Girls of Summer(22)
They went to dinner several times. He didn’t rush her to bed, but when they finally made love, he was careful and caring. He took her to the symphony, the theater, the ballet. She had to buy new clothes for all these special occasions, and beautiful, luxurious, sexy underwear for after.
He wrote a song about how he loved her and played it for her on the piano. He cooked for her. He brought her flowers. He agreed that when they had time, he would go to Nantucket with her to meet her mother.
Juliet was only slightly bothered by the way he acted toward her at work. He didn’t favor her or especially notice her in the office. He seldom looked her way and he never called her in for private meetings. He was out of town many weekends, most often in New York, on business. Those were long weekends for Juliet, because he never called or texted her, and even though she had his number, she was too proud to call him. He had her off balance. She loved her job, and she was good at it, so she had never considered an office relationship. But Hugh told her he loved her. She was expecting a proposal and an engagement ring.
Instead, on a beautiful day in May, Hugh Jeffers walked into the office and announced to the entire staff that he was moving back to New York. Suzanne Daniels would be coming here to Boston to replace him.
Juliet had spent the night with him a week ago, and he hadn’t even hinted at such a move. When he made his announcement to the group, his eyes slid over her as if she were nothing but a shadow.
It was all Juliet could do to get through that day. She wanted to corner him and demand to know what he was thinking, what his move meant for her. But she stubbornly kept hold of her dignity and didn’t pursue him. Not that night. Not for three days and nights. She’d been certain he would seek her out, or phone her at home, or at least send her an email. But nothing.
Finally, on a Saturday morning, she phoned him and asked him to meet her for lunch, or dinner, or a drink. Hugh told her he didn’t have time. So they had a brief and chillingly unpleasant conversation over the phone. She held back her tears. He told her he’d assumed she knew how ambitious he was, and yes, of course he had really loved her, but love could appear in many forms. He thought she knew that he would always love his work more.
Juliet felt like such a fool. How had she allowed herself to be so sappy, so gullible, such a simpering peasant believing the white knight would carry her off on his galloping steed to a castle in happy land?
She hated herself. She was ashamed. She slunk around her apartment all Saturday and Sunday, crying and eating. She talked for hours to Mary. But she didn’t phone her mother. She worried about her poor mother, living alone in her big old empty house. Juliet just couldn’t dump her troubles on her mom.
She didn’t want to go back to the office on Monday because she was afraid the other programmers would look at her with pity. But she forced herself to work, hoping it would distract her from her misery. She pulled on black leggings and a black tank, glad this was her normal outfit. She didn’t want to be seen in some bizarre kind of mourning.
She walked to work, bought her usual everything bagel, plastered on a fake just fine look and took the elevator to the sixth floor. The long monochromatic space was like any other cubicle farm. People were already here, bent toward their computers. Only Mary gave her a quick hello. Everyone was gearing up to prove they were essential to the new supervisor. Juliet collapsed at her desk and worked in steady despair. No doggie antics made her laugh.
She went through the week in a kind of gloom coma. She faked a smile when necessary, but mostly she kept her head down, and she got a pile of work done.
At the end of the work week, Juliet wanted to go home. Not to her lonely apartment, but to her real home in Nantucket. She had probably driven poor Mary mad every evening with all her weeping and anger. Who else could she turn to? Theo was on the West Coast now. Plus he was such a guy, so unsentimental, he was hopeless. Juliet had gone home for the past Christmas, and Theo stayed in California, so Juliet had her mother all to herself, a real pleasure. They cooked and ate and went for long walks on the stormy beaches and watched old movies together, eating ice cream from the container.
Suddenly, right now, Juliet wanted to go to Nantucket. She wanted all things not digital, not clickable. She wanted to curl up on a sofa with a slice of her mother’s red velvet cake, and read anything by Agatha Christie. She wanted to fall asleep in the middle of the night, right there on the sofa. Her mother would gently cover her with a blanket, and in the morning, she would wake her up, laughing at Juliet’s wrinkled clothes. She’d fix Juliet an enormous fattening breakfast of eggs and sausage and pancakes instead of the bagel Juliet bought on the way to work, and she’d tell Juliet she’d lost too much weight, and Juliet would eat lots of sweets.
Brainstorm: She actually could go home. All the work she had to do could be done anywhere there was Wi-Fi.
She arrived at her own city home, a four-story clapboard house, one of the many on the street that needed painting, yanked the front door open, and stepped into the small front hall. She didn’t bother to check her mailbox—anything important came on her phone. As she trudged up the stairs and let herself into her apartment, she took out her phone and checked the bus and ferry schedules to Hyannis and Nantucket. If she hurried, she could take the red line to South Station, the Plymouth and Brockton to Hyannis, and the eight o’clock slow ferry to the island. No fast boats were running that night.
She didn’t take her leather jacket off. She didn’t need to pack—she had clothes in her room at home. She had her wallet in one pocket of her jacket, her phone in another pocket, her charger and computer in her backpack. She went out her door, locked the locks, and ran down three floors of slippery steps to the front door.