Chapter 20: Nicknames (Part 1).
Thursday
Jenny’s back for an early lunch the next day, the baby girl only this time since Andrew is at school (he’s nine already, I remind myself) and the bouncy boy from yesterday, Jake, is at pre-school. Since I’ve never officially met Andrew, Jenny shows me pictures on her phone, scrolling through with her thumb as she gives a running commentary, skipping over the pictures that also feature her husband, Mason.
She puts her phone away when I get up to help a customer, and when I come back and sit down again, she asks, “Why did you come back to Ohio, Anika? And be honest with me.”
“I was honest. It’s like I told you — I’m helping out with the restaurant for a little while.”
“You hate the restaurant. And it’s the middle of the basketball season in Europe. I looked it up.”
I raise an eyebrow at that but decide not to comment on it. Instead, I sigh and admit, “Mom’s got cancer. Osteosarcoma. She’s having surgery on Monday to remove the tumor from her hip. And there’s a good chance everything will work out fine, but… Dad’s a total wreck — you know how he is with her.”
I look away as soon as I finish the sentence about my dad because I probably shouldn’t have said it. My father is more in love with his wife than any man I’ve ever known, and I used to tell Jenny that I treated her the way that I did because I’d learned from the best.
Jenny seems to catch the look on my face when I mention my father, because she leans back, suddenly very interested in her infant daughter, who is sleeping peacefully inside her sling.
I clear my throat. “So I offered to come and help. Broke my contract to do it, but…” I shrug. “It’s family. I owe them. And… It was probably going to be my last season anyway.”
She glances up, brow furrowing. “Your last season?”
I nod.
“What are you going to do? You already have a plan?”
Of course she would ask me that. Because she always has a plan, and I never have a plan, and she knows it.
“I’m not sure yet,” I answer.
She picks up the fork, pushes the collards around on her plate. “That’s… that’s really big news. No more basketball. How are you feeling about that?”
Totally fucking lost, is what I want to say. But I don’t. “All good things come to an end,” is what I say instead, which is another fucking stupid thing to say to Jenny, of all people. I scramble for something else to say that will take the conversation in a different direction, hoping she doesn’t hear the same double-meaning in my words that I do. “What about you? Last time we talked, you were still doing the stay-at-home-mom thing. Is it… how’s that working out?”
“I really miss teaching,” she admits with a sigh, then points at the baby fast asleep on her chest. “I’m hoping I can go back to work again, at least part-time, once this one gets old enough for pre-school.”
“What’s her name?” I ask.
She blinks in surprise. “I didn’t tell you yesterday?”
“You probably did and I just don’t remember.”
“No. You would remember.” She gazes up at the ceiling, takes a deep breath, and her eyes are watering all of the sudden.
Geez. All I’d asked was the kid’s name.
“Her name is Annie.” Jenny meets my eyes again, staring me down like she’s waiting for a challenge.
“Okaaayyy,” I say, not really getting why she’s descended into weirdness. Since I remember how much she liked the musical, I say, “Like, uh, Little Orphan Annie, right?”
She’s still staring hard at me. “No. Not like Little Orphan Annie. More like… Ani.”
My eyes narrow. “Ani? Wait. Ani as in… are you saying…?”
“Yes. Ani. I named her for you.”
“That’s… that’s… pretty fucked up, Jen.”
She laughs, and the sound crackles in her throat like splintering glass. “I know.” She sniffs hard, wipes both eyes. “I always thought you and I would start a family one day. Annie’s the closest I’ll ever be able to come.”
There’s a long, breath-holding silence between us, broken only when the baby girl stirs and whimpers like she knows she’s being talked about.
“Jesus, Jenny. Does Mason know? That you named your daughter — his daughter — after your ex-wife?”
She rocks the daughter who will grow up to look like her father but who has my name. “No. No one knows except for me. And now you.”
Shit. I wipe a hand down my face. “Jen…”
“I’m sorry,” she says hastily. “You’re right, it’s crazy. And I shouldn’t have told you. Plus we agreed not to talk about the past. So let’s get back to talking about the present. Like figuring out what you’re going to do when you stop playing basketball. Have you thought about coaching?”
My head’s still spinning over her revelation, because for someone who’s supposedly straight now, she just pulled some really classic fucking lesbian drama. But I grab onto Jenny’s change of subject like I’ve fallen overboard and her question is a rope.
“Yes. I’ve thought about it. But… I don’t know. Coaching is Alex’s thing. Ophelia’s. I’m not really sure that it’s mine. If I had to coach players as obnoxious as I was in high school and college, I’d probably — ”
“Turn into Bobby Knight and get yourself fired,” she says, smirking.
“Yeah,” I agree, and I return her smirk, pleased that she remembers who Bobby Knight is. And there it is again — the simple ease of talking to someone who knows you better than anyone else. Maybe someone who knows you better than you even know yourself. “So I don’t know. I…”
But instead of finishing the statement, I turn my palms face-up on the table, indicating in a single gesture how utterly lost I’ve become. I know it’s a gesture Jenny will understand, because of the aforementioned fact that she still knows me better than anyone, even after nine years apart and five of those years not speaking.
