Chapter 14 #2
“Six months of every single night and you’ve never seen her?
” I keep it easy. “I’m not saying she isn’t real.
But at some point a thing has to become real, or you owe it to yourself to be honest about what it actually is.
Make a plan to meet. A real one, a date and a place you book and pay for.
Then watch what she does with it. If she shows, you’ve got something worth the wait.
If she finds a reason she can’t, then you’ve got your answer, son, and it’s the one you’ve been ducking for six months.
Whatever you do, don’t send her money because if she’s not willing to get on videochat at least, you’ve got more to lose than you think. ”
Bex puts the next one through.
“It’s me again, Liam.” A pause. “Harley. You probably don’t remember me—”
“I remember.”
“I took your advice. About getting out. Meeting people.” Her voice climbs, eager now.
“And I’ve been trying, I really have. But it’s the strangest thing.
I’ll be sitting right across from somebody and the whole time I’m thinking, they don’t get it.
They don’t get me. Not the way you do. You just say the thing I’m already feeling before I’ve even found the words for it.
Every night. Like you’re right there in the room with me.
Nobody out here does that. You know what I mean? ”
Behind the glass the room’s gone still. Bex is looking at me.
I don't have an answer ready. It's the way she ended it, making it seem like this show is just between the two of us, and it sits wrong. I take a second too long picking the call back up.
“Here’s the thing, Harley.” I clear my throat.
“I’m not in the room with you. That’s the trick of the whole format.
I’m a voice and a microphone, and I get to sound like I understand you because you can’t watch me fumble for the right way to answer you.
But the people sitting across from you? They’ve got a real shot at knowing you.
The actual you, the one that doesn’t sit on the other end of a call.
That takes longer than a couple of weeks.
It takes a lot longer than a call to a radio station.
Give those people the time you’ve been giving me. ”
A silence on the line. Then, “I know. You’re right. Thank you, Liam.”
I’m about to disconnect when she sighs. I keep the line open. “I’ll keep trying. For you.”
“Not for me,” I say, as gentle as I can. “For you, Harley. Do it for you.”
“Right.” A breath. “For me.” She doesn’t sound like she believes it. “Same time tomorrow, Liam.”
She’s gone before I can tell her it doesn’t work that way.
Behind the glass Bex writes something on her pad and doesn’t look up. I spin in my chair and look at Paige, her eyes are wide and she’s shaking her head.
Bex doesn’t give me a second to sit with the unease. She’s got the next one ready before I’ve cleared my mind.
“Good evening. You’re on The Love Line with Liam.”
“My wife wants to open the marriage. See other people. Says it’ll make us stronger. I don’t want to. I want her. Only her. But she says if I really loved her, I’d want her to be free.”
I sit back, mute my mic, and take a second. I’m not sure how to tackle this one or if I even want to.
“Wow, okay. This is a lot.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Right. There’s a difference between compromise and an ultimatum.
” I sit forward. “Some couples make an open marriage work, the ones who both want it. You two don’t both want it.
One of you wants more and one of you wants only each other, and that isn’t a thing you split down the middle.
That’s a difference about what a marriage even is.
So before anybody opens a single door, you need a hard conversation, probably with somebody trained in the room, about whether you’re still building the same thing.
Don’t sign up to be miserable so she can call it freedom. ”
The next call is a woman whose husband never says he loves her, never has, twenty years in. “He shows it,” she says, defensive and aching at once. “He fixes my car. He warms up my side of the bed. But he won’t say the words, and I’m starting to need the words.”
“Then tell him that. Plain. Not an accusation, a request. Some people grew up in houses where those words were never said or if they were, they came with requirements. He can learn. But he can’t learn a need you’ve never said out loud.
Give him the words but don’t make him feel stupid.
Most men will say it back if you let them. ”
The next one’s a woman, hurt, her voice working overtime to stay level. She found out her husband watches porn, and she says the floor went out from under the marriage. I take this one slow, because it’ll go wrong if I’m flip about it.
“First thing. What you feel is real and you don’t have to argue yourself out of it.
Second thing. I’m not going to tell you it means nothing, and I’m not going to tell you it means he doesn’t love you, because I don’t know your husband and neither does anybody else with an opinion.
Here’s what I do know. You need to talk to him, tell him how you feel, and ask him what he’s getting from watching that he’s not getting from you.
That’s the talk. It’s the hardest one there is.
It’s also the only one that fixes anything. ”
One more before I let the room breathe. A guy convinced the couples’ pottery class his wife signed them up for is a trap.
“It’s not a trap,” I tell him. “It’s your wife asking you to be bad at something next to her for an hour.
Go make an ugly bowl. Laugh at it. The marriages that last aren’t the ones that are good at everything.
They’re the ones willing to be bad at something together. ”
I play the new artist Elle found. I really like the guy and love how she has an ear for new talent. After the song and a few commercials from new sponsors, I take a few more calls before Bex tells me our time is done.
“Good night, friends,” I say. “If you’ve taken anything away from tonight, I hope it’s communication. I tell my wife I love her every day even when I’m on tour. It’s important she hears those words from me. Until we meet again, I’m Liam Page, signing off.”
The light goes dark.
Bex opens a line into the room. “Those were some tough ones tonight.”
“Especially Harley.”
She nods. “I have her number in the system and flagged. We’ll watch for her to call again.”
I nod and shut everything down. Paige kisses me on the cheek and tells me she’ll see me at home. I make sure all the other equipment got turned off and lock the rooms. On my way out, there’s a vase on the front desk. Flowers that weren’t here earlier. I look for a card. There isn’t one.
I turn the vase a slow circle looking for one. I lift the cellophane, check the little plastic clip where a card rides. Empty. Just the flowers, a lot of them. I don’t remember Bex bringing them back from Whimsicality earlier.
“Hey,” Paige says as she comes around the corner, shrugging into her coat. “Those came during the second block,” she says. “Delivery guy. Said there was no name on the order. Weird, right?”
“I thought you left?”
“I had to grab my coat. Those aren’t from mom’s shop.”
“No, they’re not.” The boxes Josie uses have the shop’s name on them. “I guess they’re from a listener.” I pull a stem out and smell it because it’s in front of me. “People send things. Comes with the gig.”
“There’s no card, though.” Paige isn’t letting it go. “Who sends flowers and doesn’t want the credit? Even at school when we have our flower sale, Mack always has a card with them even though he’s the only one buying me flowers.”
“Somebody shy.” I put the stem back.
“You want me to call the shop, ask who ordered them?” she says, halfway to the door. “They’d have a name on the receipt.”
“It’s flowers, Paige. Not a ransom note.”
“I’m just saying. Five minutes.”
“Go home. I’ll be right behind you.”
Bex catches me at the door with a banker’s box under one arm, heavier than a box of paper has any right to be.
“Mail’s picking up,” she says. “A lot of it.” She shifts the box against her hip. “I read some of it. I always read some of it. And lately a few of these are, I don’t know, intense. Personal. People telling you things you’d only tell somebody you actually know. One of them sent a poem.”
“People feel connected,” I say.
“Maybe.” Bex doesn’t set the box down. “I’m keeping these ones separate. The intense ones. Just so you know where they are, if it ever comes up.”
“You think I’ve got a problem.”
“I think you’re famous.” She hoists the box higher and turns for her office. “Probably nothing. I’ll watch it anyway. That part’s the job.”
“That’s what Mira would say,” I mutter as she disappears down the hall. I take one last look at the flowers and then walk out of the studio.