Chapter Twenty-Six
I was buzzing from a good day at work, and I wasn’t even high. Though at least half my residents were.
I had hosted a high tea with infused beverages and cakes from a local dispensary with a café.
The residents turned out in their Sunday best. Huge, flamboyant hats.
Seersucker suits. It was genuinely delightful.
Though it wasn’t until after I checked over the sign-in sheet that I realized Ruby had skipped the event despite RSVPing in the affirmative.
That night, I went back to the apartment to pick up Marlon for a walk. Well, technically, a walk and carry since he always protested after the first hundred yards or so and demanded to be held.
I headed over to Ruby’s because I’d told Hollis I would check in on her, and I was also a little bit curious to find out what exactly had happened.
On my way, I stopped at Leonard’s building and left one of the pamphlets from the funeral home in his mailbox with a note to check out the section on living funerals.
When I reached Ruby’s, I knocked on the door and waited for her to answer.
“The Winner Takes It All” by ABBA played at full volume from inside.
That was not a good sign.
I pounded on the door more aggressively this time. “Ruby!”
After a moment, she flung the door open and then walked away without saying a word. She wore a pink-and-orange-paisley apron and pink rubber gloves and held a Windex bottle poised like a weapon.
Oh fuck, she was in a frenzy. Ruby hated cleaning.
Loathed it. But when she was backed into a corner and her brain was too full of her own thoughts, she would do anything to distract herself, including recklessly cleaning the house.
I say recklessly because not only did Ruby hate cleaning, but she was also appallingly bad at it.
Behind her, I noticed her vacuum abandoned in the living room, clearly clogged, and the oven smoking, likely from a self-cleaning cycle gone wrong.
“Vera, dear, I’m a bit busy.”
“Oh, I can see that,” I said, stepping past her as I released Marlon onto the floor and into the chaos.
She huffed. “Well, since you insist on interrupting, I suppose you could at least take a look at my vacuum. I probably ought to buy a new one.”
I walked over and opened the canister of her brand-new Dyson to find it full of lint, dust, and probably Marlon’s hair. “You can’t just buy a new vacuum every time you have to empty yours.”
She turned her nose up and abandoned her Windex to spray the inside of the sink with far too much foam cleaner.
First, I would help her get this disaster under control, and then I would pry.
Humming along to the best of ABBA, I dealt with the stove and then finished the rest of the carpet and even vacuumed the sofas before emptying the canister again so it would be cleaned out for her next manic cleaning spree.
As the apartment began to return to its usual state, I lowered the volume on Ruby’s record player. “So I ran into Hollis today.”
Ruby turned her back to me and wiped the same stretch of countertop over and over again.
“She said you two were taking a break.”
Ruby paused, and then shook her head. “You can’t take a break from something that never existed.”
Ouch. I sat down on the couch and pulled Marlon up into my lap. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“What’s there to say?” she asked as she finally turned around and removed her gloves and apron.
“We spent sixty years crossing paths at the worst possible times. We made debris of each other’s lives every chance we got.
” She shook her head and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed.
“I’m a fool for spending my life loving her—mostly from afar, and now .
. . finally we’re here. In the place we always promised each other we would be at the end.
I finally told the woman I loved her and she backpedaled out of that door faster than Ginger Rogers in heels. ”
It took a great deal of force not to react to the declaration of love baked into that last statement.
Having meaningful, heartfelt discussions with Ruby was as rare as finding parking at a Trader Joe’s.
The moment it was time for vulnerability, she morphed into a moody cat who would receive affection only on its own terms.
“Why did you two spend all those years playing tag?” I asked. “You know me and Mom wouldn’t have cared.”
Ruby sat down on her chaise longue with her feet up and her back to me as though it was easier to say the words if she didn’t have to make eye contact at the same time.
“I was twenty-three and she was twenty-one the first time we kissed. She was delusional enough to think that we could work. That people wouldn’t blacklist us.
But I knew better. I knew no one would put me on camera again if I let it go on.
She never would have made it as far as she did with me by her side. ”
“Rubes,” I said, “you can’t know that for sure.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she snapped back. She took a moment, and then inhaled deeply. “What’s done is done. I can’t sit around living in a moment that’s passed me by. I tried to make it right. To give her the future she’d always wanted us to have, but it’s too late.”
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t too late and that there was still time, but I was half Ruby’s age, and even I felt like it was already too late.
But maybe Ruby was right. Maybe she couldn’t have at eighty-two the life she’d missed out on when she was twenty-three.
Even if all the puzzle pieces were there, they’d never fit back together in the same way.
“I was foolish for wanting more,” she said so softly that I didn’t think I was meant to hear her.
“I’m sorry,” I said simply, because what else could I say?
How could I possibly express how much it sucked that she’d never been with the love of her life even though she’d been standing right in front of her all along?
It was the kind of heartbreak that could fill a book’s worth of pages.
“Let’s order some takeout,” I said. “And we can watch whatever you want.”
“Cats,” she said with a sniff. “I’d like to watch the 2019 feature film Cats.”
“I thought you said that movie was an atrocity and an insult to artists everywhere.”
She nodded, blowing a sigh through her nose. “Yes, but I’d like to watch someone else’s train wreck right now. I find the thought deeply comforting. Besides, a hostess once gave my reservation away to Dame Judi Dench and I’ll never forgive the dame or the hostess.”
I smiled at that as I began to scroll through delivery options. Beneath the heartbreak, Ruby was still there.