Chapter 42: Grown-up questions with grown-up answers. Like a fucking boss.
We sit across from one another a few seconds later, with my hands laced together on the glass table top, Jenny gripping her to-go cup.
“How was the rest of the reception last night?” I ask. “After Amy and I, uh…”
I was going to say “after Amy and I left,” but of course that sounds as if we left together. Just another happy fucking couple at another happy fucking wedding, happily leaving arm-in-happy-arm after they’d had their fill of the happy-ass reception.
But of course that’s not what happened. We were a happy couple until Amy came into the bathroom to find Jenny and me sucking face. Which triggered Amy’s panic attack. Which triggered Amy’s fainting.
And when Amy came-to a minute later, far from wanting to see me, the sight of my face floating over hers nearly triggered a second panic attack.
No shit.
I followed the ambulance to the hospital, but when I went into the emergency room, Grace Fucking Adler, still in her wedding dress, shooed me away. And in the twelve hours since? Amy won’t see me, won’t text me back, won’t take my calls. Probably deletes every voicemail without listening.
“The rest of the reception was about the same,” Jenny says with a shrug. She taps an irregular rhythm on the black plastic lid of her to-go cup. “Are you and Amy still…?”
“Talking? Starting a relationship?” I ask. I shake my head. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“I’m sorry about… if I…”
“Don’t be. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. It’s not like I didn’t participate.”
She tries to smile. “Seems like this always happens, when we get close enough. Like at your sister’s wedding.”
I try to smile back. I don’t need a fucking mirror to know that my smile doesn’t reach my eyes anymore than hers does. “Maybe it’s a wedding thing.”
“Maybe.” She takes a sip of her coffee. Looks down. Looks back up. “Or maybe it’s an ‘us’ thing. A sign that we still have something, that we always will. Something neither of us can deny.”
“Jenny…” I let out a long breath. “All we have together anymore are memories.”
“Memories are what knit people together.”
I slowly shake my head. “And memories push people apart. Don’t you remember why we broke up?”
She takes a breath. “I got pregnant.”
“No. It was more than you getting pregnant. It was you pulling away from me. It was me cheating on you. It was the two of us constantly arguing. For years.”
“There were good times, too.”
“Yeah, but the good times got fewer and further between. By the end, there weren’t any good times.”
“That was then. Maybe it would be different if we tried again. We’re older now, more mature. I don’t think we’d hurt each other in the same ways that we did back then.” She pauses, studies my face. “Will you try? Will you try again with me?”
“I didn’t ask to meet so we could talk about us.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
I rest my elbows on the table, press the heels of my hands into my eyes. Rub. Lace my hands on the table again. “Jenny. I have a question of my own. You have to answer it honestly.”
“Anything,” she says softly. “Ask me anything.”
“What do you want from your life?”
Her brow creases. Obviously not the question she was expecting. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said. What do you want from your life? What do you want your life to be about?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I’ve been asking myself that question for the past two years. As soon as I realized my career wasn’t going to last much longer. For a long fucking time, I made my life about basketball — basketball, and you. And once I realized you and I weren’t going to last forever, it was just basketball. But now you know what I’ve figured out?” I wait for her to answer, but she says nothing, so I keep going. “It sounds like a fucking no-brainer, but I realized basketball’s not going to last forever, either. And basing my life around a person, or around a game… that’s not enough. Not for me. Not anymore.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re fucking lost, Jen. I see it all over your face every time we run into each other. You’re lost, and you think I’m the one who’s gonna make you found again. Like I’m your fucking ‘Amazing Grace.’”
She shakes her head. “I’m not los — ”
“You are. I know you are, because I know you, and because I’ve been lost for a long-ass time, too. Takes one to know one and all that shit. You’re holding onto me — onto the idea of us — because us being together was the last time you knew what your life was about. And I get it, because I did the same thing for a really long time. But I can’t be the center of your life. You have to find your own center.”
Her eyes water and she looks down at her coffee cup. She pulls in a deep breath, lets it out slowly. Sniffs. When she speaks again, her voice is small. “What about you? What do you want from your life? What’s your center?”
I reach across the table, pry her hands from her coffee cup, hold them in my own. They still fit together, our hands. Even after all these years. Her hands are cool; my hands are warm. I run my thumbs across her knuckles.
