Emergency Contact(37)

Lorraine laughed dryly and took another sip of wine.

“So much for the pact.”

“Well,” he said. “We make up and break up without talking about what actually happened.”

“What are you asking me, Sam?”

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “Why we’re not together.”

Lorraine put her fork down and sighed.

“We don’t make sense,” she said. As if that explained anything.

“How can you say that?”

Sam suddenly wished he’d ordered a glass of wine. Or a box.

“We’re not friends,” she said.

Sam felt the dull thud of her words in his sternum. It took all of his composure to maintain eye contact. He scrunched his napkin under the table.

“We were these lunatic hotheads that fought and made up,” Lorraine continued. “You’d scream and cry. I’d want to get it over with, and that was that.”

Sam couldn’t stand the way she distilled their relationship to the plot of a formulaic rom-com. Or as if she were wearing a white coat and chuckling about the mating lab rats she kept under observation.

“You say that like there weren’t truly beautiful moments,” he muttered into his food. “We loved each other.”

“I know we did,” she said. She took his hand in hers, with a tender smile playing on her lips, as though she were bargaining with a child. “I still love you in a way. I swear to God, Sam, sometimes you were so good at literally reading my mind.”

Sam pictured Lorraine cracking his skull open and reading his brain grooves literally like braille.

“But we were together for four years,” she continued. “And you didn’t make an effort to get to know me or my family.”

At the mention of “family,” Sam stiffened. He wasn’t big on the Mastersons. He recalled the abysmal Easter when he’d had dinner with them at Chez Jumelles.

“Oh, you mean the time your racist dad asked me if I had any Middle Eastern blood so he’d have a real reason to hate me?”

Lorraine removed her hand from his. “No, he didn’t,” she said.

“He sure did,” he said. Not that it made a difference. The night was a wash from the get-go. The Capital Metro bus strike happened at the last minute and Sam arrived straight from work in a bleach-stained Black Flag T-shirt.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You were outright hostile toward them. It’s hardly my parents’ fault that they’re well off. They work like demons.”

She said this plainly. As if there were no privileges inherent in being land-rich by pedigree for generations. A distant relative on her mom’s side, C.E. Doolin, had also happened to invent the Frito. Rather, he’d happened to buy the recipe for a song from the Mexican man who’d invented it.

“It’s not as if it were some great secret that you were”—she gazed up at him—“not well off.” She miraculously sidestepped calling him poor. “Your clothes are a dead giveaway.”

Sam chewed on the inside of his cheek. Lorraine went on cataloging his shortcomings between bites of food. Sam was a romantic, no doubt, and these were parts of their relationship he’d forgotten about. The comparisons. Sam wanted to get up, calmly set his napkin down, and sprint out into the night.

“Hey,” said Lorraine, poking his hand. “I’m just joshing. Partly.”

Sam didn’t think so. He took another bite as his stomach roiled. Though, mercifully, he didn’t pass out.





PENNY.


“Writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”—Mary Heaton Vorse.

Penny got up at five fifteen a.m. No matter when she closed her eyes, they snapped open before six. These days it was a blessing, seeing as she needed a quiet moment to write. She hadn’t had to do that before—find time. And she wondered lately if tapping out little blue bubbles to Sam was somehow sucking her inspiration well dry. Penny feared that she’d used up her best stuff on him, and her mind wandered constantly. It didn’t help that a pert little antenna stayed vigilantly trained on her phone, scanning the airwaves to see if he needed company or was having a mini crisis.

Penny threw on a sweatshirt and cracked open her laptop.

Henry Miller, whose middle name was Valentine and who when he died was married to a Japanese woman, said, “Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterward.” Penny wondered where marrying came in, considering Miller had five wives. She also wondered where workshopping Sam’s drama fell in terms of priorities. For Penny, it was sizing up to be “text first and always.”

SAM HOUSE

Sunday 4:14 PM

What do you love about your writing class Nothing. I hate it

Also i love it

Obvs

Say more

OK


Penny cracked her knuckles. She’d hooked up iMessage to her laptop so she could type as much as she wanted without her fingers falling off.

It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to feeling like a writer A real one

You sit there and you have to do it

Everyone is capable of putting words down Or telling a story

But not everyone will actually do it This class is about the doing