Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [3]
So it’s not like it always used to be this way, I remind myself, as Enya stopped crooning in the background and another New Agey singer whom I don’t recognize filters out through the speakers overhead. But still. How could we get back on track? Redbook had dozens of articles on it, but none of them seemed to help. What was the one moment where we lost our way? Or was it a series of moments that snowballed into something larger, something intangible, something careening forward with too much acceleration for us to stop it now?
What I didn’t think about—what I refused to allow myself to think about—was that Ainsley, another friend from business school who now lives in a house on my same cul-de-sac and who runs a ridiculously lucrative eBay business from her garage that sells personalized baby gifts, had just gotten an invitation to Jackson’s wedding. And that, despite the fact that we’d broken up seven years prior and I’d been the one to finally—firmly and permanently—walk away from him and on toward Henry, his engagement and upcoming wedding still ate away at my emotional landscape, as if him avowing himself to another woman was somehow a blight, a pox on me.
“Are you going to be okay if I tell you the news about Jack?” Ainsley said two mornings ago when we were power walking with our aerodynamic strollers in tow.
“Of course!” I said, waving my free hand but not turning to look her in the eye. “Is he still at Esquire?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, between breaths. Figures, I thought. Figures he’d stay at a job that he didn’t love simply because of inertia. Figures that he’d never get that novel off the ground despite his best promises.
“He’s getting married,” Ainsley said, shooting the bitterness straight out of me.
I should have responded. I suppose that the ten-second pause before I did respond was what gave me away. It must have been clear that within that ten-second pause—as my brain spun back to how much I fucking loved him and then to our first date at a falafel joint stuffed with undergrads where we had to shout above the raucous din but that we had so much to say to each other that it didn’t matter, and then to our last and final date at China Fun when we were all talked out, and then to how, even though I’d found complete contentedness with Henry, sometimes I was haunted from the inside out by how much I still craved Jackson, his spontaneity, his zeal, his ability to wander through life without a defined to-do list, and Henry was always, always armed with a to-do list—I was in no way okay. Frames from my old life flashed through my brain the way that they do in the movies just before the hero is set to die: the camaraderie that I thrived on at the ad agency, the lazy Saturday mornings when Jack had toted his laptop to the neighborhood diner to work on his stagnant novel and I had forty-five minutes of quiet time just to nurse my coffee and stare out the window dreaming of nothing at all, the Christmas vacation before I ever even met Jack, when Ainsley and I booked a last-minute trip to Paris and kissed random French men on the night before New Year’s Eve. There were so many things to miss about my pre-Henry, pre-Katie, pre–this era life; Jack was just one of them.
“Of course I’m okay!” I chirped to Ainsley breathlessly, partially due to the clip of our pace, partially due to her announcement over his impending nuptials. “I mean, it’s been seven years for God’s sake.”
“It’s fine if you’re not.” She shrugged. “It would be totally normal if you’re not.”
“Well, I am,” I answered. “My life with Henry and Katie is exactly where I’m supposed to be. And I have no doubt about