Say Hello, Kiss Goodbye - Jacquelyn Middleton Page 0,8
Let her leave first, don’t be creepy. A server swooped in, picking up Leia’s half-full bottle and Tarquin’s paper cup. “Oh, actually, sorry—I’m not finished with that.” The bistro employee shot Tarquin a pinched ‘Okay, loser’ glare, handed back the empty cup, and walked away. “I’ll let the crowd disperse first.” He hid his frown behind a fake sip. “Thanks for the company, Leia. It’s been lovely chatting.”
“It has.” She stashed her phone and his card in a pocket and stood up. “Well”—offering a kind smile, she hoisted her shopping bag onto her shoulder—“good luck with your business. And Happy New Year!”
Happy? I wish. A dull heaviness settled in Tarquin’s chest. “Happy New Year.” He flashed a sincere grin. “All the best to you, too, Leia.”
Sweeping her hair off her forehead, she stepped away, joining the rush of customers headed to the checkout. Tarquin awkwardly raised his empty cup as a fond farewell, but Leia didn’t look back.
He slumped in his chair. And she lived happily ever after—with someone else.
Three
LEIA
The next day
Nursing an orange juice and listening to Diana Ross through her headphones, Leia hunched over the table in her sister’s conservatory, sketching clothing designs in the back of her journal. The welcome warmth of the late-morning sun hugged the shoulders of her flannel Christmas pajamas, fending off the chill accompanying the first day of 2019. The glass-walled back room, a small addition to the one-bedroom ground-floor apartment, lay empty and still, albeit cluttered with the previous night’s excess. A stack of the just-purchased IKEA plates, now dirty, congregated on a bookshelf along with burnt tea-lights and discarded party hats. Empty beer and prosecco bottles and folded cardboard stuffed the recycling box by the patio door along with leftover sparklers, waiting to burn bright another night.
Sarah was still cocooned in bed, sleeping off the festivities, while her boyfriend, Jordan, desperate to make a good impression with their father, Eddie, had popped two extra-strength painkillers and joined Mr. Scott for a frosty New Year’s Day run around Islington. They’d been gone for forty-five minutes—Leia wondered if Jordan was keeping up or tossing his cookies behind a dumpster.
She flipped the pages of her journal, her eyes detouring past her snoozing laptop, Sarah’s framed London marathon medals, and the neat stack of her well-thumbed gossip magazines, then down to the floor and the two storage boxes she had purchased the day before. Filled with Canadian treats—boxes of Kraft Dinner mac ’n’ cheese, Rockets candy, Coffee Crisp and Mr. Big chocolate bars, and semi-crushed bags of various flavors of potato chips—the orderly stash was courtesy of their dad, who had arrived ten days earlier. Leia hadn’t lived in Oshawa, a city east of Toronto, for eight years, but such home comforts always transported her back to her parents’ tree-lined backyard, Hockey Night in Canada on TV, and weekend shifts as a teenager at one of her family’s two businesses, a bustling Tim Hortons franchise in the center of the city. Twenty-two years since opening its doors, Eddie, a former National Hockey League goalie, still stopped in daily, splitting his time with the car dealership he had founded with his wife, Jenny. For his daughters, cars took a back seat to donuts, so when Eddie walked through Sarah’s door before Christmas with the chain’s famous TimBits in his carry-on, the donut holes were wolfed down within minutes.
For Leia, no more TimBits meant Canadian Smarties were the next best thing. She ripped open a box and shook out a palmful of the colorful candy-coated chocolates. You’re procrastinating again. Listening to music, sketching, eating junk… stop it. She slid the candies back into their cardboard home and stared at the words written in ink twenty minutes earlier:
December 31, I was grateful for:
1. the lights coming back on at IKEA.
2. celebrating New Year’s with Dad, Sarah, and Jordan.
3.
Forehead scrunched in thought, she absentmindedly stuck her hand in an almost empty bag of Hickory Sticks, the smoky potato snacks a childhood favorite of hers. C’mon, what else am I grateful for? You’re not hungover—you have no excuse. She stuffed a handful of savory goodness in her mouth and chewed slowly, hoping something—anything—would pop into her head. Why is this so hard? She flipped a few pages to the front of the journal, desperate for inspiration, and read the first entry from Christmas Day, her birthday.
December 25, I was grateful for:
1. spending my birthday/Christmas with Dad and Saz.