Never Have I Ever(57)

“Black’s good,” I said. I hadn’t had a whole cup of coffee in a year and a half, thanks to Oliver. Caffeine made him so hyper. But right now that life seemed far away.

He came around the bar with our mugs. His had a map of the world curved around it. Mine said world’s best dad.

“You have kids?” I asked, taking it.

“Not that I know of.” It was a very Tig Simms answer. “You?”

“Two,” I said. “My stepdaughter, Madison is fifteen, and about eight months ago I had a baby. Boy. Oliver.”

“Eight months? Shit, you do look good,” he said, and that was all.

“Thanks.”

I liked that my weight loss didn’t seem to be that big a deal for him. Anyone else, we’d be talking about it still. It had happened over and over as my body changed in Boston. People would express amazement, delight, and ask how I was doing it. I never told the truth. Never said, I eat less than five hundred calories a day, I throw most of that up, and then I take a laxative. I’d murmur something about walking more, and they would overpraise me, acting as if I were beating cancer. Tig didn’t do any of that. He was simply glad to see me.

He said, “Gimme a sec, okay? I just woke up.”

He set our coffees on the bar and disappeared into the back of the house. I could hear water running.

I took a sip of mine. Now that I was here, time felt different. As if I’d driven backward through it, back to find myself fifteen again, landing in a place where Tig and I were friends. Early days, before it all went south. As if we had yet to break anything that could not be mended.

I ought to get up while he was gone and search his house for signs of Roux. But now that I’d seen him, it was very hard to treat him like a criminal. I didn’t want to ask about Roux, or blackmail, or even if he’d hated me for a time, in spite of what his hands said. Not just yet.

In the wake of his surprising joy to see me, what I wanted to know most was why he’d kissed me, all those years ago. Pity and chemicals, I’d thought then, because my mother had taught me that fat girls don’t get kissed or touched or loved. I did not believe that anymore. I’d used food to hurt my body in a lot of ways over the years; when I was ninety-eight pounds, I’d felt as unworthy of love as I had when I was over two hundred.

Now I’d been at relative peace inside my body for long enough to wonder, had he loved me?

I should have gone back to that old mattress when he asked. We might have kissed more, or talked eye to eye about drunken, silly things, or slept off our high, side by side.

If only we had.

I could see it, like another world. One where Mrs. Shipley drove in circles until her fussy baby fell asleep and then they all went safely home. I would be an entirely different Amy. My family wouldn’t have moved to Boston. Tig and I would have finished high school together, gone off to different colleges, lost touch. Or maybe not. We might have stayed friends. We’d both have been home summers. We might have kept kissing, on and off, over the years. Maybe now I would be raising curly-headed babies in a house like this, near a garage. Or maybe he would be designing car engines for Lexus and I would be studying literature in France. I had no way to see how our lives might have unfolded. I could only see the things that would not be.

In that world I never met Charlotte. She never brought me Davis. He and Maddy picked someone else. And Oliver? He never came to be.

I wouldn’t wish Oliver away for anything. Not on the earth or off it. And yet I still wanted to know. Had Tig loved me then, a little?

He came back, now in jeans now and a Restoration logo shirt. He sat down on the second stool, angling to face me. The space was so small our knees touched, and I could smell the new mint on his breath.

“I want to say things to you,” Tig said. He had always been the chatty one in our old friendship. The idea guy, waving his hands around for emphasis and punctuation.

“Me, too,” I said. “I want to say a lot of things.”

This close, even in the dim, warm glow of the single lamp, I could see all the ways he’d gotten older. There were deep scores on both his cheeks, like parentheses around his mouth, and creases at the corners of his eyes. I hoped they meant that he’d smiled a lot since I’d seen him. His teeth were the same, with that little overlap on both sides where his canines tilted in.

“Why’d you pay my mortgage off?” he asked.

The question didn’t surprise me. Roux knew I had paid it off, and if she’d learned about my past through him, of course he knew, too. They had to be connected. Somehow.

“I owed you,” I said simply. “When did you know it was me?”

He shook his head. “Not at first. I was too damn happy to question it, you know? I was gonna lose the place, and then pow. Magic happened. Who looks a gift grant in the mouth? A few weeks later, these guys I jam with were over, and we got all Auld Lang Syne-y. Playing Pixies. ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven.’ God, you loved that song.”

“I remember,” I said.

“So I’m singing it, right, and you were in my head. You always are when we play Pixies. I thought, Oh. It was Smiffy. Had to be. You were my only rich friend, ever, and there’s no such thing as a bunch of free money that comes looking for you. You have to hunt that shit down. I wanted to see you then. I wanted to thank you. Ask you why you did it.”