Georgie, All Along (93)
You are free to simply be.
Theoretically.
“So I’ll go ahead and schedule for next time?”
I blink across the counter at the woman standing in front of me. I can tell from the gentle, somewhat confused smile on her face that this question is being posed as part of a series, as though she has already said at least three other things that I have not heard. Her brown skin is smooth and shiny from her facial, and her eyebrows—done by the aesthetician the spa hired last week—look incredible.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I say. “Was I spaced out?”
The confused part of her smile fades; it transforms into something more understanding. “Who isn’t these days?”
I laugh, a customer-service-type laugh, and move over to the spa’s lone computer, pulling up the scheduling program. It’s always slow to load, and to prevent myself from using this dead air time to continue to fail at being theoretical, not-thinking-about-Levi me, I decide to launch myself into some customer-service-type chat.
“That’s for sure,” I answer, falsely cheerful, but I’m convincing. “More than usual for me today.” Instead of saying, Because I wrote this journal when I was in eighth grade that has my boyfriend’s brother’s name all over it, and my boyfriend found it, and then he panic-offered me a place to live, and also insulted me! I say, “My best friend had a baby! Yesterday she got discharged from the hospital.”
“Oh, isn’t that wonderful!”
I nod, finally getting the scheduling program to load. “Sonya Rose,” I say, clicking through various tabs. “Seven pounds, nine ounces.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” says the woman, and I nod again.
“After my best friend’s mom.” I get choked up thinking about it, or maybe it’s that I’ve been getting choked up every ten to twenty minutes for the last two days. Not theoretically.
The client—her name is Tasha, the scheduling program finally tells me—clearly notices my welling eyes but doesn’t want to put me on the spot about it.
She says gently, “Do you have any pictures?”
Lucky for her, I have ten thousand pictures. That is maybe a slight exaggeration, but not by much. I met Harry and Bel and baby Sonya at their house yesterday, my parents in tow, and it had been a picture bonanza, even more than at the hospital. Mostly Sonya didn’t do anything but sleep, but it was the most fascinating, beautiful sleeping I’d ever seen, and also, there was something about being around her—being around Bel and Harry being around her—that definitely kept me pretty firmly in the present. Babies and their new parents need a lot to make things better for them in the moment, and I was happy to deliver.
“She’s lovely,” says Tasha, as I swipe to another photo.
“This one you can see her little fingernails. Have you ever seen anything like that!”
Tasha laughs. “I’ve got a couple of my own at home.” There’s a note of patient indulgence in her voice, which means I went too far with the pictures.
I pull my phone from the counter, wincing. “Sorry! I got a little excited.”
“You’re a great auntie.”
I get choked up again over the simple kindness and renew my focus on what she needs—scheduling for her next facial and threading appointment, settling her bill, giving her the small gift bag of samples we hand out to clients after their services. When she tucks it into her purse and thanks me, I’m already restless with the knowledge of what is surely going to be my renewed theoretical failure once she’s gone: It’s my first shift back at work since Sonya—since Levi—and every time I’ve had more than five minutes alone I’ve done the sort of spacing out that Tasha caught me doing. It doesn’t help that it’s a slow day, not many appointments scheduled, and I’m still here for another three hours before I start a dinner shift over at the restaurant.
But as Tasha’s making her way out the door, someone else makes their way in, and for a fleeting second I’m relieved. Maybe this person will look at the 9,775 photos Tasha didn’t have time for.
But then I register that it’s Olivia Fanning.
I swallow and stand from my chair, smoothing my uniform shirt. I’m unusually nervous in her presence, because I haven’t seen her since that night at The Bend, the night I told her and Evan—flatly, sharply—that Levi and I were together. Now it’s not even a week later and I not only know something more—something awful—about the Fanning family history, I also don’t know what Levi and I are anymore.
“Hey, Georgie,” she says, and it’s clear she’s nervous, too: her cheeks flushed, her hand coming up to pat her already perfect hair.
“Hey,” I answer, all my usual enthusiasm muted. Muffled under the weight of my sadness.
She takes a deep breath before she speaks again. “I’m glad to see you here. We were . . . um. We were kind of worried you wouldn’t come back.”
I furrow my brow, confused.
“You know, after . . .” she trails off, not completing the thought, but I know what it is. After we saw you and Levi out. “And then you called off the other day.”
“Oh. Well, that wasn’t because . . .” Now I trail off, not completing my thought, either. “Annabel had her baby,” I say instead. “I called off because I was in the hospital with her.”