But I had never been serious, and I had never thought he was serious either.
My morning was a blur of unruly students and lectures on grammar. When I reached third period, which was a mixture of juniors and seniors, I was thankful for a class that didn’t need to learn the basics of the English language. Even I knew my morning lectures were boring. I had been fighting yawns for hours.
Third period was my most challenging class of the day, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I finally woke up thanks to the livelier class and our discussion on the Scarlet Letter. It was one of my favorite books to read and to teach, because even if I couldn’t get my students to actually read it, they all loved to share their opinions on adultery.
I mean, who didn’t?
“These people are so stupid,” Jay Allen declared, punctuating his opinion by slamming his book down on his desk. “It’s just a baby. It’s not like she was a serial killer or ate people or anything.”
I tried not to smile. Ate people? Tried and failed. “But it’s a different time period, Jay. The culture back then took sex, marriage, children outside of marriage and all other sins very seriously. It was their way of life.”
“Well, it’s a stupid way of life,” he grumbled mutinously. “Leave the woman alone. She already had a kid to take care of by herself. She had enough problems. It’s not like she had food stamps.”
“That’s true,” I agreed, happy with the direction of his thoughts. “There was no system put in place to protect her from starvation or poverty.”
Jay continued, shaking his head at Hester’s tragic circumstances, “Being a single mom is hard anyway, but at least my moms has help. And nobody’s making her stand in the middle of the city so they can yell bullshit at her.”
Andre Gonzalez snickered from the other side of the classroom. “That’s because ain’t nobody wants to stare at yo’ mom for longer than they have to. Hester was a hottie.”
Jay half rose out of his seat to defend his mother’s honor. A nervous twitch pulled at my gut and I wondered if I was going to have to call for help.
“Shut your mouth, Gonzalez,” Jay hollered. “Talk about my mom like that again and we’re going to have words.”
“Alright, enough,” I demanded with my most stern teacher voice. “Andre, if you talk about another student’s mother in my class again, I’ll send you to detention.” Jay smirked proudly until I turned to him and said, “And you, Mr. Allen, if you threaten another student again, you’ll find yourself in the same place.”
Silence reigned once again so I tried to refocus them. “How do you know Hester Prynne was a hottie, Andre?” I doubted he had read his assignment so it took me by surprise that he was making judgment calls on her.
He stared at me for a long minute before finally deciding to answer. “She got the pastor to do the nasty with her, didn’t she? That was like a… a… sin or whatever. He was probably a virgin and he knew he’d go to hell for it. It takes a certain kind of woman for a man to choose hell.”
I rocked back on my heels, amazed at his insight. Andre was just as bad as Jay most days, at least when he chose to come to class. Some days he was worse.
“That’s a good point,” I said quietly. “Or maybe he was just desperate? Maybe he just wanted to get laid?”
The kids laughed at me, some of them threw out crass comments and escalated the conversation beyond appropriate school discussion, but at least they were engaging.
“Nah,” Jay spoke up over the raucous. “He wasn’t sleeping around. It was just her. Just this one girl.”
“So he loved her?” I prompted.
“Sure,” Jay agreed. “True love. It’s not just the booty that would have made him stray from his vows. He needed something stronger than that.”
“And did she love him?”
Jay nodded as if it was obvious. “I mean, her husband was a psycho, but she loved that Dimmesdale guy. She wanted to run away with him all those years later.”
I let his words settle over the class and wondered if these kids knew anything about love. How could they? I didn’t know anything about it and I was almost twice their age.
“So? What do you think about that?” I stared at them, but nobody was brave enough to answer. “Is true love enough? Was it enough for Hester and the way she was forced to live? Does it make their crimes forgivable? Does it redeem them?”
“No,” Andre announced loudly. “It just made them stupid.”
The bell rang and the kids jumped out of their seats before I could say anything more. Besides, there wasn’t really anything else to say.
I was inclined to agree with him.
“Don’t forget about your Scarlet Letter project! Now that we’ve finished the book, you need to be thinking about how you’re going to represent it to the class.” I hollered after them. “I want to hear your proposals on Monday!” They grumbled as they filed out of my room, but it didn’t bother me.
I felt like we’d made a breakthrough today. Somehow, despite my hung-over brain and my students’ usual lack of enthusiasm, we’d come together on social issues they could all relate to.
How many of them had single moms?
How many of them had been abandoned by people they loved?
Kara stepped into my classroom and I lunged for the trashcan. “Don’t puke!”
After a series of mumbled curse words, she collapsed in my desk chair. “Don’t say that word. God, don’t ever say that word again.”
I breathed a sigh of relief that she wasn’t going to toss her cookies all over my desk and smiled. “Did you have fun last night, Kara? Are you super happy we went out for hump day?”
“I want to die,” she mumbled. “Why the hell did I let you talk me into tequila shots?”
I tried not to laugh. Er, I tried not to laugh loud enough that she heard me.
“Am I interrupting?” Eli asked from the doorway.
I turned around and gave him a smile. “Nope, not at all. Kara is just dying.”
