Cara #2
“I just don’t trust him,” she said finally. “His going quiet doesn’t make me trust him more. It makes me trust him less. Quiet isn’t the same as gone. That’s all. He’s a creep. Jerks like him aren’t known for giving up that easily. Just a feeling.”
“Okay,” I said.
Quiet—the word landed somewhere it hadn’t before.
Quiet isn’t the same as gone. I looked out at the lawn, at my sisters moving through the warm evening, at the familiar geography of a place I’d loved my whole life, and felt the edges of something I’d been deliberately not examining start to come into focus.
I’d been relieved this week. I’d let myself exhale, let myself enjoy Eric’s absence.
Paige, who had been running a bar in this town for years and had seen more of human behavior than most people twice her age, didn’t think it was resolution.
I turned that over quietly and didn’t like what it felt like.
“Okay,” I said again, softer this time, and meant something different by it.
“That’s all, Cara. I promise.” She bumped her shoulder against mine again.
“I don’t want you thinking about him at all.
I want you to think about Friday. I want you to think about Jasper.
I want you to think about what you’re going to wear and what shoes go with it, and whether you should put a little extra mascara on.
I want you to think about a good man who is choosing you. Okay? Promise me again.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I promise.”
“Now go say goodnight to Grandma,” Paige said, in the lighter voice she used to close a conversation, “before she puts another piece of cobbler on your plate. Because if she does, you’re not going to be able to walk to your car.”
I said my goodbyes—it took twenty minutes because every single person had to hug me twice.
Grandma pressed a foil-wrapped square of cobbler into my hand as I left, because she could not let me leave without leftovers.
Lucy hugged me hard and whispered I love you; Friday is going to be amazing into my hair.
Eliza hugged me with both arms wrapped all the way around my back, like she’d done since she was small.
Piper kissed the top of my head. Paige hugged me last and held on longer than usual.
I walked to the gravel turnout with Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder and tried to work out what had just happened in there.
I’d been on dates before. Not many, not recently, but enough that my family had some frame of reference.
Enough that this shouldn’t have felt like a collective event, like something worth pulling me aside about, like something that required two hugs from everyone and a foil-wrapped square of cobbler.
I wasn’t a teenager. I wasn’t someone who had never done this before.
But somewhere between Piper asking me three times if I had a good outfit and Lucy cornering me by the lemonade and Grandma holding both my hands and looking at my face like she was reading something she’d been waiting a long time to find there—I’d started to understand that they weren’t reacting to the date. They were reacting to me.
I thought about the last person I’d dated seriously.
I’d been present for that relationship in the technical sense—showed up, tried, went through the motions with genuine enough intention.
But I’d been careful. I’d been measured.
I’d been, if I was honest, a little bit absent in all the ways that mattered most. And then he’d turned out to be a lying cheater, so there’s that.
I didn’t feel absent right now. I felt the opposite of absent.
I felt like every nerve I had was awake and paying attention and slightly terrified, and apparently that was visible from across a porch because my entire family had spent the evening looking at me like I was someone they recognized but hadn’t seen in a while.
The pugs followed us down the gravel. Lois, the chocolate lab, followed the pugs. The goose, somewhere in the dark, honked once at something I couldn’t see.
At my car, Grandpa squeezed my shoulder one last time. “Drive safe, kiddo.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
“Tell whoever he is I want to meet him sometime.”
I went still. I looked up at my grandfather in the soft yellow porch light. He was looking at the gravel between our feet, not at me, in the careful way he looked at gravel when he was saying something he’d been working up to all night.
“Grandpa. I didn’t tell you anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I—”
“You don’t have to bring him soon,” he said. “I just wanted you to know I want to meet him eventually. When you’re ready.” He looked up then, and his eyes were warm and steady, the same way they’d always been when he had something important to say and was going to take his time saying it.
“Okay,” I said, and felt the truth of it move through me, warm and a little frightening. “I think this one will be coming here with me someday.”
Grandpa nodded once, satisfied, and looked back at the gravel. “Good,” he said simply. “That’s all I needed to know.”
He squeezed my shoulder one more time and turned back toward the porch, the pugs trailing behind him, Lois ambling after the pugs.
I stood by my car for a moment in the dark, the cobbler warm in my hand, the night air soft around me, and let myself feel it without immediately talking myself out of it.
I was happy. Carefully, with both hands wrapped around it like something I didn’t want to drop.
I got in the car.
I drove home with the cobbler on the passenger seat, where the shortbread tin had been three hours ago. The road back into town was empty and dark, and I had the windows cracked again because the air felt good on my face.
The cats greeted me at the door—Wentworth first, climbing me before I could even set the cobbler down, then Knightley winding around my ankles, then Darcy from the back of the couch, watching with his usual I am pleased you have returned, but will not say so out loud.
I put the cobbler in the fridge. I changed into pajamas.
I brushed my teeth. I picked Wentworth up off the bathroom counter twice, where he had positioned himself like a small black gargoyle who needed to be exactly in the way of everything I was doing.
I picked up my phone before I got into bed.
CARA: Made it home
Me: Goodnight, Cara.
I held the phone against my chest for a second. Wentworth was already on my pillow. Knightley was at the foot of the bed. Darcy was somewhere in the apartment doing whatever Darcy did at night.
I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the pillow with Wentworth’s small, warm body pressed against my shoulder.