating up some lasagna they had made over the weekend, when Joel came in from running errands. He worked from home but got restless by four and usually found a few things to do to get out of the house.
“Hola, Senora, how was your day?” He walked over for their nightly peck on the lips while simultaneously cupping one of her buttocks lightly. She didn’t mind; it was comforting and sexy at the same time.
“Hi, honey. My day … Well, Lexi and Aidan continue to be troublemakers at every opportunity. I busted them with a bingo card they made to make fun of teachers. They have squares for everything from ‘wipes nose’ to ‘wears ugly jeans’ and they mark it throughout the day. I think they got me on ‘looks tired and bored.’ I had to send them to Mahaffey’s office for another talk.
Those two are on the road to nowhere fast.”
“Or maybe they’re on the road to being the next great creatives or something,” Joel said with a laugh. “That’s pretty funny. Anything else?”
“There was something,” said Kelly. “I’m actually trying to figure out what to do.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” Joel leaned against the counter, cocking his head in a way that she had always found incredibly appealing.
“Soo … you won’t believe who emailed me, asking for a lunch date.”
She could see the wheels turning in his head, but she was impatient to get to the story, so she didn’t wait for him to guess.
“OK, I’ll just tell you. Get ready for this. It was my ‘fair-weather friend’ herself.”
“Wait … you mean … not the Faith Richards?” His eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding me?”
“Not kidding. She said she’s at a point in her life where she wants to make amends and apologize and even made me some sort of homemade gift. I don’t know, Joel, I haven’t responded yet. I wanted to ask your opinion.”
“Well…” He contemplated. He had never met Faith in person, had only seen her on TV and heard the stories from Kelly. “It would just be at a restaurant, right?”
“Yes, I think so. I mean, I would make sure it is.”
“Do you want to do it?”
“Curiosity sort of gets to me a bit. It’s been so many years since we last spoke.
Maybe she’s a whole new person. And I do wonder what in the world she made me.
Faith was never crafty. It’s probably part of the reason why she bought so many things.
The rest of us would go to ‘make your own tie-dye’ nights and things like that at the dorms and she would stay home and well … you know.”
“Right, but so many years later, I guess it can’t hurt to go to lunch, right? Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“That’s kind of what I was thinking,” she said.
Later that night before bed, Kelly read the email again three times, before taking a deep breath and deciding to respond.
Faith—It’s been a long time. I have a new job teaching Spanish which is keeping me busy but I can probably find time for lunch on a weekend.
She left it at that, short, simple, to the point. No use getting into anything deeper in an email.
Hovering her finger over the send button, she took a long breath. Was she opening another Pandora’s box or was she instead closing a chapter? She opted for closing—why not be optimistic? people could change—and she hit send.
But right after she did, a strange feeling came into Kelly’s body, a feeling like she had just made a mistake and would regret it.