The Ex Talk(5)

So I sit back and let Paloma and Dominic take over. Dominic will win accolades and audiences, and I’ll stay right here behind the scenes.

Ends: never.





2




Even though he was never on the air, my dad had the best radio voice. It was powerful but soft, a crackling fire on the coldest night of the year. He grew up fixing radios and owned an electronics repair shop, though of course he eventually learned how to fix laptops and phones, too. Goldstein Gadgets: my favorite place in the world.

I inherited his love for public radio but not his voice. Mine is the kind of high-pitched voice men love to weaponize against women. Shrill. Unintelligent. Girly, as though being a girl is the worst kind of insult. I’ve been teased my whole life, and I still brace myself for cleverly disguised insults when I’m talking to someone for the first time.

My dad never cared. We hosted radio shows in our kitchen (“Tell me, Shay Goldstein, what kind of cereal are you having this morning?”) and on road trips (“Can you describe the scenery at this middle-of-nowhere rest stop?”). I’d spend afternoons with him at Goldstein Gadgets, doing my homework and listening to game shows, Car Talk, This American Life. All we needed was a great story.

I wanted him to hear me on the radio so badly, even if no one else did.

When he died my senior year of high school after a sudden cardiac arrest, it shattered me. Classes didn’t matter. Friends didn’t matter. I didn’t turn on the radio for weeks. Somehow, I managed a B-minus average for the University of Washington, but I couldn’t even celebrate getting in. I was still submerged in depression when I landed my internship at Pacific Public Radio, and slowly, slowly, I climbed out of darkness and into a conviction that the only way forward was to try to rebuild what I’d lost. Here I am, twenty-nine and clinging to that childish dream.

“Make people cry, and then make them laugh,” my dad would say. “But most of all, make sure you’re telling a good story.”

I’m not sure how he would have felt about Ask a Trainer.



* * *



—

I’m the fifth wheel at dinner tonight. My mother and her boyfriend Phil, and my best friend, Ameena, and her boyfriend, TJ are already seated at a Capitol Hill French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant by the time I emerge from rush hour traffic. Ameena Chaudhry and I grew up across the street from each other, and she’s been a constant in my life for more than twenty years.

“Only ten minutes late,” Ameena says, jumping out of her chair to lasso me into a tight hug. “That’s got to be a new record, right?”

TJ pulls out his phone to check the notes app. “There was one time last March we were all on time except for Shay, who was only three minutes late.”

I roll my eyes at this, but guilt twists my stomach. “It’s great to see you, too. And I really am sorry. I was rushing to finish one last thing and lost track of time.”

We try to schedule dinners as regularly as we can, but my mother and Phil are violinists in the Seattle Symphony with regular evening performances, Ameena is a recruiter at Microsoft, and TJ does something important-sounding in finance that I’ve never fully understood. On occasion—fine, most occasions—I stay late at the station to make sure everything’s prepped for the next day’s show. Today I was on the phone apologizing to Mary Beth Barkley for an hour.

I hug my mom and TJ, then shake hands with Phil. I’m still not sure how to navigate my mother having a boyfriend. Until Phil, she didn’t seem interested in dating. They’d been friends for ages, though, and he lost his wife a few years after we lost Dad. They supported each other during the grieving process, which of course never really ends, until they eventually became a different kind of support system.

I should be used to it by now, but by the time they started dating last year, I’d only just gotten used to the idea of my mother as a widow.

“As much as I love bullying Shay,” my mother says with a half smile in my direction, “I’m starving. Appetizers?”

Phil points at the menu. “The chili cumin pork ribs are supposed to be incredible,” he says in his Nigerian accent.

After we order and exchange how-was-your-days, Ameena and TJ share a quick sideways glance. Before they started dating, Ameena and I were the ones sharing sideways glances, inside jokes. Being the fifth wheel is only slightly crushing when I realize I’m not anyone’s person. Ameena and TJ live together, so it’s natural that she shares secrets with him before me, and my mother has Phil. I am a solid second, but I’m no one’s first.

I’m on a dating app hiatus, something I implement every so often when swiping becomes especially frustrating. My relationships seem doomed to never last longer than a handful of months. I want so badly to get to that place where Ameena and TJ are, five years of dating after they accidentally swapped orders at a coffee shop, that it’s possible I rush things. I’ve never not been the first to say I love you, and there are only so many times you can stomach total silence in response.

But I won’t lie—I want to be that first person someone tells everything to.

“I have some news,” Ameena says. “I’m interviewing with the Nature Conservancy tomorrow. So it’s not news, exactly, but news adjacent. It’s just the first phone interview, but . . .” She trails off with a shrug, but her dark eyes are bright with excitement.