As she sinks into the sofa, she’s remembering the stunned expression on Jerald’s face when he saw the wounded look on hers. The speed with which his expression turned to a smirk, and then a dismissive snarl. Her next words had come tumbling out so fast, she still can’t remember all of them. But they weren’t furious. Not yet. They were specific.
It was a speech she’d rehearsed ever since Rachel had suggested she might be hiding her light under a bushel to avoid causing a fire in her relationship. She explained to Jerald the time it had taken, the effort she’d put in, the rejection letters she’d received over the years and how much they’d hurt. And the whole time, Jerald’s snarl just got more severe, as if she had no right to be boring him with any of these details and oh my God why was she still talking?
And, of course, she knew it wasn’t about the books. Their relationship was a hot mess, had been for months now, and now that fact was bubbling to the surface like magma, ready to melt everything in its path. In the beginning, he’d said all the things he thought he needed to say to land the deal; then, as soon as they decided to go exclusive, he merged with her sofa. It’s where he spent most of his time whenever he came over, and the steady stream of criticism he gave her seemed designed to derail any decision she might make that would require him to get up off it.
Maybe they could have recovered, sought higher ground. But what Jerald said next was even worse than his opening line. “That’s fine and all, babe, but I honestly don’t think you’d need the books if you felt better about your body.”
She spoke her words as she thought them. For her, that was rare. “Did you just say I only wrote my novels because I’m fat?”
“I didn’t say you were fat. You said you were fat. I said you don’t feel good about your body, and when you don’t feel good about your body you have to do all these other things to feel better about yourself. Just be you, is what I’m saying.”
“I am being me. The books are me. All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer.”
“Yeah, well all my life I’ve wanted to date a supermodel but . . .” He realized his mistake too late and went quiet and still, as if she might not have realized it was a mistake.
“But you’re just dating me? Who’s fat, but not fat, apparently. I just feel bad about my body. I’m sorry. What are we even talking about right now?”
“Stop yelling.”
She’d barely raised her voice, but the next thing she heard herself say was, “I’m sorry, Jerald, but I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“I just . . . wish it was something else, OK? I just wish you’d found something else to do other than those books. They’re weird and they’re hard to explain to people and I mean, I know you’re not crazy about working at Dr. Keables’s office, but you’re good at other things, Zoey. You are. You can be good at other things.”
Of course, she recognized the phrasing, but it was his tone that gave him away. He sounded like he was continuing a conversation they’d been having for months instead of just a few tense, awful minutes. And that was it—he had been having the conversation for months, just not with her. He’d been having it with himself, and along the way it had taken the form of a one-star review.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, “that was you.”
“What?”
“Bored Reader. You’re Bored Reader!”
Anyone who’d never used the moniker Bored Reader on the internet before would have reared back in shock or simply shaken his head in confusion. Instead, Jerald went really still and tried not to chew his lower lip.
“‘Hopefully this writer can be good at other things because it’s not writing stuff’ . . . That was you. You wrote that review.”
Jerald’s sneer had been replaced by a deer-in-the-headlights-of-an-eighteen-wheeler look. This should have satisfied her on some level, but it didn’t. Instead, her stomach felt like it was coated in ice. Her face, on the other hand, felt like it was made of melting wax that was about to smack to the table in front of her, exposing the visage of a rageful she-demon.
“You son of a bitch!”
Her voice went off like a gunshot in the sparsely crowded food court, and she saw the reactions to it as if through fogged glass. A few tables away, a mother let out a small offended yelp and tapped the table in front of the child sitting across from her, as if to remind Zoey there were young, impressionable minds present. A man in a baseball cap and a dark waffle-print coat who’d been walking slowly past their table slowed his steps even further and turned. Clearly he thought a fight was about to break out and didn’t want to miss the fireworks. The dude was right, whoever he was.
Her volume rocked Jerald back in his chair, and he ended up with palms flat on the table on either side of his food tray, as if he was afraid the sheer force of her anger would send his chair flying out from under him. Then, just like that, he was gone.
And, scene, as Rachel likes to say.
Only it wasn’t the whole scene.
The whole scene included those moments she’d sat alone afterward, enduring the stares of other food court visitors, as the adrenaline rush of anger gave way to the crippling, bone-deep ache of regret, knowing she’d have to get an Uber home because he’d probably left her there. She hadn’t just said too much, gone too far. She’d lost something—the delusion that inside she was all sunshine and roses while her girlfriends were the tough, hard-edged bitches. She’d lost a certain sense of superiority to any woman who’d ever had to resort to raising her voice to be heard, to be seen.
And now, alone on her sofa, awaiting the return of her no-longer-quite-so-smelly cat, she wonders if there’s ever going to be a time in her life when she doesn’t feel like a negative emotion is an indulgence she can’t afford, a passport to places inside herself she’d rather not visit.
In the meantime, where the hell is Boris?
When it comes to her cat’s movements, Zoey has an internal clock, complete with little alarms that go off when the cat does something off schedule. Even amid her painful reliving of her breakup, one of those bells is ringing now. He should have come out by now. She gets to her feet, counts off her steps down the hallway, an old trick she’d learned to center herself. It almost works. Every third step or so she’s back in that food court, suffering through the gallery of Jerald’s dismissive facial expressions.
Cold air hits her when she reaches her second bedroom, the one with the elliptical machine she never uses and the work space she managed to assemble by clearing a space out of all the old boxes full of paperbacks she keeps telling herself she’ll donate someday but can’t bring herself to part with. The little sliding door to the tiny patio where Boris’s litter box has been sitting for two days is still open, but there’s no sign of the cat anywhere near it. And only now does it occur to her that leaving the sliding door open like this isn’t exactly safe. The patio’s got a high stone wall around it, over six feet high, but still, it’s not too high for a determined burglar to scale. The last two nights she was home before dark, but tonight’s impromptu trip to the food court kept her out late for the first time since Boris’s cheesy feast, and she hadn’t pulled the patio door shut for fear Boris would need to use the bathroom while she was gone. Funny how one visceral fear—the fear of cat doo-doo in your bedroom—can override another, the fear of a robber sneaking into your house.