Chapter 19: Fay
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
I should have known right then and there that something was wrong. I should have turned and left, just gone and hidden myself away until Neil was past whatever mood had him in its grip and come back another time.
If I had been smarter, if I had been more experienced maybe, that was exactly what I would have done. But when it came to men, experience was something I just didn’t have enough of. When Neil opened his front door and looked at me with a dead, cold expression in his eyes, I should have turned and gone straight back home. Instead, I stayed. I thought I could make things better. It was a rookie mistake, and it was one I would cringe over for a long time to come. It was like any stupid thing a person did. I would think on it and wonder why I hadn’t seen that things were going to go bad.
“Hey! You’ve come by to see me so many times at the diner, and I thought it might be nice if I came and did the same for you. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine. You can come in if you like.”
He didn’t exactly slam the door or anything, but he didn’t look excited to see me either. As I followed him inside, I searched my brain for what on earth I could have done to piss him off. It had only been two days since his visit to the diner, and that wasn’t a lot of time. But I also hadn’t seen him or heard from him, and from the way things had been going between us, that was strange. I mentally went through the sex we’d had at the diner, trying to figure out if I had done something wrong there, but from my perspective, everything had been pretty much perfect.
The only thing about it that had been off at all was that desperate look in his eyes, and there was no way that could have been my fault. Whatever was going on with him was about him, not me. I repeated that to myself over and over again as I followed him into his kitchen, where he silently pulled out two glasses and an already open bottle of wine.
“Isn’t it a little early?” I asked uncertainly, looking at the clock on his stove and seeing that it was only two o’clock in the afternoon.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Neil, what’s wrong? And please don’t say nothing because I can tell something’s bothering you. Did I do something? I don’t feel like I did, but if so, please just tell me, and we can talk about it. But you’re making me nervous, the way you’re acting.”
He looked at me as he took a sip of his wine. He looked at me with such a horrible expression that I felt compelled to take a pretty big sip of my own glass. I wasn’t much for day drinking, but something told me that this was the kind of conversation that was going to call for it. When I looked behind him and saw his suitcases packed, I knew I was right.
Even before I looked back into his eyes, there were tears springing up in them. I wanted to ask him again what was happening, but I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and I wasn’t too sure that it would have made any difference if I had. Whoever this man was standing in front of me, he wasn’t the Neil I had been spending my last month with. This man was cold and so closed off to me that we might as well have been total and complete strangers.
When he spoke, I could hear the same hard edge in his voice that I saw in his face, and the hopelessness that was starting to build up inside of me threatened to explode into full blown panic. The only thing I could think about was Courtney’s words. She had told me not to believe in those stupid love stories. She had told me not to put all of my eggs in one basket, and I had been so sure that Neil would be different this time that I had chosen to ignore her completely. I could only imagine what her face would have looked like if she had been sitting there with me, and the thought of it made me feel ashamed.
“Look, Fay, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to be brutally honest. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t tell me you don’t want to talk about it. Just tell me the truth, okay? Let’s just lay it all out on the table.”
“All right, then ask. Ask what you need to ask, Neil. I have a feeling you’re going to, whether I want you to or not.”
“Are you ever going to leave Ashville? Are you ever going to get out of this shithole?”
“It’s not, Neil,” I answered so quietly I wasn’t even sure he could hear me, “It’s not a shithole. It’s our home.”
“No, that’s bullshit, okay? It’s your home, but it’s not mine. I get that you want me to give up my whole fucking life and move here, but it isn’t going to happen.”
“But I never said that, Neil! I don’t understand why you’re acting this way. I never asked you to stay!”
“Sure, not yet, but you were going to, and we both know it. You didn’t want me to go when I was eighteen, and you don’t want me to now.”
“That is so, completely unfair.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I’m going. My bags are packed, and I already called to have my plane fueled up. I’m out the door, and I need to know if you have any intention of leaving here.”
“Just like that? No time for me to think? No time for a discussion? You’re just gone? It’s just done?”
“That’s it, Fay. That’s the way it has to be for me.”
If he had slapped me in the face, he couldn’t have hurt me more than he did with those words. I loved him. It was something I had suspected before this awful meeting, but now that he was telling me that he was leaving, I knew it without a shadow of a doubt. I loved him, and for the second time, he was leaving me.
All of a sudden, I was sure I was going to have a complete meltdown if I didn’t get out of his house. I stood up abruptly, so quickly that I knocked my glass of wine onto the floor where it shattered into tiny pieces. Under any other circumstances, I would have stopped to clean it up, but at that moment, I couldn’t stop. It was like I was being chased by something terrible, and the worst part of it was that the something chasing me was inside of me. So instead of cleaning it up, I ran out his front door and just kept running. Some silly, naive part of me kept expecting him to chase me, and it was something I held onto up until I got to the diner.
When I walked inside and saw Courtney staring at me, I knew it was all over. I collapsed into a heap on the floor. She hurried towards me, scooping me up as best she could and cradling me in her arms. Dimly, I could hear the man from the nature magazine somewhere behind her, asking what was wrong, and if there wasn’t something he could do.
Of course, he would be here to witness my fall. Why wouldn’t he be? It was like the last nail in my coffin, the last bit of proof of Courtney having been right this entire time. Maybe if I hadn’t been such an idiot, hadn’t been so sure that it would be Neil and nobody else, I wouldn’t feel so much like I was going to die. I would have done what Courtney told me to and learned that there were all kinds of decent guys out there, and it wouldn’t feel like Neil’s leaving was the end of my chance at love. There were plenty of maybes, but none of them changed the fact that my heart was breaking. Instead of subsiding, my sobbing only grew worse, and Courtney pulled me in tighter, doing her best to comfort the comfortless.
“What is it, Fay?” she whispered fiercely into my ear, rocking me like I was a distraught child and not a twenty-six-year-old woman. “What’s the matter? What happened?”
“You were right!” I sobbed, feeling like it would kill me to say it out loud. “You were right the whole time!”
“Right about what? I don’t understand, lady. Right about what? What’s going on?”
“Right about Neil. He’s leaving. He’s getting on his stupid private plane, and he’s leaving. For all I know, he’s gone right now. He’s leaving, and he’s not coming back. He’s not ever coming back.”
The two of us sat there that way for a long time, Courtney only getting us both up to take me out onto the porch and call somebody to come and work for the both of us. She snagged a bottle of liquor, and the two of us passed it back and forth, getting drunk and feeling like shit. When we heard the incredibly loud sound of a plane taking off and flying away, we didn’t say a word.