Forever, Interrupted(44)

“I think, really, I’m just going to go to sleep. Is that okay? Do you think that’s bad? To go to sleep at”—I look at the clock on my cell phone; it is even earlier than I thought—“to go to bed at seven oh three p.m.?”

“I think you have had a very hard day and if you need to go to sleep, that’s okay. I’m going to go home and let my dog out and I’ll be back,” she says.

“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t need to, you can sleep in your own bed.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want you to be alone if you—”

“No, I’m sure.” I don’t know how she’s been sleeping here for all of these days, living out of a backpack, going back and forth.

“Okay.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll come by in the morning,” she adds. She grabs her things and heads out the door, and when it closes, the apartment becomes dead and silent.

This is it. This is my new life. Alone. Quiet. Still. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. Ben and I had mapped out our lives together. We had a plan. This wasn’t the plan. I’ve got no plan.





FEBRUARY


Ben called me from the car to tell me he would be late. Traffic was backed up.

“I’m stuck on the 405. Nobody’s moving and I’m bored,” he said to me. I had been at lunch with Ana and had just left and made my way home.

“Oh no!” I said, opening up my front door and placing my things on the front table. “How far away are you?”

“With this traffic I can’t even tell, which sucks because I want to see you,” he said.

I sat down on the couch and kicked my shoes off. “I want to see you too! I missed you all morning.” Ben had spent the night with me and left early to make the visit down to Orange County. He had planned on telling his mother about us and wanted to do it in person.

“Well, how did it go?” I asked.

“We went out to breakfast. She asked a lot about me. I kept asking about her, but she kept turning the conversation back to me and there just . . . there wasn’t an opening to say it. To tell her. I didn’t tell her.”

He didn’t say the phrase “I’m sorry,” but I could hear it in his voice. I was disappointed in him for the first time, and I wondered if he could hear it in mine.

“Okay, well . . . you know . . . it is what it is,” I said. “Is traffic moving? When do you think you’ll be home? Er . . . here. When do you think you’ll be here?” I had started to make this mistake more and more often, calling my home his home. He spent so much time here, you’d think he lived here. But paying rent in one place and spending your time in another was just the way things were done when you were twenty-six and in love. Living together was something entirely different, and I was showing my hand early by continuing to make that mistake.

“You keep doing that!” he teased me.

“Okay, okay, it was a mistake. Let’s move on.”

“The freeway is clearing up so I should be there in about a half hour, I think. Then I think I’ll move in, in about four months. We will get engaged a year after that and married within a year after that. I think we should have time alone together before we have kids, don’t you? So maybe first kid at thirty. Second at thirty-three or thirty-four. I’m fine to have three if we have the money to do it comfortably. So, with your biological clock, let’s try for the third before thirty-eight or so. Kids will be out of the house and in college around fifty-five. We can be empty-nested and retired by sixty-five. Travel around the world a few times. I mean, sixty is the new forty, you know? We’ll still be spry and lively. Back from world travel by seventy, which gives us about ten to twenty years to spend time with our grandkids. You can garden, and I’ll start sculpting or something. Dead by ninety. Sound good?”

I laughed. “You didn’t account for your midlife crisis at forty-five, where you leave me and the kids and start dating a young preschool teacher with big boobs and a small ass.”

“Nah,” he said. “That won’t happen.”

“Oh no?” I dared him.

“Nope. I found the one. Those guys that do that, they didn’t find the one.”

He was cocksure and arrogant, thinking he knew better, thinking he could see the future. But I loved the future he saw and I loved the way he loved me.

“Come home,” I said. “Er, here. Come here.”

Ben laughed. “You have to stop doing that. According to the plan, I don’t move in for another four months.”





JUNE


I lie in bed all morning until Ana shows up, and she tells me to get dressed because we are going to the bookstore.

When we walk into the behemoth of a store, I follow Ana along as she picks up books and puts them down. She seems to have a purpose, but I don’t much care what it is. I leave her side and walk toward the Young Adult section. There I find a trio of teenage girls, laughing and teasing each other about boys and hairstyles.

I run my fingers over the books, looking for titles that I now own on my own bookshelf, their pages torn and softened by Ben’s fingers. I look for names I recognize because I got them from work and brought them home to him. I never guessed correctly, the books he’d want to read. I don’t think I ever got one right. I didn’t have enough time to learn what he liked. I would have learned though. I would have studied it and learned it and figured out who he was as a book reader if I’d just been given enough time.