Chapter Eighteen
Kelli
The next morning, I was awoken by Renee standing over me holding a plain vanilla latte. I glared at it suspiciously as I took it from her hand, as if expecting her to have secretly poisoned it while I slept.
“What’s in this?” I asked, peering down into it as though looking for bugs. “What did you put in it?”
“I didn’t put anything in it,” said Renee. She didn’t even sound like her usual chipper self; she sounded almost, well, normal. “I just thought you might like to enjoy a normal, unhealthy drink for once.”
Now I knew there was something up. “Is this your way of trying to say you’re sorry?”
The miserable look on Renee’s face confirmed my suspicions instantly. “I’m not sorry for what I said,” she explained as she pulled up a chair and sat down beside me. “But I realize that sometimes I can come across as—”
“Abrasive and controlling?”
“Yeah, I was getting to that. And I realized I can’t force you to do things you don’t want to do or to hear things you don’t want to hear. This has been a problem between us ever since we were little, even though you were the older one and should have been looking after me instead of the other way around. It’s because I don’t ever want to see you get hurt like that again.”
That made sense, though it was weird to hear her bring it up—weird even to see her being halfway serious. She had a habit of pretending like terrible things weren’t happening, even when they plainly were. “I didn’t know you still thought about that,” I said quietly.
“Always,” said Renee with a look of profound sadness. “Anyway, finish your drink. Are you coming with me to yoga?”
I took a sip of my vanilla latte and enjoyed it so much I took several more. “Not on a Saturday,” I replied. “It’s my day off, I’ve been going all week, and I need a break. I’ll go on Monday.”
“Sad,” said Renee, throwing on a tight-fitting pink shirt. I had a strange feeling she had brought me the latte in part because she was hoping it might motivate me to follow her to class. “You sure you don’t want to come?”
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna stay here and make some breakfast. It’s been so long since I’ve watched anything, I’ve been so busy.”
“You ought to check out Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. It’s about an Australian woman in the ‘20s who solves crimes and wears the most glamorous clothes. She’s in love with a dashing police inspector who glowers and has cheekbones.”
“You had me at cheekbones,” I replied.
Renee left. I climbed out of bed and pulled what was left of the bacon, the tube of sausage, and the package of hash brown patties out of the fridge. Then, as the skillet was warming, I booted up my computer and put on James Blunt’s first album, the one with “You’re Beautiful” on it, the one everyone went crazy for, for about a year, before we all collectively decided we hated that song.
I let that play for a few minutes while I logged into Netflix and searched for the show Renee had been telling me about. It looked ridiculous in the best way: there was a woman with an angular face, an upturned nose, and an elegant dark bob wearing the sort of clothes I had dreamed about running away to Paris and getting married in. The episode descriptions sounded fairly lurid: jewel thefts, murder at a carnival, murder on a train, murder in a Turkish bath. I couldn’t help but shake my head and smile as I clicked “play” on the first episode. Leave it to my sister to find the perfect show for me.
I was midway through the opening credits (which were fantastic) when my phone buzzed. Swearing under my breath, I ran over to the table and picked it up. Someone was calling from a number I didn’t recognize.
I felt a brief moment of panic as I stared at the screen. Despite my attempts to be even-handed in my portrayal of the SEALs, I had been getting a steady stream of death threats ever since the article went to press. Some enterprising young fool had found my personal number and put it on Twitter, and the Bugle had been inundated with hate mail. Few of the senders were SEALs or veterans; they were just old people who watched a lot of Fox News and thought I was part of the liberal “resistance” destroying the country.
With a quick prayer for protection, I pressed the answer button. “Hello?”
“Hello? Hey, is this Kelli?” To my immense relief, it was Zack.
“Zack! Hey.” I sank down into a chair, feeling my whole body loosen. “How did you get my number? Where are you calling from?”
“Somebody posted it on Twitter,” said Zack. “And I’m calling from Manhattan. I actually just flew back in yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah? Is your deployment over?”