She nods, and just like she understands my gesture, I recognize the change in her expression: Jenny’s put on her serious let’s-fix-it face.
“Well,” she starts, “how do you feel about Switzerland? Would you want to stay there? Is there anything holding you there? Or…” Her eyes flick down to her plate, then back up. “Is there anyone holding you there?”
My thoughts flash briefly to Amy, who will be headed back to Basel in a few more weeks, but a single date and two kisses hardly count as someone “holding” me in a foreign country.
“No,” I say. “There’s nothing holding me to Europe. No one, I mean.”
“Oh.” She seems relieved by the admission, and it makes me want to defend myself, to tell her I have dated in the nine years since our breakup, including a nearly two-year relationship with one of my teammates that only ended because she got a better offer to play ball in Australia.
But then I remember I don’t need to defend myself to Jenny. I haven’t needed to in a long time.
“Okay,” Jenny says, getting herself back on track with fresh determination ringing in her voice. “So you don’t need to stay in Europe. And you don’t want to coach…” She thinks for a moment, taps her chin pensively, which is part of the let’s-fix-it routine. “What about here? What about coming back to Ohio? Especially since your family’s here. And with your Mom sick — ”
I cut her off with a groan. “I’d rather be almost anywhere besides Ohio. You, of all people, know that. Fucking Antartica comes to mind.”
She covers her daughter’s tiny ears. “Try to control your mouth for at least a single lunch,” she says. “Or at least in front of Ani.”
I’m just about to make two pointed comments — one, that the words Ohio, fucking, and Antartica are all the same to an infant, and two, that I really don’t think she should be calling Annie “Ani,” but the door jingles behind me and I turn to greet the customer who just walked in.
And see that it’s Amy.
She glances over at me from the podium, smiles, lifts her hand in an easy wave. I smile back, grinning like big, doofus, puppy-petting George from Of Mice and Men again, and glance at my watch. Twelve-thirty already. Which means I’ve been chatting with Jenny for over an hour, and totally forgot that Amy said she’d be dropping by for lunch.
She walks in our direction as I rise from the table, stopping a few feet away from us. Looks from me to Jenny.
“Hey,” I say, and after one plane ride, one car ride, and a coffee date, we’re definitely not at a point of a hello kiss, but I reach for her automatically anyway, my hand landing on her forearm and giving it a squeeze before I think to second-guess myself.
“Hi,” she returns, but it’s a little cool. She glances at Jenny again. “Are you busy? I can come back later if you need me to.”
I follow Amy’s gaze and look over my shoulder. For a brief second, Jenny’s eyes meet mine, and there’s another one of those Jenny-looks that would slip by other people but which is obvious to me — it’s a silent and slightly territorial, Who’s this chick?
Don’t need to defend myself to Jenny.
“No, no, I’m not busy,” I tell Amy. “We were just… catching up. This is Jenny, by the way. Jenny, this is Amy.”
I take a half step back so that I’m not blocking Amy’s line of sight and watch as the two women size each other up. For a moment, something tense buzzes in the air between them, and I’m reminded of Amy’s story from last night about her first meeting with Quinn in the bathroom of the frat party. But the tension only lasts a second before Amy leans forward and extends her hand across the table with a practiced, professional politeness.
Jenny meets her halfway, and they shake.
“Nice to meet you, Amy,” Jenny says.
“And you.” Amy straightens, looks up at me. “So how do you two know each other?”
Jenny looks like she’s about to answer, and I know exactly what she’ll say, so the words rush out of me quickly, beating my ex-wife to the punch. “We went to high school together.”
I can tell Jenny’s going to elaborate, even though I’m trying to tell her with my eyes and my psychic powers not to, but it’s little Annie who saves the day by waking up from her long nap and starting to fuss.
Amy watches Jenny soothe the infant, I watch Amy watching her, and holy shit, I realize all at once that the women are photo negatives of each other. They look like they’re exactly the same height, with exactly the same small frame, the same Tinkerbell-sized delicate hands. But whereas Jenny is blonde and rosy, long hair flowing down her back in a loose braid, Amy’s skin is paler, creamy instead of pink, and her shorter hair is a dark, rich brunette.
Despite the differences between them, there’s something about Amy and Jenny that echo each other, and it instantly makes me uncomfortable, like I’ve done something wrong and I’m gonna get caught any second.
I suspect Jenny feels it, too, because she looks up at me and says, “I think Annie’s hungry. And I’d probably better get going, anyway.”
Annie. Ani.
I nod and start helping Jenny gather her things, while Amy settles into the same sun-bleached table near the window that she sat in the day before. A few minutes later, after I’ve cleared Jenny’s table, I set a glass of water down in front of Amy.
“Have you already eaten?” she asks.
I look past her for a moment, through the plate glass window and into the parking lot, watching Jenny load the baby into the car seat in the back of her car.
I shrug, and instead of admitting that I kind of forgot she was coming and ate with Jenny, I say, “When you work at a restaurant, you end up eating on and off all day.”
If she picks up on the fact that I dodged the question, she doesn’t show any sign of it, because she just smiles and says, “I remember those days. I told you I waited tables all the way through college, right?”