Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
By the time the sun creeps through my window, my anxiety is shining at full force. My dinner with Cosmos’ family was a disaster. His mom was a sweetheart, but other than that I’m pretty sure the rest of them hate me… and then, there’s Cosmos. And his confession.
When he first told me about his obsession with his parent’s love story and the magic they had, I thought it was alarming, but kind of sweet.
Now, it’s like he wrote a single word on a blank page, and all night my sleepless mind multiplied that word into a sentence, and then a paragraph, and then an entire story of anxiety and impending doom.
A story that tangles my stomach and knots my heart.
A story that inevitably ends with me sobbing my eyes out.
Despite the early hour, I crawl out of bed and head to the kitchen to make coffee. I don’t want to wake Mom, but I can’t just lie around staring at the ceiling anymore. I press the button on the already-prepped coffeemaker and open the cabinet to get a mug, still lost in thoughts about Cosmos.
“What are you doing up?”
I scream, and the mug crashes to the floor. Thankfully—miraculously—it doesn’t break. Mom peeks her head up over the back of the couch. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Nope. Just wanted to scare me to death.” I pick up the mug and set it in the sink, then circle the couch to get a good look at Mom. “Why aren’t you in bed? Is something wrong? Are you feeling okay?” I place a hand on her forehead, checking for a fever. She bats it away.
“I’m fine. Just uncomfortable. Came out here for a change of scenery and decided to read.” She holds up the latest book from Aunt Joan. I sit down on the coffee table and try not to notice how pale she looks, or how she keeps flexing and pointing her foot and adjusting her position.
“Do you want some more pain meds? How long has it been?”
“I’m fine, Hazelnut.” She pats my knee reassuringly, but then breaks into a coughing fit. When she recovers, she asks me how my date was with Cosmos.
The coffeemaker beeps before I can answer, and I’m grateful for the excuse to get up and move. “It was fine.”
“Fine is how you describe a trip to the post office without incident, not a date with a sexy doctor who’s clearly into you.”
“It was good. I meant good.” Some of it was, at least. Some of it was very good. The way he looked up at me with hooded eyes and wet lips when we were in his bedroom. The sweet way he kissed me goodnight when he dropped me off, lingering because he didn’t want to say goodbye.
“If it was so good, why are you so jumpy?”
“I’m not jumpy.”
“You’re as tense as a coiled spring and almost broke my favorite mug. Now, tell me what really happened.” Mom coughs into her elbow. I stop what I’m doing and look at her, worried. But she waves a hand dismissively through the air. “I’m fine. Answer the question.”
I pour two mugs of coffee, one for each of us, giving myself a moment to think about how to answer. I’ve never kept things from Mom before, but I’m not sure how she’ll respond if I tell her Cosmos and I can stop time. Will she believe me? What will I do if she doesn’t?
“It was good. Really. But his family is… a lot.” I pour a splash of milk into Mom’s mug.
“Julia is lovely,” Mom says. “Was she there?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s thrilled that we started things up so quickly.” I set the mugs on the coffee table and join Mom on the couch.
She curls her feet under her in a position that mirrors my own. I know she’s waiting for me to say more, but she doesn’t press. Which is good. I need a minute to decide how to put my thoughts into words.
Mom picks up her mug and blows on her coffee.
We both stare out the window, watching the sun slowly brighten the sky from royal purple to robin’s egg blue.
Watching the sunrise has always been our thing.
After the divorce and the move, early morning sunrises became our ritual.
The thing we did together that was stable and sure.
Even when I moved out and lived with Kane, whenever one of us needed a little hope, we’d call and sit on the phone together while watching the sunrise.
Emily Dickinson called hope ‘the thing with feathers.’ She was comparing hope to a bird that never stopped singing. But I wonder if she also knew how flighty hope can be. How it always seems a little out of reach.
“How do you know if someone really likes you?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Mom sits up a little straighter, studying me. “You don’t. Not really. Not unless they tell you.”
“I mean, if they’ve told you, how do you know they really like you… for you?”
“You trust them,” she shrugs.
“And what if they end up being like Jerky Jeremy?”
“Your dad is absolutely singular, Hazelnut. The world couldn’t handle two of him.
” She says it with the kind of humor that comes long after a wound has scabbed over.
