“Yup.”
She laughed. “You need to bring her by to say hi sometime. Is she…dating anybody?”
There it was. She looked innocent, with stress wrinkling around her kind eyes and slightly graying hair, but deep down, she was just like the rest of them. Lying to my mother was bad, but technically, Shelby had gone on a date with Briggs, and that sounded like enough. “You can call off the hounds, Mom. She’s dating Briggs.”
If my mom made any sort of face at that, I was deep in the weeds and not caring.
“Well, I saw one of your old friends in the diner tonight,” she went on.
“Who?”
“Ellie Rogers. You remember her?”
When I said nothing, she continued, “She was a couple of years younger than you in school, but she sure remembers you.” She gave a little laugh while my stomach tightened in annoyance. “She’s recently divorced too and a little bored, I think. She told me she’d love to catch up, if you’re interested.”
I tried hard to keep my expression even. “I’m good, thanks.”
Would this be my constant battle being back home—dodging set-ups and blind dates? How many times did it take for a person to refuse before people would finally believe me? It wasalmost tempting to move again, even though just thinking those thoughts brought a pang to my gut. This place was home.
“It’s been over a year since she left.”
Her words were soft but sharp. A knife to the gut. Not because I felt any lingering sentiment toward my ex-wife (I didn’t) but because of the way people around me viewed time. Apparently, 365 days was the appropriate span of time to be done grieving something. It didn’t matter that I had no interest. To the outside world, one year seemed to be the required due diligence before the damage had been repaired enough to move on. To try again. As if recovering from the obliteration of a family had a time stamp.
The year of my supposed grief had flown by in a mixture of panic, anger, and survival, which happened when the only thing you were trying to do was keep your head above water. I didn’t recall grieving while selling my house in Washington. I was happy to get rid of any memory involving Miranda. I didn’t recall grieving while scrounging to pay bills when my wife had taken our entire savings with her. It was survival mode that helped me to find a daycare, navigate Sophie’s tantrums that followed us ever since, and finally, our move back to Eugene.
But now it had been a whole year.
I guess that damn horse was ready for me to hop back on again.
“I understand that you might not be ready, but I just…I don’t want you to write off relationships forever. One day, I want you to try again.”
“You never did,” I interrupted, immediately annoyed that I had added input. My usual move with conversations like this was to smile, nod, and ignore. But the double standard here was hard to push aside.
“No. I didn’t. But I wish I had. For your sake.”
“We did just fine,” I insisted, moving to wipe my dirt- and mud-caked hands on the grass, certain I wouldn’t have wanted another man in my mom’s house growing up.
“We did. Because you stepped up and took care of us both, even though you were just a kid yourself. And I told myself that it was enough. That we were just fine together. But now I wonder what it would have been like if I had remarried and you’d had a decent father figure in your life?—“
“Okay. Sophie’s crying,” I interrupted, pointing toward my daughter humming happily while drawing on the sidewalk. “We’d better go.”
She laughed. “Alright, I’ll stop. I just…” She took a step closer. “I don’t want you hiding away the rest of your life. You’re too good, Jake.”
“Sophie, don’t cry! We’re leaving,” I called out again while Sophie objected loudly, and my mom shook her head.
“Go on a date, Jake. Please. You might feel better.”
“That’s enough out of you, old lady,” I said lightly, calling Sophie over to give her grandma a hug. “We brought you some dinner from Chad’s. It’s in the fridge. If there are a couple bites missing from the cake, it was Sophie.”
She laughed, the lines on her face softening as she patted my cheek like I was a child. “Thank you. You’ll make some woman very happy one day.”
Which was my cue to leave.
7
JAKE
I layon my bed later that night listening to the disturbance outside my window with one ear open in misguided interest and one hand covering my face. It was like a bad whiplash of wanting to keel over with laughter one minute and bury myself in a coffin of second-hand embarrassment the next. I watched Shelby and Briggs from my window for only a minute or two when the pair first arrived to play basketball, before finding it too painful to watch. And I had recently survived a groin lap launch from Sophie, so that was saying something.