Chapter Twenty-Six
Jaimie
“You still on for the aquarium?”
“Don’t you have work today?” asked Ren. She had a habit of speaking directly into the phone, magnifying her voice to a painful level.
“Not today, actually. I was able to talk Randy into letting me have the day off.” I opened the blinds over the bedroom window, and warm mid-morning sunlight spilled into the room. “I think he felt bad because he’s been dragging me all over the country lately. Right now, I could ask for anything I wanted, and he’d probably give it.”
“It’s nice that of all the things you could’ve asked for, you chose to spend the day with me.” She began humming softly to herself. “I could probably close the shop early. I only have one customer this afternoon, and I think I could get her to re-schedule without too much fuss. Do you want to meet me for brunch in an hour?”
“Consider it done.” I hung up the phone.
We met up at the Walnut Café, a restaurant that was locally famous for its all-day breakfast and homemade pies. I deliberated for a long time over my menu before settling on the sunrise sandwich: two eggs served with chicken and mozzarella on rosemary olive oil bread. It didn’t take Ren more than a minute to decide what she wanted: she always ordered the Duzer’s breakfast burrito: a scrambled-egg-and-potato burrito topped with melted cheddar, sour cream, salsa, and black olives.
When our orders came, I eyed Ren’s plate jealously for a moment.
“You want to try it?” asked Ren. “It’s clearly tempting you, I can tell.”
“No, but I’m definitely going to order that the next time we come.” I let out a dignified huff. “Makes me wonder who Duzer is and where he learned to make such excellent breakfasts.”
“Yeah, I’m sure there’s a story behind that.” She bit into her burrito, dripping salsa over her plate. “True story: the first time I came here I thought it said ‘Dürer’s Burrito,’ as in the fifteenth-century painter Albrecht Dürer, and I was like, ‘No, thanks!’”
“What would that even look like?” I wondered.
“Very proto-surreal, no doubt.”
It was always a little dizzying going from Braxton to Ren and back again. Ren was so articulate, so cultured, so quick with a joke, and so hard to keep up with. Braxton was—well, none of those things, exactly, but he was good-hearted and always striving to do the right thing even though he failed more often than not.
“You want to hear something else funny?” asked Ren. “Maybe this is just a personal quirk, but when I sit down to eat with someone, if my meal looks particularly appetizing, I sometimes leave it sitting on the plate for a few minutes.”
“Why, so you can stare at it? Why don’t you just Instagram that shit?”
“No, actually!” exclaimed Ren, looking fascinated with herself. “I think it’s because I want the other person to see it and admire it. It’s almost like I have to make them jealous before I can start eating.”
“Hmmm.” I bit a chunk out of a sweet potato fry. “I’m calling that out the next time you do it.”
“You should; it’s probably mean and unhealthy. But I can’t deny it makes dining out a hundred percent more worth it. Jealousy is the best spice.”
While we were eating, Ren told me about the book she had just finished writing, which she still hadn’t let anyone read except for her agent. She was stubbornly insistent on this point: she hoped to be famous but would rather millions of strangers read her stories than for her own friends and family to read them.
“What is the book about?” I asked her. “You still haven’t told me anything, apart from it being a love story.”
“I mean, I guess you could call it that,” she said uncertainly. “It’s more a coming-of-age story. It’s about a young woman who is invited to leave America and spend a year living in Egypt working as a private tutor for a family, and the various frustrations and setbacks and disappointments she goes through: not being able to buy food, the death of a family member back in the States, being in a long-distance relationship.”
“Sounds like a rough year.”
“Well, I wanted it all to feel very normal and mundane—just an intimate look at this one person’s life over the course of about ten months.”
“Sort of like a Richard Linklater film.”
Ren wagged her spoon at me, looking excited. “Yes! Yes, exactly.”
“I like that. Sounds like you paid more attention to the emotional journey than to following a set of prescribed plot points.”
“I did. It was important that her journey feel believable to me and to the reader. Half of learning how to write well is just figuring out how to get the reader believing in what you’re writing.”
“Makes sense.” I took a sip of my latte. “You must’ve learned a lot while writing this book.”
“I really did.” Ren smiled, looking quietly pleased with herself.
