A Girl Like You Read online

  “OK, it’s time to rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty,” Eddie announced, coming into my bedroom and throwing open the room-darkening shades.

  “Tired,” I mumbled.

  “You’ve been in bed all day, missy,” he announced. “I think someone’s being a little bit diva here.”

  “Leave me be,” I said, pulling the blanket over my face.

  “Well this may cheer you, Ms. Shopaholic,” Eddie held up a brown box from Amazon. “You should be earning cash back with all the things you buy. Have you considered therapy?”

  “If you’re trying to make me laugh, it’s not working.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Eddie said, pulling off the tape and opening the box. “Ah, here’s something practical. A steamer? This for rice? Didn’t you buy one a few months ago?”

  “It’s a facial steamer.” I pushed the covers off to look. “You steam open your pores and your moisturizer sinks in better. It’s like an at-home facial.”

  “Oh, now that’s something I could get into,” Eddie said, pulling out the directions. “We could save a lot of money at the day spa.”

  Eddie and I took a trip to the spa every couple of months for a Swedish massage, mineral bath, and manicure. We’d done facials a few times and his gentleman’s facial left his skin buffed and glowing. Mine gave me rosacea on my cheeks.

  “Facials really aren’t for people with sensitive skin,” the twenty-year-old esthetician had told me afterwards.

  “Get out of bed and we’ll steam open our pores,” Eddie said when I refused to budge. “In twenty minutes, you’ll look like new.”

  “I don’t care how I look. I’ll probably just return it.”

  Eddie chuckled. “You’ll make Amazon regret their generous return policy. I bet you send back half the stuff you order.”

  “Not half,” I said indignantly. “I keep lots of stuff—the striped mittens, the kitchen towels with the roosters on them, that roller thing for sore feet.”

  Penny bounded over to Eddie, wagging furiously. She nudged his hand and he scratched behind her ears.

  “Traitor,” I told my dog.

  “Let me remind you that I didn’t grieve this much when Matthew left me,” Eddie said, pulling my covers right off the bed.

  “You weren’t with Matt three years.”

  Eddie sighed. “Well, it felt like forever.” He sat down and rubbed my leg.

  “Yeah, but then you met Don, and now you’re happily married, damn you.”

  “I had my share of heartache before Donny. You helped me get through it, just like I’m going to get you out of this little slump of yours.”

  I turned away from Eddie and curled up. “You don’t understand.”

  “Honey, I understand fine. Do I need to remind you of the bad times? The pro and con list?”

  I grunted in response.

  “Picture last winter,” Eddie said. “Bryan came home from work and collapsed on the couch, where he ate dinner and then went to bed at 9.”

  “He worked ten hours a day; he was tired,” I said.

  “You stopped communicating altogether, you stopped having sex—”

  I groaned. “I regret telling you that.”

  “Sweetie, you tell me everything. That’s what I’m here for. Besides, it keeps me entertained.”

  I grunted again.

  “Seriously, babe,” Eddie said, brushing the hair out of my face. “You can do this. You survived Adam. You can survive anything.”

  Maybe he was right. Probably not, but perhaps.

  “Now come on, up you go. I brought your favorite.”

  “Chai tea?”

  “Bucket of spaghetti.”

  “For breakfast?”

  “Sweetie, it’s 5:00 in the afternoon.”

  “Meatballs?”

  “What do you think I am, a rookie? Of course, meatballs, but you don’t get any until you take a shower. Your hair is doing a thing all its own, and it ain’t pretty, my dear. Sort of a cross between Cruella De Vil and Broom Hilda.”

  I didn’t care how I looked, but the spaghetti sounded good, so I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling lightheaded.

  “Someday this will all be a blip in the road,” Eddie said, holding out a hand to help me up.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me to give it time?” I said, grabbing my black-cat leggings and heading to the bathroom.

  “I don’t know if it’s true what they say about time healing everything that hurts,” Eddie said. “But it’s the only thing we can think of to say, even if it’s utter and complete bullshit.”

