3. Bree
Bree
“Don’t you think Puffball is looking like an anorexic out-of-work model?”
That was M.J., the writer of the book I was illustrating, and she was staring at me through my laptop screen with a perplexed look on her face, squinting at the illustrations I had drawn.
“Uhh,” I said. “Is he now? He looks fine to me.”
I looked at the drawing I’d made. Puffball, the purple dragon, did look a teeny bit off.
I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him.
I looked at his googly eyes. Had anyone ever stopped to consider that maybe Puffball wasn’t ready for this change in his life?
Maybe his parents thought he was being a big baby about the whole training pants situation, but nobody bothered to ask if he had real feelings about it too.
Maybe he just wanted things to go back to the way they used to be.
Maybe his parents should just leave the poor guy alone for a while and let him figure it out on his own time.
“Bree,” M.J. said, snapping me out of it. “You need to redraw these, darling.”
I could tell she was trying very hard to stay calm. Thanks to the fancy laptop Gavin had given me for our anniversary (“Now you can draw right on the screen with the stylus, Bree” he’d said), I could see every little blue vein in M.J.’s pale pink neck, and every single one of them was throbbing.
“They’re cute, and they’re colorful,” M.J. said. There was a but coming. “But I’m sure you understand, he’s called Puffball for a reason. Please make him puffier?”
I forced the biggest, fakest smile I had in me. “Of course, M.J. Puffier it is.”
“And Bree,” she added. “Maybe make him look a little less constipated?”
“Little less constipated it is,” I said.
“Can you get these to Mark by tomorrow? We really need to get the storyboard moving.”
“Tomorrow it is,” I said.
What was wrong with me?
M.J. looked at me like I was some kind of alien specimen they’d just pulled out of a spaceship. “Okay, darling. I’ll let you get back to it. Same time tomorrow?”
“Same time it is,” I said, and winced right into the camera the second I said it. M.J. hung up abruptly with a stiff little smile and a worried look on her face.
I took a long sip of the coffee Wren had made that morning.
I hated Wren, but I still needed the coffee.
And the thing that bugged me the most was that I really wanted to make a point about all of it.
That it was my coffee maker, my kitchen, my life, my husband that Wren kept helping herself to.
If Wren had been standing right there, I would have poured the whole pot straight down the drain in front of her and brewed a fresh one just to prove the point.
But since Wren wasn’t there, there was no point in making the point.
So, I continued drinking straight out of Gavin’s mug.
The rest of the day went into making Puffball as puffy and cute and thrilled about the idea of peeing in his training pants as eight years of illustration experience could manage.
I got so hungry and so deep into work that I ended up eating Gavin’s left-over eggs and toast, standing at the counter, calling it my lunch.
By the time I finally sent the illustrations over to M.J.
, with the subject line Puffy, Happy, Not Constipated, it was already four in the afternoon.
Thank god I had that deadline today, honestly, or I would have gone completely crazy, because I hadn’t heard one single word from Gavin the whole entire day.
I knew he had back-to-back practice sessions.
I knew he had interview clips to shoot with Wren in between.
But come on. He couldn’t find thirty seconds to send one text?
No matter how busy he got, he always called me at lunch.
Always. But not today. Another coincidence, I guess.
Maybe he was still mad about me going through his phone.
Fine. I get it. I shouldn’t have done that.
But he should have called. But then, what was stopping me from calling him?
I picked up my phone and I was about to press his name when I had a better idea. It would be so much better if I just showed up at his practice and surprised him in person. Maybe we could even go get dinner together afterward, just the two of us, no Wren invited.
I guessed, in a weird way, I understood something about Puffball right then that I hadn’t understood all day. You can sit around and wait for your situation to fix itself, or you can put on your training pants, so to speak, and go do something about it yourself.
So that’s exactly what I decided to do.
Two hours later, I was parking the blue SUV outside the Redcoats practice facility, feeling pretty proud of myself for the surprise I was about to pull off, when I saw a guy walking toward me, waving both arms like he was trying to land a plane.
He looked like a more nervous, dorkier version of Mr. Bean, and it took me a second to place him. Lavi. Wren’s assistant.