“Finally over, although those last ten months or so were hell. I think they make it that way on purpose.”
It’s fair to say this wasn’t how I had expected the morning to go. I had almost given up hope that we were ever going to talk again, and now here he was on the other end of the phone crashing my Netflix party. I wanted to tell him how good it was to hear his voice, but I didn’t want him to think I was a sap. Get hold of yourself, I told myself; he’s only calling you because he knows you’re in town. Never mind that he had called me almost as soon as he landed…
“Anyway,” he said, “I was just calling to see if you wanted to get dinner tomorrow night while I’m still in town. I have a feeling my parents are going to want to see me before too long, so I figured we’d better do it soon—that is, if you want to.”
“What? Yes, I would actually love that. Where would you like to go?”
I could almost hear him tousling his hair on the other end of the line; after being separated from me by an ocean for ten months, we were that close. “I’ll let you pick,” he said. “You know this area better than I do, and honestly pretty much anywhere we go is going to taste amazing after the meals I’ve been eating for the last year. That sound good?”
“Yeah!” I knew I sounded too eager, but at the moment I couldn’t bring myself to care. “That sounds great. Text me when you’re on your way? I’ll text you my address.”
Knowing I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my murder show, I closed Netflix and put the unused food back into a set of containers in the refrigerator. After the invitation I had just gotten, it somehow didn’t seem right to sit here alone eating the same foods I ate every morning. I wanted to celebrate. Throwing on a blue sequined shirt with delicate lacing and a pair of skinny jeans made of dark denim, I grabbed my computer and left the apartment.
I ate a breakfast of bagels and lox at a locally owned shop near Hell’s Kitchen, then sat in the window for about half an hour watching the pedestrians passing in the late-morning sunlight. I ran through our conversation in my head so many times that by the time I paid my bill and left, I had practically memorized it. I wondered if Zack noticed how awkward I had sounded, if he paid as much attention to the peculiarities of my speech as I did, or if he even cared.
When Renee finally got out of class, I was waiting for her in the coffee shop. I managed to flag her down before she could reach the front counter and Max.
“Hey, how’d your class go?” I asked her. I felt unusually effervescent, and I was sure it showed on my face.
“It actually went mostly well,” said Renee. “Maureen O’Connor only threw up once at the very end of class, so it wasn’t as big of a disruption as—you don’t really care, do you?”
I shook my head, my eyes twinkling. “What have you got going on this afternoon? Whatever your plans are, cancel them. We’re going out for lunch, and then we’re going to go get our hair done.”
***
As we sat in a circular booth at Bareburger on 85th Street an hour later, I told Renee about my surprise phone call from Zack and his invitation to eat out before he headed home to Texas. At first she looked thrilled, but the more we talked about it, the more she reverted to her usual stance of being protective and cautious.
“This sounds great and all,” she said, taking a sip of strawberry lemonade, “and I couldn’t be happier for you.”
I could sense there was a “but” coming. “Go on,” I said, my brow furrowed in suspicion.
“But I hope you won’t assume this is going to lead to anything long-term. It sounds like maybe he was just in the area and wanted to hook up for the night. He might not be in the Navy anymore, but he’s still a Navy man at heart.”
“Yes, but did you hear the part where he called me first thing when he flew in?” I asked. “I feel like you’re overlooking a very important part of all this.”
“Maybe,” she said. “And anyway, it’s cool that he invited you out and it’s exciting and you should be excited. But I don’t want you to be disappointed if you don’t hear from him again after tomorrow night.”
“You’re doing it again,” I said, half-amused and half-exasperated. “The thing, the thing that you do!”
“What thing?” asked Renee.
“The thing that you apologized for doing this morning, where you want to protect me from the world instead of letting me live my life and make mistakes like a grown woman.”
Renee shrugged in defeat. She knew better than to argue with her own words, especially when they had been spoken not three hours before.
“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you’ll go out and have a good time tomorrow. You’ve earned it.”