  16

  “It’s rained a lot since I’ve been down here,” Bryan texted from North Carolina. “But that’s OK, because at least it’s not freezing cold.”

  Bryan had found a one-bedroom apartment less than ten miles from his Cassie and Ben. He said it was small but all he needed for furniture was a bed, a couch, and a kitchen table with two chairs. Beyond that, he was starting over.

  “There’s so much stuff I need that I never thought of,” he texted. “Like a trash can, a frying pan and a broom. Do you think you could ship down my Blu-ray player? I want to watch the Batman movies with Ben. Can you believe he’s never seen them?”

  What I couldn’t believe was that he sounded like the old Bry, the one who went to Halloween festivals and parades and always beat me in mini-golf.

  He needed his Blu-ray player, and I needed him, especially now that he sounded like his old self. I would send Bry anything he needed. No, I would drive down and deliver them. I could leave now and be there by sunrise. I realized, for the first time, that if Bryan had moved across town, we’d never stay separated. I’d be at his doorstep when he got home from work every day.

  The only thing keeping us apart was the 1,800 miles between us.

  But I couldn’t tell Bryan this. I couldn’t tell him how much I cried, or keep him up on family news, like about Ian’s project on the Egyptian empire, or that there was so much lint in the dryer vent it almost caught fire. I couldn’t tell him how I’d lain in bed the days after he left, because I didn’t want him to feel responsible.

  Instead, I asked if he was eating.

  “Mostly eggs,” he texted me. “Scrambled, hard-boiled, you name it. I still can’t poach an egg the way you do.”

  Sometimes you have to leave behind the ones you love, he’d told me.

  And sometimes you have to send them away.

  Bryan had three solid leads on jobs, and I was hopeful one of them would pan out. He’d be more settled then. In the texts, Bry still called me “honey,” and “sweetie,” because that’s who we were to one another, maybe forever. We didn’t use emojis, because it would always be the crying face.

  “Do you see a lot of Cassie and Ben?” I asked.

  “I get to take Ben when Cass works on weekends. I’m also looking for some new projects to start in between job interviews.”

  I’d imagined Bryan holding Ben’s hands and swinging him over the low waves at Wrightsville Beach, digging in the sand for crabs barely larger than spiders. Cooking burgers on the grill. Riding his bike.

  A couple days later, after three glasses of wine, I did the unavoidable: I drunk-texted Bry.

  “How’s it going?”

  He texted back immediately.

  “Pretty good. I’ve had second interviews but no offers.”

  “The right thing will come along,” I texted, sipping more wine and looking down at Penny, who was tilting her head to one side the way she did when she was studying me.

  “How are you doing? How’re the kids?”

  “They’re good, busy, Ian is finishing up spring semester. Maddy started a new job as an assistant in a doctor’s office while she decides what to do with her life.”

  “Still not quite sure what to do with that sociology degree, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “So, how are you?”

  I felt the tears sting my eyes and my heart lurch.
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  My fingers were poised to text that I was fine, I was good, I was busy. But I couldn’t type those words.

  “Not great,” I texted, breaking our silent rule to not tell each other when we were having a bad moment. “I cry a lot.”

  “Yeah, I cried on the drive down here.”

  “Did we do the right thing? I think maybe I want to take it back,” I texted, looking for Kleenex.

  “It’s too late, Jess, you know that. We can’t go back.”

  “I miss you,” I said hiccupping. “I miss you every day.”

  “Me too. But we did the only thing we could think of to get happy,” Bry texted. “We’ll both be better. Just takes time.”

  There was that fucking saying again about time healing things. Time moved like a snail from one lonely day to another, and it didn’t seem like anything was getting any better.

  “I love you,” I texted, blowing my nose on a napkin.

  “I love you, Jess. Even when I don’t text, know that I miss you,” was his last message for the night.

  I fought myself to resist texting him again.