“I can see that,” he chuckled.
“Tequila,” she winced.
Eli turned to me with his eyebrows raised and a playful smile on his lips. “Death by tequila, not a pleasant way to go.”
“Eli, I hate you,” she grumbled.
“At least you don’t have to share your lunch with her,” he said to me.
The heavenly scent of fried foods had made its way over to me and my stomach rumbled loudly. “What did you bring me?”
“Ruby’s.”
“Oh, my god. You’re truly my hero!”
He set three Styrofoam containers on my desk and opened them slowly. My mouth started watering as soon as I saw the fried, crispy lumpias and spiced tocilog.
“This is my ultimate hangover cure,” he explained. “Ruby’s fixes everything.”
Kara winced, “Not everything…” she slipped out of my chair and practically collapsed on the ground. She curled up into a ball and tucked her arm under her head. “Wake me up in ten minutes.”
Eli and I shared a look. Then we dug into our lunch.
“So this is okay?”
“I love Ruby’s,” I said around a mouthful of lumpia. They were the perfect combination of crispy outside and spicy inside, like a spring roll only Filipino style. “Nick and I used to go on the weekends when we were first married because we could get so much food for so little.”
Eli waited a beat before he responded. I realized I put him in an awkward conversation spot, but with his usual directness, he rolled with it. “Why did you guys stop?”
I glanced at Kara on the floor, but she seemed completely out of it. I didn’t know why I didn’t want her knowing I opened up to Eli about my divorce. It still felt weird to me and I didn’t think I wanted Kara to look at it like a good thing.
I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.
“Probably for the same reason we stopped doing most other things.” I reached down to fiddle with one of the sauce containers, making my fingertips sticky.
That wasn’t exactly fair. “I don’t know, actually. We always had fun at Ruby’s. We just stopped going. Maybe we got too busy.”
“Or maybe you stopped wanting to spend time with each other?”
I swallowed a large bite of rice and spiced meat and tried not to choke. Was he right? Instead of feeling the pain that I should or the insecurity in the truth of his words, I felt irritated.
My first thought was, “What did he know about me?”
What gave him the right to make judgments on my marriage?
But I swallowed again and tried to push those thoughts away. He was just being my friend. And he probably was right.
“Maybe,” I said noncommittally. “Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out the majority of reasons our marriage didn’t work out.”
He leaned in and I felt the warmth of his body as his arm grazed mine. “You know, you don’t have to torture yourself with all the whys and why nots. This is hard enough on you.”
I looked up at him, noticing the shaved line of his jaw and the smooth skin over high cheekbones. He was wearing his glasses today and the fluorescent classroom lights glinted off his lenses, hiding his eyes from me.
“Does that work?” I asked quietly. “If I tell myself to stop analyzing everything, will I listen?”
His smile was filled with sorrow from his own past pain. “No,” he said with a gruff rasp. “But you can try. Maybe you’ll do better than me.”
We finished up our lunches over small, easy talk. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t lose my appetite. I ate as much of my lunch as I could until my stomach felt distended and I knew I would have to fight through a food coma to teach my afternoon classes.
We woke Kara up and Eli offered to walk her to her classroom since she still looked on the verge of puking her guts and every ounce of alcohol from last night up.
Once they were gone, I had about five minutes until the bell rang, so I dug out my phone from my locked drawer and stared at the screen for two minutes. I clicked my nails against the back of it as I cradled it in my palm. Curiosity and a masochistic sense of self-analysis buzzed through me in a way I couldn’t ignore.
Finally, I texted Nick, asking, I just had Ruby’s for lunch today. It was so good. Why did we stop going there?
A minute later he texted back, They had an Ebola outbreak last year.
Shut up!!!
He sent back a smiley face and for another minute I thought that was the end of it. The bell rang, but I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and greet my class. I kept staring at my phone, waiting for more.
Just as students started to filter into the room, my cell vibrated in my hand and I caught his one last text before I needed to put it away for the rest of the afternoon.
I wish we wouldn’t have stopped.
Chapter Eight
15. We can never agree on anything.
“I can’t believe you guys are getting a divorce.” The high-pitched whine shrilled through the phone. I wanted to chuck it against the sidewalk.
“Fi, believe it.”
I stepped out of my car and stumbled back a step when the force of the late afternoon wind smacked me in the face. For a minute, I couldn’t hear anything on Fiona’s end because of the static and interruption from the wind.
“Hold on!” I yelled to Fiona, my college roommate, as I fumbled with the keys to the side door.
Our tiny house only had an unattached garage, which made weather a real concern trying to get in and out of the house. Since Illinois only had about three good months of weather during the year before it turned either surface-of-the-sun hot or subarctic, it made leaving the house at any time obnoxious.
Except near Lake Michigan. Then it was only differing degrees of violently windy.
When we had looked at houses, Nick tried to convince me that the garage would be an issue, but I hadn’t been willing to listen. I fell in love with this house from the street. I adored the cute coziness of it, the original but updated wood floors, the brand new kitchen that was small but modern. I loved the loft style bedroom upstairs and the office with French doors on the first floor.
