when the world was crumbling around me?
I was about to get up and get back to work when Pauline said something that made me sit back down.
“When you really care about someone, you have to forget everything you’ve done wrong before, everything you’re insecure about, everything you think you know about yourself. You can’t see yourself the way they do, but you can see them in a way that only you are capable of. And that’s what you tell them.”
I was nodding along, slowly understanding the wisdom in her words.
“I thought he was out of my league, but he thought the same thing about me. And when I laid it all out there, what I found out was that he felt exactly the same way, but we’d both been too scared to take the next step and admit it.” She sipped daintily at her wine. “And then I did a striptease that totally clinched it. We got married a year later.”
“Um. Okay.” My head turned that around a bit more, minus the striptease, and a startling image came to mind of a tall lanky man with a shock of white hair. I’d known him as a kid. “Wait, that was Al?”
“My late husband,” she confirmed with a sad smile.
We sat in silence for a while, both of us drinking and looking out the big window beside my desk. I was trying to figure out how Pauline’s story related to the wine crisis, along with attempting to piece together how her telling my dad stories about her past love life ever helped him figure things out.
“So you helped my dad with problems at the office by telling him stories about your love life?”
Pauline’s head swiveled to look at me and she made a little tsk-tsk sound that made me feel about three years old. “No,” she said slowly. “I told him stories he needed to hear when he needed to hear them.”
Then she put down the glass and rose, stepped over the quilt pieces on the floor and headed back to her desk.
I finished my wine as I thought about her words. It was a nice idea, but I knew that in my situation, being honest about my feelings wouldn’t help me at all with the wine crisis. And I was pretty sure it was too late to help me with El.
16
Isabel
* * *
My body clock was still on an accountant’s schedule. I woke up the next morning bright and early, which was super annoying when all I wanted to do was to pull the covers over my head and sleep in. My body ached like I’d put myself through one of those bootcamps that looked so fun from the outside but was actually just organized torture. My abs hurt from laughing at Chad, my head hurt from crying myself to sleep when I couldn’t stop thinking of Boston, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to fit any rings on my fingers today after eating an unadvised number of hotdogs last night. For a skinny guy, Chad sure could pound the dogs. He’d eaten twenty before tapping out while I’d been one step away from running to the bathroom to puke after the first ten.
Note to self: an all you can eat hotdog place was not recommended for a date.
I had to be at work by three to pour wines for people looking for an after-work escape. I also wanted to start talking to Pam about getting out and selling the Cunning Ham wines at various restaurants around town. I might have been back to hating Boston with a passion, but I still had a new job to excel at.
A pounding coming from my front door had me tossing back the covers and facing the world, whether I wanted to or not. Hopefully whoever was here didn’t mind my pajamas with math equations all over them. Mom bought them for me one year for Christmas, because why wouldn’t an accountant who stared at numbers all day want to also stare at them all night?
“Please don’t be Frank,” I muttered under my breath right before opening the door.
Thankfully, it was Ashley. “What are you doing here?” I let her in, surprised to see her unannounced. She looked so much better than yesterday morning when she had woken up on my couch with popcorn kernels crunched in her bra and no idea what had happened the night before. Explaining she was high off a brownie from a stranger wasn’t a conversation