Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [9]
I have no idea what shot or which party he is referencing—Jack and I were always darting from one event to the next—so I just bob my head like a parrot and hope that I look convincing.
“So . . . I was there when you woke up this morning?” I ask pointedly.
“Sweetie? Go back to bed. You’re delirious. You’re there every morning when I get up. Dead to the world until the alarm goes off at 7:45, but yes, you’re there.”
“Interesting,” I mutter, more to myself than to him.
“Okay, well, if you’re this sick, I’m calling Megan and Tyler to cancel dinner. No way can you make it like this.”
Dinner. Dinner with Megan and Tyler. I try to think back to it, and reach for the Filofax, hoping Jack won’t notice, to jog my mind. Yes, that’s right! Tonight’s the night that she’s seven weeks pregnant; “too early,” they’ll say, “to tell anyone, but we couldn’t help ourselves with you guys.” Six days later, she’ll miscarry, and I’ll be the one she calls for rescue.
“No, no,” I say to Jack, standing to kiss him, as if that’s an assurance that I’m well on my way to healthfulness. He recoils at the scent of my rancid breath. “We’re going. Where is it again?”
“Café Largo? You picked it. You got pissy when I suggested somewhere else . . .” Jack’s voice drifts off. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I try to recall the fight we had over the restaurant. Vaguely, it comes to me. Jack silently seething that I’d chosen a spot that I knew he detested, me screaming into his voiceless void that he should have suggested somewhere else when I asked for his input but that “it was so damn typical of him to cruise along while I did all the work,” him responding “that it was only fucking reservations and not exactly a big deal” and then slamming the door to our bedroom, and me left wondering how we ever imagined we could coexist under the same roof.
Now—after years of knowing what real problems were, after living with a man who was cautiously loving but no longer fawningly committed, a man who was rational and smart but not quite passionate or spontaneous, after slowly spinning away from the person I vowed to be true to for the rest of my years, after feeling like I lost myself in his shadows and goals—the arguments over restaurants, over who took the trash out last seemed futile, silly, and so much easier than the hurdles that Henry and I would come to face in the road of the future.
“I’m sorry that we’re going there,” I say softly, cupping his stubbly face in my right hand. “I know that you hate it.” I can’t remember why I insisted on Café Largo so many years back, but I suspect that it was done to retaliate to some wrong that I thought Jack had inflicted on me. That was how we worked, Jack and me. Do to me what I have done to you; an eye for an eye, and all of that.
“Uh, don’t worry about it. We resolved it.” His eyes are still searching, awash in confusion and worry. “Okay, I have to get back to work, but get back into bed for a while . . . you look . . . not right.”
He takes my arm and ushers me to the bedroom, pulling back the covers with a flourish and watching as I crawl inside. He leans down to kiss me. “Okay, see you tonight. I love you.”
I gnaw again on the inside of my cheek. What was I supposed to say in response? I’d spent the past seven years squashing out any reminders of lingering emotional ties to Jackson, ensuring that his fingerprints weren’t still marked all over my body, that when I walked away, there were no regrets, no take-backs, and certainly no look-backs.
And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I’d soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect, though in far different ways. So, rather than turn the moment into something that it was not, I simply respond as I would have seven years back, back when my younger self did love him, back before my older self