Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [11]
Chapter Four
I arrive early at Café Largo, a characteristic from my old life that I could never shake. Henry, though so fastidious and meticulous in nearly every aspect of his life, ran perpetually late—an anomaly that only pure human quirk can explain. I’d learned to adjust to it—waiting in restaurants, waiting at home for him to come to relieve me so I could finally, desperately, have a girls’ night out, waiting for him to get out of the house while Katie and I were already parked in the car—but my personal clock never matched up with his. Most couples do. Most couples acclimate so that a year into the relationship, the early one is almost always constantly running a good twenty minutes behind or vice versa, but Henry and I, well, we just never clicked.
I’m ensconced in a back booth, my fingers keeping time on the citrus-colored tiled table to the saxophone that soared in the background, when I look up and see Jack coming straight toward me.
“Hey,” he says, leaning down to brush my lips against his, his lavender tie skimming the tabletop. He surveys me, his brow furrowing. “How do you feel? You look . . .” He tilts his head to the right and pauses. “You look different. Did you do something with your hair?”
I scoot over, and he slides into the sparkly red leather booth beside me. I peer over at him rather than answer. Jack! I want to clamp onto his shoulders and shake him to make sure that he is real.
Instead, I press my palm over his sweaty hand.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t done anything with my hair.” I smile. “But it’s nice to see you.”
He scrunches his face as if I’d just told him that the world was flat.
“But I’m feeling better, much better, so don’t worry. Maybe I just needed a good day of rest.”
“Maybe,” he mumbles, unconvinced, and reaches for a menu, pulling his hand from under mine.
If I looked lighter, different, it might have been because of how I spent my day, because I felt lighter, different, too. After the cab had deposited me back at our apartment and after it became permanently clear that there were no take-backs, that this wasn’t some sort of fluke or sick joke or eccentric dream gone bad, and after I plopped on my couch and tried to breathe and breathe and breathe, I made a decision. A shaky one at first, but then I carved it into my soul and swore to abide by it: This was my second chance, this was what I’d been fervently hoping for. So I opted to embrace it rather than run. It was, after all, all I could do, anyway. And with my decision planted, I looked up my old number at work, which, after finding it, came rushing back to me. How could I ever have forgotten it?
My career, right up until we packed it in for Westchester, was the one place I slid into the comfort of my skin. There were no reminders of a mother who ditched her family, no hints that I might be mired in a stagnant relationship with a boyfriend who loved me, yes, but who lacked a certain ambition and who might be a tad too worshipful of his own mother, no loneliness that plagued me even when I cuddled with Jackson underneath our IKEA headboard or drank merlot with my equally up-and-coming friends at the latest restaurant written up in Time Out New York. At work, I came into my own, as if I were inhabiting another person entirely, thriving on the creative highs and camaraderie of building a campaign from the ground up.
So, with a clearer head, I redialed Gene and assured him I’d be back tomorrow, in time for the meeting with Coke. Only this time, rather than spending the twenty-four hours leading up to the meeting in a frantic flurry trying to nail the quintessential pitch, I spent the afternoon rereading old e-mails, revisiting old photographs, reacquainting myself with my former life. A life, which viewed from wiser, well-worn glasses, didn’t look so bad to begin with. Besides, I already had the perfect pitch for Coke, the one that would launch my career like a rocket ship, on a course that even I couldn’t have anticipated.