“Bree! Hi! Oh my gosh, hi,” he said, practically jogging the last few steps to reach me.
“Hey, Lavi,” I said. “What’s going on?”
And that’s when I noticed it. He looked absolutely wrecked.
“You are not going to believe what happened to Gavin today,” Lavi said, pressing a hand to his chest. “Oh, this just breaks my heart.”
“What happened?” I said. “Tell me. Is he okay?”
“No,” Lavi said. “He is not okay.”
He was talking so fast I could barely keep up.
“He got absolutely chewed out by coach today. It was so heartbreaking to watch his beautiful face go so tight.”
A wave of guilt hit me right in the chest so hard that I stopped myself from commenting on the words “beautiful” and “tight”.
Maybe whatever happened to Gavin today was some kind of butterfly effect from our fight the night before.
I started walking fast toward the field, firing off questions the whole way.
“Do you know where he is right now?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Lavi said, hurrying to keep up with me.
“I saw him last with Wren, right after the whole showdown with the coach. Poor Wren, she was so devastated too. She told him it wasn’t even his fault, it was the other player’s fault, coming in between him and the ball like that, that’s why he dropped the snap.
You should have seen her beautiful face. It went just so?—“
“Tight?” I said.
He nodded.
We were basically jogging at this point, me leading and him struggling to keep pace beside me.
“Oh, since I ran into you,” Lavi said, a little out of breath, “can I ask you something? Gavin couldn’t remember the name of your last publishing house. Was it Blue Violin Publications, or Blue Jay Publications? I couldn’t find it anywhere on your socials, so I wanted to double check.”
I stopped walking.
“Why do you need the name of my last publishing house?”
“For the piece,” Lavi said, like it was obvious.
“What piece?”
He went quiet for a second.
“The piece about your first project,” he said. “The Harley and the Magic Marker piece?”
My whole body went cold.
My very first illustration project ever was a book called Harley and the Magic Marker, about a little boy who could draw things into real life.
I was so proud of it. And then a woman named Amanda, who I actually thought was one of my closest friends in the industry, stole the entire idea behind my back and sold it to a rival publishing house.
Her illustrations looked exactly like mine.
Not similar. Exactly like mine. And her book came out three days before ours did, and it blew up overnight.
Amanda told everyone it was me who had stolen the idea from her.
At the release event for my book, with Gavin standing right there watching, the CEO of my own publishing house stood up in front of everyone and humiliated me.
He called it a cheap trick. He said I’d sold my soul for a payday.
My publishing house lost almost a million dollars on that book, because they’d paid that much to get a former First Lady to write it.
Meanwhile, the other house had a famous pop star writing their version, and it turned into a massive hit, with sequels, and eventually a Nickelodeon deal.
It was the darkest, most personal, most humiliating chapter of my entire career. And I had never, not once, wanted to think about it again, let alone show it to anyone.
“Who told you that you could put that in the documentary?” I asked.
“Gavin did,” Lavi said. “He even gave me all your original hand-drawn illustrations from back then.”
He opened a folder on his tablet and turned it toward me, like he was proud of it, like this was good news.
There they were. My drawings. My humiliation. Right there on a screen, ready to be shown to the entire world.
I was trying so hard not to cry. My ears were burning hot and I couldn’t get a full breath in.
I turned and started running toward the locker room, hoping Gavin was there, hoping he had some kind of explanation that would make this make sense.
He wasn’t in there.
Derek, the team’s top defensive end, gave me a friendly little wave from his locker. “Hey, Bree.”
I couldn’t hold the tears back anymore. “Derek, have you seen Gavin?”
“Yeah, saw him out on the field with Wren a few minutes ago,” he said.
I turned and headed for the field, wiping my face with the back of my hand as I walked, trying to get myself together before I found him.
That’s when I heard his voice.
Gavin and Wren were on the other side of the corridor where I was walking, with their backs towards me, tucked in a corner of the field. She had her camera down at her hip, not even filming, which somehow made it worse. This wasn’t for the documentary. This was just for her.
