Chapter Twenty
Logan
Dawn was different as soon as we woke up the next morning. More distant. It was like the negative version of a fairy-tale: all night she’d been my warm, loving princess, and then with the first rays of the morning sun she turned into—well, not a pumpkin. More like a stranger. Or someone who wanted to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t want to be around me. She didn’t leave, but I found her in the kitchen, staring out at the lake like she wished she were miles away.
“You’re a quitter,” I told her. It wasn’t what I wanted to say—really, I wanted to be rolling around on the floor, crying and begging and making a damn fool of myself—but I didn’t feel like I was lying. “You’re giving up on us, just like that?”
She shook her head, but not like she was disagreeing. More like she was refusing to hear the words. “It’s not so simple. Not for me.”
“So let me fix it!”
“How?” She asked it like she truly wanted me to be able to answer and then smiled sadly when I couldn’t. “I don’t want us to go bad. Does that make sense? I want—I want you to be my pure, perfect summer boyfriend.”
“And what if I can’t go back to hockey?” I felt like I was inviting bad luck just by asking, but this was too important for me to leave anything unsaid. “If it turns out I actually am a washout? You’d be happy then?”
“Do you see how it goes?” she asked quietly. “Do you understand how it all goes bad from here, no matter what happens with your knee? If you can play, then I get swallowed up by hockey again. And if you can’t play? Then what does it do to us? If you think I’m walking around being all happy about the worst thing that ever happened to you?” She pushed herself away from the counter she’d been leaning on. “No. It’s better to end it cleanly.”
There wasn’t much more to say after that. It’s not like I could refuse to be broken up with. At least she didn’t say the actual words. But when we got packed up and walked down to the Jeep and she kissed me good-bye, I could tell that for her, at least, it was good-bye for good.
It was a long drive back to Montreal and I thought about Dawn pretty much the whole way.
For about fifty kilometers on the far side of Toronto I was furious at her. Like, mad enough that I was thinking about pulling over, calling her up, and yelling at her. She couldn’t dump me because I played hockey; I was dumping her because she played mind games.
But I got over that somewhere around Port Hope. I still didn’t understand her problem, but I knew she wasn’t playing games. Whatever she was feeling, she was really feeling it.
So then I spent some time thinking about giving up hockey. If I was going to do it, I’d need to do it fast—the insurance guys were already aware of what was going on and they were definitely hoping they’d be getting some of their money back. If I quit now, if I said the pain was too much or I just couldn’t skate right or whatever, I’d get to keep the cash. But if I kept going, showed I was recovered, and then just decided that a girl was more important to me than my sport? They’d want their money back and I couldn’t blame them. So I’d have no hockey and no money. But I’d have Dawn.
It might be a sign of how truly far gone I was about her that I honestly thought about it. Obviously my brain was screaming at me the whole time—I’d known Dawn for a month, and, sure, it had been great, but no one in his right mind could sacrifice everything he’d ever wanted, everything he’d worked for, in order to please a girl who—well, a girl who didn’t actually seem all that interested in being with him.
And that was what it came down to, finally. I was thinking about giving up everything, and Dawn didn’t care enough to even consider giving up—whatever the hell it was she thought she was going to lose. Her independence or whatever. I could give up everything and she could turn around and dump me the next day.
No. If Dawn didn’t care enough to bend even a little, then I couldn’t twist myself up into a pretzel just to please her. So I went back to being angry, and I was still mad as I hit the traffic around Montreal.
And I was maybe the first person in human history to find himself calming down as I was stuck in traffic. There was something I wasn’t understanding. I needed to figure it out.
So instead of staying straight on the autoroute and heading downtown, I turned off into my parents’ neighborhood. There was obviously a way for a woman to be happy in a relationship with a hockey player—my mom had managed it for more than a quarter century. She’d have some insight, some advice. And if she couldn’t help me, I’d just have to keep looking until I found someone who could.
I wasn’t ready to give up. Not by a long shot.
…
Dawn
“You’ve been gloomy for two days in a row,” Mrs. McMann said on Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve gone for ice cream three times in those two days. That should be more than enough to cheer anyone up. We can make a fourth trip if you want, but at this point I’m beginning to think you may be ice cream resistant.”
