Cackle(46)

I tell myself that I’ll have a glass. A single glass. I tell myself that I won’t immediately change into sweatpants and pull my hair back in a low ponytail like I’m the backwoods murder suspect in a low-budget crime show reenactment.

Act like a real, functioning human being, I beg myself as I climb the stairs to my apartment. Read a book. For the love of God, read a book!

But sure enough, after five minutes of walking around my apartment, pretending I’m not about to do exactly what I’m about to do, I do it.

I change into sweatpants, pull my hair back in a low ponytail, open the bottle of wine, not bothering to get a glass, and sit on the couch. I reach for the remote to put something on TV, but “accidentally” grab my phone instead.

Sam texted me again last weekend. He wrote, Annie . . .

I was with Sophie, so I didn’t respond. But I’m not with her now.

I know I shouldn’t talk to him. It’s better for me not to. A few days this past week, I woke up, and he wasn’t the first thing I thought about. I didn’t open my eyes and instantaneously feel the crushing ache that reminds me I’m without him. One day, I didn’t even think about him until I was eating my lunch, picking the crusts off of my uninspired turkey-and-mayo sandwich, something he used to criticize me for.

“The crusts won’t kill you!” he’d say.

“Where’s your proof?” I’d ask.

He’d groan. “It’s wasteful.”

“I give them to you,” I say. “No waste.”

As I sat there decrusting my sandwich, I wondered if he’d known that one day he wouldn’t be around to eat them. Maybe that was why he objected so strongly.

I lost my appetite, but I ate the sandwich anyway, not wanting it to go to waste.

Now, on my couch, trying to resist the urge to reach out to him, I come up with the idea to instead look at old pictures of us. For some reason, this seems like a good alternative.

A few pics in, I realize this is hands down the stupidest decision I’ve ever made.

The last picture we took together was a week before we broke up. We got ice cream sandwiches to celebrate the first warm day of the season, those magical hours in early spring when you no longer need a jacket, when the sun is high and bright, when the birds are extra chatty. It’s one of the rare occasions when everyone in the city is in a good mood, probably because the trucks are out and everyone’s eating ice cream.

Our fingers got so sticky from the ice cream sandwiches that, when we’d finally got some napkins from a generous street vendor and went to wipe our hands, the napkins stuck. Sam managed to take a selfie of us holding up our napkin fingers. We were making miserable faces, but you can see in our eyes that we were happy.

There’s a video of us on Valentine’s Day in which he’s working his way through the massive box of chocolates that he got for me, eating all of the undesirables. The molasses chews and weird nougats.

“I’m doing this for you!” he says, grimacing as he bites into what looks like a chocolate-covered turd. “Ugh!”

“This is so romantic,” I say, turning the camera around, capturing me laughing maniacally while he whines in the background.

I haven’t spent a Valentine’s Day single since I was thirteen. How will I cope with the endless stream of hearts and flowers and the onslaught of Hallmark gooeyness, knowing that I’m thirty and alone and that the person I have loved for so long doesn’t want me anymore? Knowing that Jill is somewhere out there pitying me. Knowing that pretty much everyone pities anyone single on Valentine’s Day.

Maybe not Sophie, but she doesn’t count.

Panic floods my lungs, and suddenly I’m struggling to breathe. I can hear my heart pounding like an angry neighbor. I’m sweating. Or maybe I’m crying. Probably both.

In the midst of this anxiety fit, it seems I’ve dialed Sam.

Because it’s ringing. Until it’s not ringing. Until he’s saying, “Annie? Hey!”

“Hi,” I say. I clear my throat. “Hey.”

“What’s up? How are you?” he asks. “I thought you were ignoring me.”

“No,” I say. “Just busy.”

“Molding impressionable young minds?”

“Sure,” I say. I tuck my feet underneath me, making myself as small as possible. I feel safer this way.

“So you weren’t ignoring me?”

“No,” I say. “I’m actually busy. New job. New apartment. New friends.”

“Other teachers?”

“No,” I say. “They’re all pretty cliquey.”

“It is high school.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Good you’re making friends, though.”

I don’t know why I called him. Was it to hear his voice? Was it to figure out why he’s been trying to reach me? Was it to ask him if it’s really too late to fix this? To repair our relationship, go back to how it was at the beginning. Get the spark back. Have sex on the living room floor and afterward snicker at our carpet burns.

Can I? Should I? Ask if we can go back to the start? Be more assertive, push harder like I know I should have that day in April.

“I thought you might have seen . . . ,” he says.

“Seen what?”

He doesn’t respond, and enough time passes that I feel it necessary to pull the phone away from my ear to check that the call didn’t get disconnected.