  I wanted to message him about the good times, the adventures, like our trip to Salem, Mass, known as the “witch city” for Halloween when we’d dressed up for the Witch’s Ball in a fancy hotel believed to be haunted.

  We went as a Day of the Dead wedding couple. I found a hoop-skirted wedding dress at a thrift shop and Bry bleached out an old suit. I got a Marie Antoinette wig, snowy white, that stood up six inches from the top of my head. I hot-glued lace around the spokes of an umbrella and spray-painted it white. Bryan made a top hat out of an old brimmed fedora and heavy-duty cardboard.

  The B&B we found was just a short walk to Derby Square, a cobbled street blocked off to traffic, where vendors sold everything from feathered and sequined witch’s hats to skull-topped walking sticks to caramel popcorn. Street performers posed for photos and $1 tips: two parents and their daughter sat on a wicker chaise dressed as The Addams Family, looking eerily like Gomez, Morticia, and Wednesday. A green-faced Frankenstein, complete with nuts and bolts stuck to his neck, clomped around in black platform shoes, holding out his arms and pretending to chase people down. A trio of friends dressed as mice with pointy noses, long tails, and dark sunglasses: “three blind mice.”

  “We gotta try some of these next year,” Bry said, taking pics with his cell and tipping all the street performers.

  Halloween morning, we couldn’t get ready soon enough. We powdered our faces and arms with theatrical make-up until we looked ghost-like. Then Bryan drew the iconic sugar skull patterns around our faces, filing them in with bright pink, green and yellow paint. I needed Spanx to fit into the wedding dress, but once it was on, it gave me an hourglass shape Bryan said was sexy.

  We walked all around Salem that day, from the harbor with the tall sailing ships to the street lined with gift shops, tarot card readers, and psychics, then down to the sweet shop for multi-colored candy corn and solid chocolate witches and warlocks.

  When we danced at the Witch’s Ball, I felt like Cinderella’s odd cousin.

  Afterwards, crowds of costumed kids and adults spilled into the streets. Many people stopped us to ask if they could pose with us for pictures. Bry said we should start taking tips.

  We stayed out till dawn, finally collapsing in bed, still white with powder.

  “Best night ever,” Bryan decreed.

  We’d vacationed on Cape Cod, Myrtle Beach, Orlando, and Lake Placid. On every getaway, although I missed my kids and dog, the only person I wanted to be with was Bryan.

  In many ways, that was still true.

  Penny nudged my arm to be picked up.

  “Thank you, sweetie,” I said. I held Penny up on my shoulder the way I used to burp the babies after a bottle. She tucked her warm nose into my neck.

  “You save my life every day.”

  We settled down to sleep, side by side.

  17

  A month after Bryan moved south, it was more than urgent to look at my finances. Because I hate math intensely, I made Ian sit down with me to write up a household budget: mortgage, utilities, groceries, cable, car loan, garbage collection.

  I decided to cut out online shopping and entertainment entirely. I hoped I could break my Amazon addiction, which seemed necessary, to gauge by the fact I had a collection of a dozen pairs of Halloween leggings. As for movies, that’s what Netflix was for.

  When he printed out the spreadsheet, I felt sick as I looked at the columns of numbers.

  “Wow, grim,” Ian said, putting his arm around my shoulders.

  “At least I have good credit,” I said.

  “Let’s check Credit Karma,” Ian said, already Googling it on his cell. “Yup, your score is 820, that’s excellent. But you do seem to be lacking cash.”

  It was clear: The freelance work wasn’t cutting it: I needed a full-time job, and I needed it fast.

  We’d had to sell the suburban house where the kids had grown up, and afterwards, the three of us had moved 11 miles north to Meredia, a small, historic town that billed itself as the “Welcome Home Town.” Eddie had lived in Meredia for ten years since his marriage to Donny and always said I’d like small-town living. I wanted to be out of the suburbs. I invested the equity from the sale of the home we’d had with Adam into the Meredia house. It was an older home but was exactly what the kids and I needed. My bedroom was on the first floor with my own bathroom, the kitchen, and the laundry room. Upstairs there were two good-sized bedrooms, a smallish office space, and a second bathroom. It gave Ian his own space; I rarely went up there.