I wish I could approach the situation with that kind of healing, but I can’t seem to think of my dad with any sort of objective distance.
The way his words echo in my head more than any others proves how much I can’t get over those wounds. I always cared more about what he thought of me than anyone else.
He was the steady, sane one. I was Nutter.
And Mom was emotional—unless he was really upset with her, and then she was ‘unbalanced.’ He was the first and last word, the one who held the measuring stick.
And even though I always felt like I came up short, I still believed his measure was the one to live up to.
Then, everything imploded. It was senior year of high school.
I’d left an assignment at home that I needed to turn in.
So instead of eating lunch, I went home to get it.
I never did turn in that assignment. I walked into the kitchen to find my dad and his secretary with their pants down—literally.
It was the most horrifying cliché I’ve ever witnessed.
The most confusing betrayal I’d ever felt.
Until I found out that it wasn’t a momentary lapse, like he’d originally claimed.
After the divorce, he begged me to come visit. His mom, my only grandma, was really sick, and she wanted to see me before she died, so I went. I was still angry, but I was hopeful, too. Maybe we could repair things, start over.
His old secretary was with him when he picked me up from the airport.
She acted like we were best friends and yapped away the entire drive to the hospital, flashing a diamond ring with every gesture she made.
That night she told me their whole torrid history.
She thought it would help me understand.
The gist of it was that Dad had lied to me.
They’d been having an affair for over a decade.
They had it all planned out that Jeremy would wait to divorce Mom until after I graduated, because he didn’t want me to grow up in a broken home.
Neither of them realized how much more damage it did to have my perception of reality turned on its head as a fragile teenager. Even thinking about it now, my blood pumps through my veins with a furious heat.
“I’m serious, Mom. I can’t go through something like that.”
She looks at me over the edge of her mug and takes a long sip.
Then another. “Do you remember when you were learning to sew, and you kept pricking your finger? You were so frustrated because your stitches weren’t perfectly straight, and you kept getting hurt.
You wanted to quit, but I made you stick with it until you’d finished the whole dress. ”
I can see where she’s going with this and can’t help rolling my eyes. “Alright, I get it. We have to be willing to get hurt in order to get to the good stuff. Did you read that in one of your cheesy romance novels?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t like them. I saw the stash you’re hiding in your room. And that wasn’t what I was going to say.” She sets her coffee down, moves closer, and takes my hands. Her fingers are cold. “You loved that dress. It was positively, perfectly you.”
I did love that dress. The fabric was the softest I’d ever felt.
It had puffed sleeves that made me feel like Anne of Green Gables, and I’d never owned anything that fit so well.
I felt like a princess when I wore it on picture day in seventh grade.
Until I got to school. “Everyone called me Victorian Girl for the rest of the year.”
“Not Natalie.”
I haven’t thought about Natalie in years. She was my best friend throughout high school. We lost touch after the divorce, when Mom and I moved. But she was a good friend back then.
“The day you wore that dress was the day you two became friends.” Mom stretches her legs out onto my lap. “Risk and reward are bedfellows.”
“You should write slogans for investment firms,” I tease.
Mom takes one of my hands and starts massaging my palm like she used to when I was little. She gives me a cheeky grin. “Count your blessings and your investments.”
“Investments that make cents,” I say.
“Put your eggs in our basket,” Mom replies.
I snort and almost spit my coffee at her. We both devolve into fits of giggles. Which ends in more coughing for Mom. I get up and get her a glass of water.
“We should have been 1950s ad men,” Mom says.
“They wouldn’t have let us.” The simple sentence sparks an idea that quickly spreads like wildfire.
A 1950s ad man who isn’t very good at his job seeks the help of his female neighbor, who is always cracking jokes and throwing funny one-liners at him.
The two strike up a deal that quickly develops into a romance.
I hadn’t planned on writing another romance novel, but the idea takes shape so fully in my mind that I know it’ll happen, like a premonition, like a promise.
“I’m gonna go shower.” I stand up and kiss Mom on the cheek, eager to go jot down this idea.
“Hey, Hazel,” she calls as I reach the edge of the couch.
I turn around, waiting for whatever she wants to say.
“He who cannot howl…” she says, quoting the poet Charles Simic.
She doesn’t have to finish it. I know how the line ends. She used to say it all the time when I was growing up. He who cannot howl will not find his pack.