Chapter Thirty-Six
Kelli
For about a week after Zack broke up with me I could barely bring myself to get out of bed in the morning. If it wasn’t for my job and my sister’s persistence, I might not have. I kept thinking of all the things I could have done differently to save the relationship, but it all went back to the same thing: I should never have asked him about his book or volunteered to help him.
“You’re looking at this the wrong way,” said Renee as we sat in the kitchen together eating cereal one morning a few days after the breakup.
“How? Tell me what I’m not seeing here.” My tone was challenging, but I sincerely wanted to know.
“You’ve gotten this idea that if only you hadn’t said this one thing, he would still love you and your relationship would be perfect.”
“Maybe that’s because he did love me and our relationship was perfect.”
Renee ignored the edge in my voice. “If he’d break up with you over one thing, then the solution is not to go back in time and not say that one thing. If it wasn’t this, it would’ve been something else. He gave you no time to explain, no time to correct yourself, no time to talk it out. Anyone who treats you like that would have eventually blown up over something. Frankly, I think you deserve better.”
It was gratifying to hear her say this, but she hadn’t been in our relationship, hadn’t seen the way he looked at me sometimes when we were in the car together, hadn’t heard the sincerity in his voice when he whispered the things he loved about me. If I hadn’t been so convinced of his love, the betrayal wouldn’t have hurt this much.
In my head, I knew what Renee was saying was probably true, but I couldn’t convince my heart of that. I still revered and respected Zack like no other man, and if he didn’t think I was worth dating, then there must have been something wrong with me. I began spending hours in the bathtub. I would lay there until the water had all gone cold, and my skin was a bundle of wrinkles. I bought a couple bottles of scented lotion from Bath & Body Works and rubbed them all over myself. I used so much in one day that I emptied an entire bottle.
When I went into work, I barely paid attention to anyone. I’d spend a few hours shuffling papers and occasionally typing, trying to look busy. No one asked how I was doing, and I began to wonder if they hated me as much as Zack did. Maybe they all wanted me to go somewhere else where I wouldn’t ever bother them, but they were too polite to say anything. Maybe it had been like this my whole life and up until now I had been too oblivious or self-deluding to notice. I began to hate the fake smiles and to wonder what they were hiding.
So it was all the more shocking on Monday morning when I came into work and Evan informed me that he was giving me the new position of executive editor.
“Pardon?” I said with a blank stare. “I didn’t even know we had an executive editor position.”
“We didn’t,” said Evan. “But we do now.”
He said it so simply, as if he regularly made up new positions and handed them out to undeserving employees. I sank down into my chair wondering if I had heard him correctly. Dennis smirked and applauded.
I sat for a long time with my hands folded over my mouth trying to figure out how this had happened. It was like one of those dumb ‘90s movies where some regular schmoe becomes president of the United States. I didn’t feel remotely qualified to be the executive editor, whatever that was, and I couldn’t understand why Evan had thought I was.
Once the meeting was over, I questioned him about it.
“Hey Pope,” he said as I approached his desk. He was scrolling through CNN on his laptop. “Did you hear about the mass shooting at the maritime museum in Brighton Beach? The gunman killed three people before being impaled by a harpoon.”
“Yeah, hey, I just had a couple questions.” I sat down in the hard, wooden chair across from him and folded my hands in front of me. “Why are you giving me this position?”
“I’ll be level with you,” said Evan, leaning forward with the air of a spy preparing to divulge state secrets in a public restaurant. “I think you’ve proven yourself more than up to the challenge of editing our digital publications.”
“I thought we had Bryan for that.”
Evan winced, as if it had just become painfully clear to him that I had no idea what an editor did. “Bryan’s a copy-editor. He fact-checks the work of our reporters and makes edits for spelling and grammar. You’ll be a content editor, which means you determine what stories are printed and where. You’re choosing the tone and layout of the website. It’s a high responsibility, not one I would entrust to just anyone.”
“Great. Why?”
Evan rubbed his forehead wearily with his wrist. “Let’s just say that last week I had some words with a couple of very persuasive fellows who recommended you.”
Something in the tone of this last remark struck me as decidedly eerie. “Very persuasive fellows? You mean, like, the mafia?”
Evan shrugged, as if he regularly dispensed jobs under duress. “They could’ve worked for the mafia. Look, the important thing is that now you’ve gotten what you wanted. You have a position of actual importance within this organization, and I don’t have to worry about getting my fingers broken.”
“Fingers broken?” I half-rose in my seat, goggling at him. “Did they threaten you?”
“It doesn’t matter now!” said Evan, looking harassed. “I’m sorry I capitulated, but they were going to bring very serious action against our website unless I took you off the news beat and elevated you to a senior position. I promised them we wouldn’t be doing any more investigative reports on the military, so we won’t have to worry about this happening.” Reaching behind him, he picked up a rod of metal pipe and threw it across the desk. It was bent in the middle, like it had been heated and then twisted by powerful hands.
It was the most bizarre thing. Why would a couple of shady guys threaten Evan with physical violence unless he threatened to give me a promotion? Did I even have any powerful friends? For that matter, did I have any friends?
“Evan, these guys you met with,” I asked him, “what did they look like?”
Evan had to think it over for a minute. “They were both tall, jacked; one of them had stubble and the other was clean-shaven; they were wearing Polo shirts—I wasn’t paying much attention, I was too distracted by the fact that they could break me.”
Now it felt like we were getting somewhere. A new sense of urgency crept into my voice as the truth became clear to me. “What about their accents? Did they have one?”
“The one didn’t speak much, but the other one sounded vaguely Southern—Texan, in fact! He was Texan.”
Without another word, I shot up out of my chair and ran to call Zack. If this was what I suspected it was, I knew he would answer—and he did, on the third ring.
“Hey, what’s up?”
It was like the last two weeks hadn’t happened—like he hadn’t blown up and put me on a plane back to New York in the middle of our late-summer Texas vacation.
“Hey…” I said slowly. “Did you confront my boss and threaten to break his fingers unless he made me an editor?”
“Did he?” Even from the other end of the line, I could almost hear him smirking.
“Did—did you bend a metal pipe, hoping it would scare him?”
This time Zack laughed, as if to confirm all my suspicions. “It was Carson that did that! Me, I couldn’t bend a toothpick. You should’ve seen the look on that man’s face when he did it. Damned near called you up and offered you the job on the spot!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was weird and unexpected and strangely touching. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I’ve been doin’ some thinking.” It was obvious he had spent most of the last couple weeks at home, as his accent had reached Peak Texan. “I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about us and about how I treated you when we were home, and I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that; I should’ve told you what was bothering me, talked it through, and then we could’ve gone back to the house and had orange juice and baked apples. I just made things a hundred times worse, and I’m sorry, and I’ll understand if you don’t ever want to go out with me again.”
“Zack—”
“I just—baby, I don’t know what came over me out there on the trail that morning. I knew as soon as you left I should’ve gone running after you, but I kept on like the stubborn fool I am and just about ruined the best thing I ever had. So, just to make it up to you, I want to take you out tomorrow night.”
“Zack, you already made it up to me.” I was so surprised and moved I could hardly speak. “You’ve more than made it up to me, but yes, I would love to go.”
“Really?” It was obvious from the tone in his voice that he hadn’t expected me to say yes.
“I’d love to have dinner with you. And, just to show you there are no hard feelings, I won’t force you to eat fancy French cuisine this time.”
“Baby, that’s all I ask.”
Zack was still laughing when he hung up the phone. I hadn’t known it was possible to miss someone’s laugh that much.