A Girl Like You

  Circuit Breaker Books llc

  Portland, OR

  www.circuitbreakerbooks.com

  © 2020 by Cari Scribner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Clothespin illustraion by nikolam/stock.adobe.com

  Book design by Vinnie Kinsella

  ISBN: 978-1-953639-00-4

  eISBN: 978-1-953639-01-1

  LCCN: 2020921848

  For My Sydney

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

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  20

  21

  22

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  41

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  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

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  53

  54

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  60

  61

  62

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  80

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  Share Your Opinion

  About the Author

  1

  “Lucky Strike” had a photo of a bowling alley in his dating profile. I hadn’t been bowling for years, not since the kids were little, but I’d heard it was good exercise. After exchanging several messages making small talk, we agreed to meet at High Roller Lanes.

  Strike, aka Louie, was waiting outside the doors, a zippered vinyl bag in each hand, when I pulled in. He was wearing a brown-and-gold striped bowling shirt and yelling my name, as if I hadn’t already seen him.

  “Jessica! Yo, Jess!”

  Well, at least he’s friendly. And it would be nice to play with a pro, not with the kids who threw gutter balls, then cried.

  “Jessica?” He was still yelling, and for a moment I worried he was hard of hearing and I would have to shout back.

  “Yup, that’s me. I heard you calling when I was parking, Louie.”

  “Wanted to make sure you saw me.”

  It would be hard to miss him. He had packed at least fifty more pounds on the already large frame he’d shown in his photos and in real life he had a greased-back, Elvis-style pompadour. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and sailed through, leaving me to hold the door for myself before it shut in my face.

  OK. Maybe just overly eager to get onto the lanes.

  “It’s $20 for two games, so you pay for one and I’ll get the other,” Louie said generously.

  “What about renting shoes?”

  “Got my own right here.” He held up the smaller bag. “And my lucky ball.”

  I suppressed a laugh.

  I traded my sneaks for scuffed bowling shoes and followed Louie, who was nearly skipping, to our lane.

  “OK, well, let me just get warmed up.”

  He cracked his knuckles and did some side bends at the waist. Then as I watched in amazement, he bent over and touched his toes to stretch the back of his legs and rotated his neck, which also cracked.

  “How’s that going for you?” I asked.

  “One second,” Louie said, massaging his own shoulders, then briefly running in place. “OK, ready. I’ll go first.”

  I sat down in the orange booth, a front row seat, thinking maybe I’d learn something from him. “Go for it.”

  He picked up his purple bowling ball that looked so shiny I wondered if he’d polished it.

  And then he began to shuffle. Literally shuffle, from where I was sitting all the way out to the lane, already swinging his ball with his right arm.

  OK. Maybe bowling form had changed since I’d last played.

  But when he got to the line to make his throw, instead of making one more swing and propelling it toward the pins, he just dropped it, making a really loud noise that interrupted the man on the next lane.

  The ball took an interminable time to roll down to the pins, eventually reaching a near halt and knocking down two pins. Two.

  “Well, I got gypped on that one. Should have been a straight shot, but it had a wicked right hook.”

  OK.

  He took his second shot, knocking down two more pins.

  “Jesus!” Louie was clearly pissed. “Guess I’m off my game today.”

  He came back and glumly sat down.

  I got up with my not-so-shiny pink ball and tried to use good form, throwing with surprising force, knocking down half the pins, leaving room for what might be a spare on the next roll.

  “You got lucky on that one,” Louie hollered.

  Relaxing my shoulders, I took a shot that curved directly where I wanted it, taking down the remaining pins. Spare!

  Louie glared from his seat.

  “Lucky again.”

  He did another shuffle throw, taking down three pins, followed by a gutter ball.

  “Where’s the bar?” he growled.

  He stormed away, not even asking if I wanted a drink.

  I threw a 4 pin, then knocked down 3, narrowly missing a spare. Then I waited.

  When my kids were little, I’d taken them bowling many times, but the only part they liked was choosing a bowling ball, always too large for their tiny handspans. Ian would carry his ball halfway down the alley, then drop it with a thud and try to kick it toward the pins. Madison threw hers so hard it would end up in the adjacent lane. After a few more attempts, I lured them off the lanes with quarters for a machine that dispensed rainbow hair ties and plastic orange motorcycles, because no kid wanted gumballs anymore.

  It occurred to me that Louie might have run, leaving the bowling alley and me in his dust.

  Eventually he showed up with a half-empty plastic cup of beer, and foam on his upper lip.

  He took another shuffling shot. Threw a 2 pin.

  “Goddammit!” he said, still too loud.