“I don’t know, man,” Gavin was saying, rubbing the back of his neck the way he did when he was tired. “It’s a lot right now.”
“Talk to me,” Wren said. Soft. Patient. Like she had nowhere else in the world to be.
“It’s just — the season, the retirement stuff, and then I go home and it’s just...” He blew out a breath. “More. You know? Another thing to manage. Another whole situation.”
“What happened now?” Wren asked sympathetically, nodding like she already knew, like this was a conversation they’d had pieces of before.
“Bree.” He said my name like it was a line item. “I don’t mean it like that. But it’s just… it’s just, a lot of baggage to carry into a season like this, you know?”
Baggage.
I stood there behind that shed and felt something in my chest go very, very quiet.
“With Bree,” he said, “everything’s a conversation.
Everything’s a thing we have to sit down and talk about and process.
But I come out here, with the boys, and with you, and it’s just easy, you know?
Nobody needs anything from me out here. Nobody’s waiting for me to say the right thing or feel the right way about something.
I can just show up and be a guy who throws a football. ”
He let out a short laugh, the kind with no humor in it.
“I don’t even know when talking to my own wife started feeling like homework.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Wren said. “I get it. I actually think it’s kind of amazing you hold it together as well as you do.”
“Some days I don’t feel like I’m holding anything together.”
“You are.” She touched his arm, just for a second, just long enough. “Gavin, honestly? Coming out here, being on the field, being able to just talk like this, I think that’s the only place you actually get to breathe anymore. I really do.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it kind of is.”
“I’m glad I get to be part of that for you,” Wren said. “I mean that. And for what it’s worth, I think Bree’s great. I really do. I hope you guys figure it out. You deserve to be happy.”
She said it so easily. So warmly. Like she meant every word of it, like she was rooting for us from the sidelines, and if you’d asked me to describe the tone of her voice to a stranger, I’d have said supportive. Kind. Maybe even generous.
But I’d watched this woman for months now.
I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t handing him permission to be happy with me.
She was handing him permission to feel understood by her, quietly, patiently, one I get it at a time, while saying all the right things out loud in case anyone happened to be listening.
Which I was.
Gavin didn’t say anything else for a second. He just looked out at the field, hands on his hips, like a man catching his breath.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you out here, honestly.” he said.
And Wren smiled, soft, sympathetic, camera still down at her hip. “You don’t have to know. I’m not going anywhere, Gavin.”
He turned toward her, stepped in and pulled her into a hug.
His arms went all the way around her, one hand landing low on her back, right between her shoulder blades, and he tucked her head under his chin the exact same way he did with me.
The exact same way. He rested his chin on top of her head for a second, eyes closed, like he was just standing there breathing her in.
That spot on her head. I knew that spot. I’d felt that spot a thousand times. It was ours. It was supposed to be ours.
Wren’s hands slid up his back and she went still against him, not pulling away, not stepping back, just letting it happen, her eyes closed too.
They held on like that a beat too long. Long enough that it stopped being a hug between two friends and started being something alive.
Then he let her go, slow, like it cost him something, and she looked up at him with this soft little smile still on her face, and neither one of them said anything for a second.
“Gavin?”
The word just fell out of me.
He turned toward me. His face went white, blank, wiped clean of whatever had just been on it.
“Bree?” he called out.
I turned around. And started running.
Just like the immature, paranoid, insecure wife I was. Running across a parking lot from her own husband, sobbing, like a woman in a movie she’d have watched while eating popcorn just six months ago.
My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I picked up speed anyway. I’d decided that I was going to outrun him, that I was not going to be standing still when he caught up, if he even tried.
I didn’t stop for my purse strap when it slid down my arm. I didn’t stop when I felt my sandal come half off. I ran straight across the lot to the SUV, yanked the door open, and threw myself inside.
Behind me, I heard the door to the practice building bang open.
“Bree! Bree, stop!”
I didn’t look back. I started the car, and I pulled out of that parking lot so fast the tires actually squealed, which is a thing I thought only happened in movies until right that second.
Three hours later, I was pulling into my parents’ driveway in New Haven, and I still hadn’t stopped shaking.