I fought to keep my tone light as I said, “Or maybe the ice cream helped and I’d have been even grumpier without it. But sorry. I’ll try to cheer up.”
“Or else really let go,” she suggested, leaning back in her Adirondack chair and kicking her legs up onto the wooden footrest. “Absolutely wallow in it. Scream and rant and give me a bit of a show. That’d be fun, too. My daughter was always so practical about things—sometimes I think I missed out on the more dramatic parts of raising a girl.”
“I think I might be more comfortable with your daughter’s approach,” I told her and forced a smile onto my face. “So, cheerful time, right?”
Mrs. McMann wrinkled her nose. “Not with that expression, please. You look like a jack-o-lantern with a candle shoved up its butt.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly flattering. I let the smile fade and then flopped down onto the porch steps at Mrs. McMann’s feet. “Don’t you have a plan for today? A mad caper of some sort? We were going to hike up to the lake and find that clay deposit and see if we could make pots out of it. Is today the day for that?”
“No,” Mrs. McMann said. “My ankles are swollen. Today’s a day for staying close to home. We can pick our next book club entry, if you like. But I think I might prefer to have some girl talk.”
“You want us to talk about your hopes and dreams and the boys you have crushes on?”
“We can start with me, sure. And then it’ll be your turn.”
“Wait. Do you have a crush on a boy, Mrs. McMann? Or on a man or whatever? Because you said you’d go first, so you can’t trick me into a full confession if you haven’t got any dirt of your own to dish.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have my eye on anybody right now. But I could tell you about the love of my life, if you’re interested. Surely that would be enough to balance out whatever’s going on with your Montreal boy.”
I thought about trying to deny that my mood was because of Logan, but there was no point. I couldn’t fool her, and I couldn’t fool myself. “So was Mr. McMann the love of your life?”
“He was,” she said. There was a picture of the two of them on the mantle of the cottage, and based by the way they’d been smiling at each other when the photo was taken, I’d been confident this was going to be the answer to my question. “The only love of my life.”
“Like, the only—only? Ever?”
“It was a different time, of course. Young ladies didn’t have the freedom they do today. But I still managed to have some adventures—even some beaus. But nobody serious. Not until Jack came along and swept me off my feet.”
“I met him in Corrigan Falls,” Mrs. McMann said softly. “At the beach. I was here with my family, and he had a summer job as a waiter. My parents weren’t too impressed, I’m afraid. You’ve seen Dirty Dancing? It was something like that, although without the dancing. Or the dirty. But Jack was working class and my father was a professional and had aspirations of more. I was the oldest child, supposed to set an example for my younger sisters—when Jack and I eloped, my parents stopped speaking to me. No contact for almost fifteen years. They forbade my sisters from speaking to me, as well, but they didn’t enforce that rule very effectively.”
“What happened? After fifteen years, what changed?”
“Jack’s fourth restaurant opened to rave reviews. All their friends were clamoring for invitations. All of a sudden, I was useful.”
“Were you tempted to ignore them? Or at least make them work for it?”
She grinned. “Tempted, yes. If I hadn’t had children by then, I expect I would have. But I wanted my kids to know their grandparents.”
“Did you have your own job? Or just raising the kids?”
“Raising kids is a lot of work, you know. But I helped with the restaurants, too. I did the bookkeeping, and we made a lot of the big decisions together.”
“But when you talked about the fourth restaurant—it was Jack’s fourth restaurant. Not yours.”
“He was the one with the passion for food. We were partners in our lives, absolutely, but the restaurants were his thing.”
“And your thing was the kids? That’s all? What about after they grew up?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “These questions feel like they might be a bit about you, rather than about me. Please don’t tell me Montreal Boy is pushing you to have kids…?”
“God, no! He’s just—” It sounded so stupid. “He might be playing hockey again. And I don’t want that. I mean, I want him to play—I want him to be happy. But I don’t want to be a hockey player’s girlfriend. I want my own thing. But the problem is that I have no idea what that thing is. So I’m really just walking around whining about not wanting to sacrifice myself to his dream, but it’s kind of pathetic because I don’t even have a dream of my own, so what exactly would I be sacrificing? Then if I do find something I want to do, like something I really, really care about but I’ve already set up a pattern of being the supportive hockey girlfriend, would I feel like I couldn’t make the change without letting Logan down. Or—” And as the idea came to me, everything crystalized. All the stuff I’d been having trouble figuring out, having trouble putting into words, was suddenly obvious.