We had always known we wouldn’t live here forever. This was not a house you could raise a large family in and when we were house hunting, we assumed we would have a large family.
That was something we could both easily agree on.
But we had needed something to start with, something that was just the right size for the two of us and something we could easily afford with our tight budget.
This house had been perfect.
And despite everything that happened, I still thought it was perfect.
Except for the garage situation.
“Sorry,” I huffed once I’d made it through the door. I dropped my tote bag filled with papers and notebooks that needed to be graded, my laptop, my purse and my lunch bag on the ground as soon as I stepped inside. My arm felt like it was going to break off. Annie danced around my feet, licking my legs and begging for attention. “I’m here now.”
“I just can’t believe it,” she moaned. “You two are so perfect for each other.”
My neck immediately started hurting. “I’m not sure that we are.”
“But, K! What happened?” She asked the question then murmured something to her fussy baby.
Fiona and I didn’t get to talk very often, but usually we could spend hours gabbing about nothing or everything or good times from our college years.
Today, though, I hoped her baby’s cries meant she needed to get going. I really didn’t want to have this conversation. I really wanted to talk about anything but my divorce or Nick or me.
The baby cried again and pain seared over my heart. “Shh,” Fiona crooned. “That’s a good boy.” To me she said, “This has been my fussiest baby yet. He is just never satisfied.”
I masked the brokenness in my voice by joking, “Because he’s a man.” I bent down to pet my own baby girl.
Fiona laughed at my joke and the baby settled down. “So tell me what happened. Last time we talked, you guys were doing great!”
We hadn’t been great. We hadn’t been great in a very long time. But I had never told her that.
I resigned myself to telling her the story. She wasn’t going to let it go, so I might as well give her what she wanted as quickly as I could, then get her off the phone so I could wallow in my own pity. Except that when I turned the corner and walked into my kitchen the topic of our discussion was sitting at the kitchen island helping himself to my chocolate cherry ice cream.
“Holy shit!”
“Are you okay?” Fiona asked on the other end.
Nick gave me an apologetic wave but didn’t make a move to stand up. “Uh, um, er, yeah.”
Fiona’s voice echoed through the kitchen as I pulled the phone away from my ear. “K, what’s going on?”
I put the cell slowly back to my mouth. “I’ll call you back, Fi. Something came up here.”
“You’d better!” I heard her call, but I pushed end without saying goodbye.
“Was that Fiona?” Nick asked without preamble.
“Yeah.” I took a solid minute to adjust to his presence, and then demanded, “What are you doing here?”
He took another bite of ice cream to hide his smile. “You literally say that every time you see me.”
“You just… I’m just… Nick!”
He grinned at me and I was surprised to see his easy expression. His beard had been trimmed neatly, back to just barely there and his hair had been styled away from his face. I noticed his nice dark blue oxford and black dress pants and wondered what that was about. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing his forearms and I swallowed in a desperate attempt to stop staring at his tanned skin and lean muscle.
It was a shock to see him, but even more so to find him so attractive. It felt like I hadn’t seen him in years or like maybe I’d never seen him before. My entire body reacted, took notice of every angular cut to his body and unique characteristic to his face
.
When was the last time I had looked at him like this?
When was the last time I had seen him?
“Kate, you okay?”
I cleared my throat and nodded curtly. “I’m fine. Just, you know, surprised to see you.”
He tilted his head toward the kitchen window. “Mr. Kirkpatrick asked to borrow my jack. I swung over to get it to him.”
“You could have called me. I could have walked it next door.” He raised one eyebrow and I found myself smiling. “Okay, point taken.”
“It only took a minute anyway.”
“And the ice cream?”
“I skipped lunch and somebody was taunting me yesterday with texts about Ruby’s. I’m starving. I was actually looking for something more substantial.”
I felt a blush stain my cheeks. “I’ve been meaning to go to the store.”
He watched me for a minute. I didn’t know what he was looking for or I would have tried to hide it from him. His silence grew awkward so I turned toward my discarded bags, deciding I should put everything away before I forgot.
“Do you have a gig tonight?” I kept my eyes on my task, hoping to avoid his forearms and the silly things they did to my insides.
He didn’t answer right away and it was just on the tip of my tongue to ask him to leave if he wasn’t going to talk to me when he said, “No, not tonight.”
“Then what’s with the clothes?”
“The what?”
I glanced over at him and our gazes locked for a moment before I tore mine away. “You look nice. I just thought… I thought you might have somewhere to be tonight. It’s Friday.”
I felt his smile from across the room, even though I wouldn’t look at him. “I know it’s Friday.”
“Well, you usually have gigs on Fridays.”
“Not every Friday.”
Irritation bubbled through me. “You’re right; sometimes they’re on Saturdays instead.”
He pushed back the stool and stood up. I heard him clattering around as he took his dish to the sink and washed it out. Leaning over, I noticed that he’d already washed the dishes I’d left in the sink. They sat on the drying rack perfectly clean. “I, uh, I’m taking a little break from the band. You know, while I figure shit out.”