  After his second shot, a gutter, he drained his beer and went back to the bar for another, this time also bringing back a soft pretzel drenched in cheese sauce.

  Screw him, I thought.

  I bowled my best game ever, scoring 150. Louie: 79. Actual
ly, I was surprised his score was that high.

  By then he’d had three beers, the pretzel, and a slice of pizza with bacon. He used the men’s room almost every time I shot, as if he couldn’t bear to watch.

  “Well, that’s that,” I said when the game ended.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Louie said. “My shoulder’s been bothering me, so I didn’t play like I normally do.”

  Neither of us mentioned the second game we’d paid for.

  I exchanged my shoes and headed for the door.

  “We’ll have to do something different next time,” Louie said.

  Thankfully, he was holding his two bags, so there was no chance of a hug.

  “I think we’re done, but it was nice meeting you.”

  “OK,” Louie said, shuffling off to his car.

  Note to self: Next time I feel the urge to bowl, go with the kids.

  How had I gotten to this awkward stage in my life? The only way to tell this story is to go back and start at the beginning.

  2

  Bryan and I took turns crying as we went through our closet, then his dresser drawers and his shoe pile. We tried to stay calm as we sorted out his summer clothes, the ones he would take when he moved south.

  He was looking for his golf shoes, which had never reappeared after we moved into the house three years earlier. I hoped there would be plenty of sunny golfing days for him in North Carolina. Our marriage was over, but I wished him a better life after he went south.

  Bryan’s daughter, Cassie, who’s twenty-four, and toddler-age son, Ben, lived in Wilmington. Every month, Bry made the twelve-hour trip south to visit them, leaving after dinner and driving through the night. While he was in North Carolina, he’d text me pictures of himself with Ben on the beach, jumping waves in his little blue surfer swimsuit. He made sand sculptures of giant turtles, pirates having elaborate swordfights, sunfish. Bryan was teaching Ben how to throw a Frisbee. He would carry Ben past the short, spitting waves and stand facing the surf, while Cassie took photos of them in silhouette. She had the pictures made into a collage that Bryan kept on our dining room wall.

  There were times we had talked about moving to Wilmington together. For me, it was speculation, wishful thinking about how great it would be to live near the beach. For Bryan, I began to realize, it had become almost a necessity to flee New York winters and be closer to his family.

  “Guess you won’t need these,” I said, tossing his thermal long johns into the donate pile.

  It was my turn to cry.

  We stood in the bedroom near the half-empty closet and he pulled me to his chest. We held on to each other for what felt, more than anything, like we were saying I love you, and goodbye.

  3

  I knew that one word, a single word, “stay,” would halt the course of the runaway train. Stay.

  It had been months since Bryan and I agreed we were both miserable in the marriage, that the many, many ways we’d tried to fix it hadn’t done any good at all. I’d actually made a pro/con list, and the only thing on the pro side was that I loved him. We genuinely loved each other. We just didn’t love the life we had together.

  We wanted to keep things normal, just for a little while, maybe until the start of spring. It was February in New York; who knew when spring would arrive. Sometimes it was early April, other years the end of May.

  That night, we went to the home goods store and bought black and white bath towels and a rose-scented candle for the coffee table. He wanted to go to the mall and look at jeans because he thought they were on sale. I went with him, and he bought two pairs for $30—a great deal, really.

  That night, we curled up so far away from one another in bed that my arm dangled off the side. I couldn’t bear to see Bryan, the way he slept with his hands under his face like he was praying, how he kicked at the covers when his feet got too warm, quietly mumbled on occasion, as if trying to tell me something in his sleep.

  My five-year-old little Yorkie, Penny, small and confused, lay between Bryan and me in the wide, king-sized bed. Her sleeping spot was usually at our feet so Bryan and I could reach for each other. But it had been a long time since either of us moved closer to the other in bed.

  We had been together since right after my first divorce. I hate the way people refer to it as getting “remarried,” announcing to the world you failed the first time around. We’d been married three years; two of them were really good. My first husband, Adam, was my college sweetheart. I’d met Bryan right after Adam left. I never really took the time to pause and reflect on the good sense of stringing one relationship into another. More than once, the word “rebound” came to mind.

  Bryan and I had some very good times and some very bad ones, but in the end, it was time for it to be done.

  I realized it was time to tell my kids what was going on between Bryan and me.

  “So, I hope you’re all right with this… I don’t want to upset you, but Bryan and I are separating,” I told my daughter, Madison, who’s twenty-five, the next morning when she came over for scrambled eggs. She had her own apartment ten minutes away, but dropped by for things like breakfast, laundry, and long debates about the meaning of life.

  “Yeah, well better that than stay unhappy—morose, really,” Madison said, opening a box of raisins.

