Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [31]
I hadn’t meant it to happen, of course. I’d been so adept at dancing around our hot coals that when it slipped out, my unintentional comment, I didn’t even realize what I’d said. I literally had to mentally rewind the conversation, like a VCR, to see where we might have jutted off course.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jack was saying, while I was reading our cab driver’s license, flattened against the plastic partition that separated the front from the back, and wondering if the driver had left his family behind in whatever country he hailed from to come here and make a better world for them. His taxi reeked of evergreen air freshener, and I hoped the scent wouldn’t attach itself to my pores and stay with me once we had vacated the vehicle.
“Out of the cab?” I asked, turning toward Jack. “We still have fifteen blocks to go.”
“No. Out of here here.” He waved his hands. “Let’s plan a trip.”
“That’s not going to resolve everything with my mother,” I sighed. I’d told Jack about my mom’s note earlier that afternoon, and he’d reacted as he had the last time I’d been through this—with his cocksure nonchalance, which I sometimes found irritating, but which I now envied.
“Of course it’s not going to resolve everything with your mother,” Jack said, folding his hand over mine. “But it could still be a hell of a lot of fun. And that’s the point.” He squeezed my fingers and smiled. “October, maybe? Miami?”
“I thought you had a writer’s retreat in October. To work on your novel.”
Jack’s eyebrows darted downward.
“I mentioned that to you?” His voice was flat, and I did my mental rewind to see where I’d gone wrong.
Er, no, come to think of it, you hadn’t mentioned it to me. I only know about it because when we broke up, you cocooned yourself in the Adirondacks under the guise of writing, when what you were really doing was nurturing festering wounds that our split had left on both of us.
“Um.” My brain raced. “I saw something you’d gotten in the mail about it . . . figured you would go.”
But it wasn’t just my slipup that sucked the enthusiasm from his tone. It was the mentioning of that-of-which-we-shall-not-speak. His novel. I’d pushed him on it last time. At Vivian’s behest that, indeed, her son was the next coming of Hemingway, I’d pushed him. Never considering that Jack’s talent wasn’t anything grander than any other average MFA student or that his passion for supposed skill was significantly outweighed by his mother’s. I pushed him and cajoled him and hammered out hours in which I insisted that he write, and he would—I’d hear the spatter of the computer keyboard rattling out like machine-gun fire—but the more he wrote, the less shiny he became, as if the work itself drained out all of his joy. So this time around, I nudged less and intuited more and realized that perhaps Jack wasn’t destined to be the next great writer, which, of course, was entirely fine with me. As long as he cared about being the next great something. Whatever that might be.
“Oh,” Jack said toward the glass taxi partition, with a sharpness that could puncture a balloon, but hesitatingly accepting the explanation. “No, I’d rather go to Miami.”
“Sounds like heaven to me,” I said hurriedly, brushing past the indiscretion and hopeful that we could move beyond it entirely. Let Vivian be the one to prod him, I thought. I’ll just be here to ride along and inhale the wind as we go. Because that’s what I enjoyed most about Jack now: the ride, how smooth and seamless and easy it all felt when I jumped onboard.
“So where is your mom now?” Jack said, switching back to a seemingly less dodgy subject, though, I think, it’s only less dodgy for him. For me, it awoke reams of dormant emotions that I thought might nearly strangle me.
“Here, I think, I mean, at least from her area code. She must be here.” I looked out the streaked window of the cab and wondered how often I’ve walked by her apartment, how many times I’ve just barely