He nods, straightening. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Eyeing me for a lingering moment, he seems to decide to tell me what’s on his mind: “I broke up with my girlfriend last night. She’s calling. She thinks she wants to talk, but really I think she just wants to yell at me. She won’t feel great afterward, so I’m sparing us both for now.”
I swallow past an enormous lump in my throat. “You broke up with her last night?”
He nods, toying with a straw wrapper and thanking the waitress quietly as she deposits our food in front of us. When she leaves, he admits in a low voice, “You’re the love of my life. I assumed I would get over you eventually, but seeing you yesterday?” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t go home to someone else and pretend to love her with everything I have.”
Nausea rolls through me. I honestly don’t even know how to translate this heavy emotion in my chest. Is it that I relate so intensely to what he’s saying, but am far more of a coward? Or is it the opposite—that I have moved on, have found someone, and don’t want the intrusion of Elliot into my easy, simple life?
“Macy,” he says, more urgently now, and opens his mouth to continue, but another trigger has been pulled, another game-show challenge. I dig for my wallet—racing the buzzer—but this time Elliot stops me, catching my arm in his gentle grip, his cheeks pink with anger. “You can’t do this. You can’t just continually run from this conversation. It’s been eleven years in the making.” Leaning in, he clenches his jaw as he adds, “I know I messed up, but was it that bad? So bad you just vanished?”
No, it wasn’t. Not at first.
“This,” I say, looking around us, “is a terrible idea. And not because of our past. Okay, yes, it’s partly that, but it’s also the intervening years.” I meet his eyes. “You broke up with your girlfriend last night after seeing me for two minutes. Elliot, I’m getting married.”
He drops my arm, blinking a few times, and seeming—for the first time I’ve ever witnessed—to be lost for words.
“I’m getting married . . . and there’s so much you don’t know,” I say. “And a lot of that isn’t your fault, but this,” I wave a finger back and forth in the narrow space separating us across the table, “between us? It sucks that it’s over, and it hurts me, too. But it’s done, Ell.”
then
friday, december 21
fifteen years ago
As if Dad knew that I was delicate after the conversation about Christmas Sans Mom with Elliot, he was even quieter than usual at dinner Thursday night.
“Do you want to go to Goat Rock tomorrow?” he asked when he finished his chicken.
Goat Rock, the windy beach where the Russian River collides with the Pacific Ocean. It is notoriously cold, with a dangerous rip current rendering the beach unsafe for even wading into the water, and so much sand blustering in the air that it’s nearly impossible to grill hot dogs.
I loved it.
Sometimes, sea lions and elephant seals lazed at the mouth of the river. Dark, rich seaweed washed up on shore, heavy with salt and nearly unreal to me in its otherworldly, translucent oddness. Sand dunes dotted the shoreline, and in the center of the beach and out a narrow isthmus was the lonely giant rock jutting straight up more than a hundred feet as if it had been dropped there.
“You could invite Elliot, if you wanted,” he added.
I looked up at him and nodded.
The entire drive there, Elliot was fidgety. He shifted in his seat, tugged at his seat belt, ran his hand through his hair, futzed with his headgear. After about ten minutes, I gave up on trying to focus on my book.
“What’s with you?” I hissed across the back seat.
He glanced at Dad in the driver’s seat, and then back at me. “Nothing.”
I felt more than saw Dad looking in the rearview mirror at what was going on in the back seat.
I stared at Elliot’s hands, reaching now to toy with the strap of his backpack. They looked different. Bigger. He was still so skinny, but also so at home in his gawkiness that I didn’t notice it anymore unless I really looked.
Dad pulled into the parking lot and we stepped out, shocked at how the wind nearly knocked us over. We jerked our coats on, pulled our hats over our ears.