“Or what if I stopped looking?” I said. “What if I just got content and lazy and didn’t even bother trying to find my own thing? Because being with Logan? Being with Logan was great. I’m crazy about him, and he’s got money, which makes everything easier and way more fun, and his parents are great and he even lives in the right city, so no problems there—it’s all so perfect, so why would I bother trying for anything else? Why would I try to find my own life when it would be so easy to slide into his?”
“Would it be so bad if you shared his life?” Mrs. McMann asked carefully.
“Yes! It would be! I want—just because I don’t know the details of what I want doesn’t mean I don’t have a general picture! I want to struggle, to fight, to conquer challenges—I want to be awesome! If I slid into his life I’d be fine. I’d be good. But I’d never be great. I’d never know what I was capable of, myself.” I frowned, then added, “And that’s the best case scenario. That’s the case where we actually stayed together. But it’s not like that would be a sure thing—we were still a new couple, and chances were good we weren’t going to stay together forever. I mean, it felt like we would—like we could, at least—but most people feel that way early in a relationship, right? So it could have been totally wrong. And that would have been even worse. I’d have moulded my whole life around him and then he’d dump my ass and I’d be left there with nothing. Right?”
“I’m not sure how much of this is about hockey,” Mrs. McMann said, still sounding cautious. “It sounds kind of like you’re not just afraid of being with a hockey player but with anyone you really care about. Because wouldn’t anyone you love leave a hole in your life if they left?”
“But I’d still have something. I’d still have my career in archaeology, or botany, or whatever the hell it is I end up caring about. I’d have a balance.” Yeah, this was what I’d been getting at. “If I’d stayed with Logan, I’d have turned into an accessory. I would have let that happen. And then I’d either live my whole life like that, shallow and empty, or we’d break up and I’d realize I’m nothing without him. Just a shell.”
“Or he might die,” Mrs. McMann said. “You might spend sixty-three wonderful years together, raise children and watch them raise their children, build a business, build a life, become so completely entwined that you can’t even remember which opinions are yours and which are his, and then he might die and leave you behind. And do you know what you’d do then?”
I stared at her. No, I couldn’t imagine what I’d do then.
She smiled. “You’d carry on. You’d think about giving up, probably. But you wouldn’t do it. You’d keep going, and when your kids started talking about how it’s maybe time to sell the family cottage, the cottage in the town where you and your husband met, you’d go along with them and tell them you wanted one last summer in the place before it was gone. And then you’d spend a summer there and you’d make a new friend—you’d have to pay her to be your friend, which is a little sad, but you’d do it anyway—and you’d have some adventures and some fun and you’d realize that your life isn’t over. You’d decide that you weren’t going to sell the cottage after all, and you’d just hire a new friend every summer, or if you were lucky you’d manage to convince your old friend to come back for a second year, or you’d do whatever else it took to make things work, make it so you and your family are okay. And you wouldn’t be an empty shell, even after sixty-three years.” Another smile and then she jerked her head toward the house. “Go make me a martini. And make one for yourself while you’re at it. Talks like this go better with gin.”
I stood up obediently. Numbly. Mrs. McMann wasn’t an empty shell—she was the furthest thing from one. My mom, on the other hand? Independent, sure, since she couldn’t count on my dad for much. But fulfilled? Happy? No.
I filled the martini shaker with ice and then poured in the gin and the vermouth in just the proportions Mrs. McMann liked, but doubled. I wasn’t a big drinker and wasn’t crazy about martinis, but my head was spinning, and she was right—this was a conversation that called for gin.
By the time I put the glasses on the silver tray, found the salted mixed nuts Mrs. McMann insisted on, and made it through the front door, I was feeling—not calmer. Not by a long shot. But I was feeling as if there was maybe, just maybe, a glimmer of hope to it all. I didn’t want to get too excited, didn’t want to build up and then fall. But if there was a way I could have Logan without losing myself?
It was absolutely something I wanted to talk about. A lot.