“Tell me!”
She pushed her plate back and folded her hands over the table. Ren loved to talk about writing but didn’t get to do it very often. “I think the main thing with this book has been learning how to craft compelling characters. There’s a porter in the hotel where she stays when she first moves to Aswan who is mourning the loss of his beloved pig, whom he loved like a member of his own family.”
“Relatable,” I said.
“Yeah. I tried to give even the most minor characters a dream and a heartache. It really fleshes out the world of the story. You feel like any one of these people could be the protagonist of their own novel.”
“Yeah, it took me forever to realize that every person I had ever met thought they were the hero of their own story,” I said. “Growing up, I was convinced I was the protagonist and everyone else was just a quirky supporting character in the indie movie of my life.”
“It’s a hard lesson,” Ren replied. “It’s a big step on the road to becoming an emotionally mature person, when we can accept that.”
I drank the last of my latte, marveling at how much she had been learning and trying not to feel resentful. She had put in so much time and effort over the past year into mastering her craft, and I just hadn’t. I supposed she was right that I needed to stop making excuses. Maybe if I sat down and wrote for an hour or two each day, in a few years, I would be as practiced and accomplished as she was. Maybe not, but at least I wouldn’t spend my whole life wondering whether I could’ve made it as an author.
“You okay, boo?” Ren asked, reaching for my hand.
I nodded slowly. “Yeah. I just have a lot to think about.”
“Anything you’d care to talk about?”
I shook my head. “No, but thank you.”
“How are things with the boy? Did you get him to watch the Before movies?”
“I did, actually.” I smiled. “Well, the first one, anyway. I fell asleep about ten minutes into the movie, and when I woke up an hour later, he was still watching it. He looked mesmerized.”
“Did he really?”
“He said he had never seen anything like it. So take that for what it’s worth. And I don’t know, I just—I just like him a lot.” I shrugged shyly. “I stayed the night over at his house, and in the morning, he made me breakfast. He takes care of me.”
“He sounds a bit like the Hulk: gentle and mild-mannered for the most part, until he’s provoked. And then you had better watch out!”
“You make him sound so menacing.”
“I mean…” Ren turned to the window. It was that hour of the morning when most people are at work, and the sun shone warmly over the half-empty streets. “I read online about the press conference. The media brought up some valid questions about his criminal history, and he never really answered them. He made the entire conference about his opponent, like a true politician.”
“He’s good at that,” I said, feeling defensive. “It was one of the things Randy really liked about him.”
“I guess.” Ren blinked sleepily and turned to face me. “There are still some things I would like to know, though.”
“Like what?”
“Like how much has he changed, really? Has he dealt with his demons, or has he just gotten better at hiding them? Why was he repeatedly in jail over the past couple years for beating up vagrants?”
“It sounds like you’re having second thoughts about my going out with him.” There was no concealing the irritation in my voice.
“I would just like him to explain himself, is all. Just answer a few simple questions. Has he shown any signs of anger or aggression?”
“Not at all. He’s been the soul of gentleness. He even has a cat.”
But Ren didn’t look entirely convinced.
“Look, I’ll admit I’ve only been with him for about a week,” I said angrily. “If he starts getting mean or abusive, then I’ll take that as my cue to leave. But he hasn’t yet. He’s been the opposite, in fact.”
I was doing a poor job of explaining myself, but she wouldn’t have said those things if she had seen the side of him I had seen. I almost wished she had been there that night as he held me and caressed my face. He had said I was perfect. No one had ever said that to me before. And I had wanted to argue, but his eyes blazed with sincerity and conviction…
“I know this is something you maybe don’t want to hear right now,” said Ren. “But it’s really easy for a man to seem courteous and polite and gentle at the beginning of a relationship. The real test of his character comes from how he treats people other than his girlfriend, and on that front—well, for now, I’ll just have to suspend judgment. Maybe he really has changed.”
“I guess we’ll know sooner or later,” I replied. “If he’s really a heel, then he won’t be able to hide it forever.”
“No, eventually the mask will slip.” Ren shuddered. “I just hope I’m wrong, because you’re the one who gets hurt if I’m right.”