“I’m working on that. And for starters, I have to stop running,” I say. “From my family, from Ohio. From my own fucking memories. I need to stay in one place for once. Give back. Take care of my mom and dad. Take care of the restaurant. This place is my center. I’ve fought against it for a long fucking time, but I think a part of me has always known it.”
Her breath hitches in her throat. “But I’m centered here, too. Why can’t we be centered here together?”
There’s a part of me that’s exasperated. There’s another part of me that’s infinitely patient, because this is Jenny, after all. The sun that the planet of my life rotated around for a very long time. I can’t give her my heart anymore, but at least I can give her my patience.
“Because we can’t,” I say softly. “Because we stopped working a long, long time ago, when we started outgrowing each other but refused to admit it. And if we got back together, we’d be going backward. Back in time instead of forwards. Back to when we were fucking clinging to each other because we didn’t know what else to do. I have to stop trying to bring the past back to life. I didn’t know that for sure until yesterday, at the reception, but I know now.” I swallow, meet her eyes. “I can’t be with you again.”
She cries in silence, won’t look me in the eyes.
Another way of explaining it occurs to me, and I squeeze her hands again. “Jenny. Do you know what we are to each other?”
“Exes who wish they’d never messed things up so badly?”
I shake my head. “We’re dal bhat. We’re fried chicken and cornbread. We’re collard greens seasoned with curry.”
She lets out a wet laugh. “We’re your parents’ cooking?”
“No, we’re comfort food. We’re familiar to each other, but that doesn’t mean we’re good for each other. Not anymore.” I sigh. “Comfort food… Too much of it just leads to a fucked-up heart. My heart’s been fucked-up a long time, Jen. Yours has, too. We make each other sick, not better. You know I’m right.”
She shakes her head. “You’re not.”
“I am. You know I am. You have to let go — we both do.”
She retracts her hands, uses her index fingers to swipe at the tears pooling in her eyes. When that doesn’t make the tears disappear, she tries gazing up at the ceiling for a few seconds. She blinks a few times. I wait in silence. In patience.
After a last mighty sniff, she pulls her eyes off the ceiling, puts them back on me. “So why did you want to meet me today? If you didn’t want to talk about us?”
I take a breath. “I need you to do something. I’m selling the house in Phoenix, but it’s still in both of our names. I need you to sign some paperwork.”
She freezes in place, suddenly a statue. A dead, unbreathing, wax museum version of herself. Mouth poised halfway open. Hands completely still.
And I’m thinking, Oh, shit. We’re going to have a problem here, aren’t we?
I paid for the house when we moved out to Phoenix, because back then, I was making money and she wasn’t. But we’d put it in both of our names, the idea being that if anything ever happened to me, my family couldn’t pull any crazy-ass homophobic drama and try to kick Jenny out of our home. When we split up, I somehow never bothered to take her name off the deed. Maybe there was a part of both of us that didn’t want to. The house was the last thing we could call “ours” instead of “mine” / “hers.”
Which means that technically, she’s still half-owner. Technically, she could stop me from selling it if she really wanted to.
After a couple more seconds of wax museum stillness, Jenny comes back to life. Nods. “Okay. I’ll sign whatever you need me to. But why are you selling the house? I thought you were keeping it as an investment property.”
I repeat the same explanation I’d given to my siblings earlier.
Her eyes widen. “You’ve always hated the restaurant.”
I shrug. “It’s like I told you. My basketball career is coming to an end. I need to do something, and I don’t want to coach or teach. My sociology degree is about worth the paper it’s printed on. If that. Being back here… My sister still drives me nuts, and I can’t handle living with my parents for any length of time, but the restaurant? It hasn’t been that bad. And I think… Well, I’ve been talking with Gerry a lot. Thinking things over. And this is what I want to do next.”
She seems like she’s taking all my words in, letting them steep somewhere in the back of her brain. “Do you think… if you’re living here… we could end up being friends again? Just friends — that’s all I’m asking.”
“Depends.” I laugh. “You’re not going to keep throwing yourself at me in spare bedrooms and public bathrooms, are you?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.” She takes a deep breath. “No, I won’t. I promise I’ll stop.”
I return her smile. “So… are you okay to fill out some paperwork now?”
“Yeah.”
I stand up. “Okay. I’ll get it from the office.”
I get a text from Gerry on my way into the back:
Mom’s out of surgery. Doctor says
there’s a problem.