Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [29]
No, I think, today with Gene, things are humming along as smoothly as anticipated, no potholes, no land mines to throw us off course. Maybe it’s because I’m able to anticipate those land mines before they go off. In our previous life, I’d hoped that with some encouragement, Jack would discover the inner writer that Vivian so believed lay hidden in his depths. I nagged and I nudged and I elbowed him into his fiction, despite his flat interest and nearly obvious lethargy at the subject. In my previous life, I eventually wrote him off as lazy and unambitious, a trust-fund kid who kicked up his heels and coasted on the wave he’d had the good fortune to ride in on. But with hindsight, I let all that go: Jack’s enthusiasm for life was infectious, and damned if I didn’t want to catch his fever.
With Henry, I knew ambition, I knew the straight and narrow, and seven years later, it felt choking, claustrophobic almost. So this time around, I pushed aside those lingering doubts about Jack, which, in days past, would spiral into needling nit-picking, which would escalate into full-blown arguments, which would culminate in one of us sighing in sarcastic relief at the fact that we weren’t in this relationship permanently. And then we’d apologize, and wash, rinse, repeat at least once a week.
But now, yes, thanks to a slight adjustment in my expectations, a tactic on which I was certain Redbook would surely frown, things were indeed going well. It doesn’t feel like too much, I’d tell myself every time I made one of these tiny tweaks. One day soon, it might, but for now, it doesn’t feel like too much.
“Okay, so if things are cruising with your man, then why worry?” Gene says now.
“I’m not worried,” I point out. “You’re the one who told me that I looked worried.”
He crunches his brow. “You do though. You do look worried. Which means one of two things.” He reaches over some papers on my desk to grab a piece of Coke-flavored licorice, then gnaws on it ponderingly. “That either things aren’t going as well as you think with your guy—and you’re just kidding yourself—or else this ex has left such a mark on you that you and your man could be in high heaven and it wouldn’t matter. He’d still rattle you.”
I feel the color drain from my face and rather than offer a firm answer, I say, “What are you, my shrink?”
“I wish,” he says, rising to leave. “Then at least someone would pay me around here.”
“Ha ha,” I answer. “You know that I’ve put in a good word for you to be my executive assistant. I’m hoping it will happen any day now.”
“To God’s ears,” he replies, already halfway down the hall. “Enjoy the mail.”
I laugh to myself, as I reach for the stack of letters that he’s placed on top of even more stacks of letters and files and folders. Three envelopes slide from the pile and coast off my desk, bouncing off the wastebasket and nose-diving to the blue rug that came straight from Corporate Rugs “R” Us.
The first envelope contains a coupon pack from my neighborhood’s Better Business Bureau, and the second is just my cell phone bill. The third is cream colored with an Elvis stamp, and fills me with that sense again, the sense that I’ve held this envelope before, that it’s fallen into my life in some way though not exactly