  The move into the town was a short one, but still required boxing up our belongings accumulated over fifteen years.

  There were many things I had to part with, each of them difficult to give up: the light-up Santa that stood on our porch at least a dozen Christmases in a row; the kids’ report cards starting in first grade; the Halloween punch bowl set with skull-shaped cups; the blender we never used because the idea of kale smoothies sounded better than they’d turned out to be. Ian sold the train set that he’d set up only once or twice, then lost interest. Madison donated half the clothes in her closet.

  But there were many things I refused to part with. The bin of Dr. Seuss books, well-worn from bedtime story reading. Their baby books with locks from their first haircuts, their handprints, their kindergarten school photos. Ditto for Penny’s puppy memento box with her first collar, a teething bone, and a little pair of suede boots we thought she might leave on in the snow but instead nudged off with her nose the minute we put them on. I also had a lock from Pen-Pen’s first grooming.

  I kept the haunted houses in our Halloween village set that flickered purple lights and made scary cackling witch noises when plugged in. The long-stemmed wine glasses, a wedding gift, still in the box because we were afraid we’d break them. An extraordinary painting of red and blue birds on a tree branch, a gift from Eddie for our 10th anniversary. Every ceramic project the kids had ever made in art class: the sleeping dog, the ladybug, the crooked vase, and Ian’s pride and joy, an orange sneaker. There was the foil shamrock that had earned Ian first prize in art class, the bookmark made from a clothespin with a pom-pom face, the bunny with droopy ears made from a faded pink washcloth, the contorted witch face from a dried-out apple.

  Adam had needed nothing in the camper. He said he didn’t have room for any of the Father’s Day cards strewn with glue, the macaroni necklaces Ian had made in kindergarten and surprised us with by giving them to his dad. He didn’t want my favorite online purchases: the Calphalon pots and frying pans, the Keurig, the toaster oven, the waffle maker. As for the queen-sized comforter, plum with gold thread, that we’d bought two winters before, he left that with me also. He took a dish drainer and a few towels and some silverware, but not much more.

  The divorce agreement included a small stipend for Ian, since Maddy was living on her own. I could easily have taken Adam to court to force him to pay more chi
ld support, but I didn’t even know if he would have any money, and taking him to court would cost more legal fees and bring more stress to both of us. It was over, he was gone, there was nothing more to say.

  There was a community bulletin board downtown in the town that I passed when I walked Penny, with municipal job openings—all of them terribly dull—but all with good benefits like health insurance, retirement accounts, and vacation days. After a few weeks, I saw a notice for an assistant clerk’s job in the Meredia Town Hall, a brick building downtown on the same block as the post office and library.

  “Don’t you think you can do better, Mombo?” Mad asked, as I tried on a black pencil skirt and jacket for the interview, both of which were significantly tighter than they had been the last time I wore them.

  “My clothes?”

  “The job.”

  “It’s a two-minute commute,” I told her, wrestling with a red blouse that refused to drape across the waist of my skirt to hide my tummy pooch. “You guys are on dad’s health insurance, but I’m up a creek. One good twisted ankle and I’ll be in debt for years.”

  “You’ll still do the freelance, right?” Maddy got up off the bed to help me with the blouse.

  “Absolutely. Can you French braid my hair? I don’t want to fuss with it.”

  With my hair in place, I was ready.

  There were two people at the interview, bouncing questions back and forth so frequently that I wasn’t sure who I should look at when I answered. The clerk I would be assisting was a man named Joe, who had been in the job eleven years and clearly made himself at home. He wore polyester tan pants and a dress shirt with the first three buttons undone. His forehead had a constant sheen of sweat that he mopped with a yellowed handkerchief he kept tucked in his shirt pocket. There were donuts on the conference table that I didn’t touch; he ate four of the jelly-filled during the forty-minute interview.