  “You could tell things weren’t right?”

  “I know you, Mombo,” Maddy said, staring me down with her pretty green eyes and expertly applied black eyeliner. “It’s been like the plague around here since Christmas.”

  So I hadn’t done such a good job of making things seem normal.

  “You think Ian will be OK?”

  My son Ian was twenty-one and lived with Bryan and me.

  “Ian’s pretty tough, and it can’t possibly be as bad as when Dad left.”

  “Yeah, I was worried about that,” I said, looking around for Penny, because everything felt better when she was on my lap. At night, before we fell asleep, I always thanked her for saving my life every day.

  “But still, Ian knows things haven’t been good for a while, too. I’ll talk to him if you want,” Madison offered.

  “It’s OK, Madd, I’ll tell him.”

  Madison and Ian had always been close. Before he was born, she practiced putting a diaper on her Baby Alive doll, helped me set up the crib that had once been hers, went to the obstetrician with Adam and me to see the ultrasound live on the screen.

  Ian had been sucking on his toes in one of the sonograms, something that delighted her.

  The day he was born, Maddy was the first visitor.

  “Is this really Ian?” she’d asked, looking at the little swaddled lump of a red-faced newborn. “Does he know how to play?”

  Madison was a little mother to Ian, holding him in the tub so I could wash his little hairless head, pushing his stroller, feeding him Gerber strained apples and pears. When he got old enough to play, he pushed around her Barbie Doll Malibu, built castles with Legos for her Rapunzel doll, and cooked by her side in the Betty Crocker play kitchen.

  “Don’t stare at my brother,” Maddy used to tell people in line at the grocery store who were admiring Ian. “He belongs to me.”

  For his fourth birthday, Ian asked for a Ken doll to play with her Barbies. One year for Christmas when he was five, Ian got his sister a silver ring and asked her to marry him.

  I was so lucky to have kids like my son and daughter, blessings I counted every day.

  Now I was giving up someone I loved.

  I called to Penny, but she was standing right next to my ankle where I couldn’t see her.

  “How about you, sweetie? You surprised by the news?”

  Penny tilted her head the way dogs do when they’re listening intently. Then she came over and scratched at my leg to be picked up.

  “At least I’ll always have you,” I said into her warm shoulder.

  “You’ll always have all of us,” Madison said, lobbing a raisin at me. “And you must have a plan. You always ha
ve a plan.”

  4

  Bryan and I dug to the bottom of his closet to sort, separating the heavy clothes he’d worn to get through frigid New York winters. The wool L.L.Bean sweaters went in the donate pile, which quickly became a mountain. I folded the cotton-lined jeans, flannel shirts, and zip-up fleece jackets—things that were once on his Christmas list—and even the thick cabled socks I’d found at the Army-Navy store three months before, the ones with the reinforced toes.

  Truth was, Bryan was cold from October to April—most of the year, really—in the fickle New York weather. His favorite thing was a heavy, hooded robe that I got online when he turned fifty-six. He wore it tightly belted, hood up, in a way that made him look like a boxer headed for the ring. I used to hum the Rocky theme and he would shadow box, back in the days when things were fun.

  I had waited months, all winter, for things to change, for us to get out of the rut we’d settled into, Bryan on the couch and me at my computer writing blogs and website copy for insurance companies, warehouse-sized home stores, and anyone else who would hire me. It was freelance work that brought in enough money to pay the mortgage; Bryan paid the rest of the household expenses.

  Bry increasingly hated upstate New York winters, the long stretches of unforgiving wind, snow, boulder-like and crusty, turning black from the exhaust from cars and impossible to scrape off the driveway and sidewalk out front. New York winters sting your face and make you run cursing to your car. You wonder why in hell you choose to live in New York, until beloved spring arrives, followed by summer, making you forget the evil, unbreakable winter.

  We’d tried, both of us, to get him through the winters with some enjoyment. He’d become a stellar snowman-builder. We got his and hers snowshoes and tramped around the backyard. But his fingers and toes lost sensation quickly, and I ended up being the one looping around the willow tree out back, wearing down a path in the newly fallen snow.

  Bryan had those hand warmers you crack to release heat in every one of his pockets and inside his boots and gloves. He wore cotton-lined jeans, two T-shirts, a button-down flannel, and always had shoes or slippers on his feet. He swaddled himself in fleece blankets when he was on the couch, which had become more and more frequently. We constantly argued about how high to turn up the thermostat.

  We also argued about things far more serious, especially his very dark winter mood swings. It was something that frayed holes in the fabric of our marriage. Bryan didn’t seem to listen to or care about anything I came up with that could possibly help.