The Year of Second Chances, page 20
“Whatever you say, Lindstrom.” Levi still looked skeptical, but he said no more as he helped me move a row of old sawhorses.
After a few minutes, a chime sounded from Levi’s pocket. He paused and pulled out his phone. “Speaking of onward,” he said, waving the device toward me.
In the dimness, a lanky brunette with olive skin and tattoos floated on his phone screen. I recognized the telltale navy/pink color scheme, the bubble graphic.
I leaned closer to his screen, confused. “You’re back on Bubbl? What about Christy?”
“We broke up,” Levi said, pocketing the phone with a shrug.
Now the dark shadows under his eyes made sense. He probably wasn’t sleeping.
“Sorry to hear that,” I told him, and I meant it. “I liked Christy.”
“Me, too,” he said after a moment. “I thought we had something. But I fucked it up, as usual.” He picked back up the sawhorse he’d been transporting and plopped it in a corner. “So back to the drawing board, I guess.”
I put my hand out for his phone. “Can I see?”
We leaned over the profile once again.
My most irrational fear . . . Zombies because I know my brain is tasty ;).
“What do you think?” Levi asked.
The girl’s lines were pretty clever. My heart beat hard for some reason. “She seems cool.”
“What should I say?”
I scoffed. “Why are you asking me?”
“You bagged a ten, Lindstrom. You’re the Bubbl expert now.”
“Very funny.” I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling. “I don’t know, tell her you prefer your brains medium-rare or something.”
“See? I was too rusty to come up with something like that.” He gave me a jaunty salute as he headed back toward the Honda. “Thanks for the shirt, by the way.”
As he sped—way too fast—down the driveway, I went back to sweeping. The bristles made long streaks in the dust. In the corner where the sawhorses had been, the broom caught on a giant bug. I jumped.
Upon closer examination, it was long dead. Mummified. I added it to the nest of the dust.
Onward and upward.
20
Bet you you can’t . . .
Guess how many Batman jokes I’ve heard about my name.
“Places!” The stage manager poked her head in the doorway.
Behind the North Star Theater stage, I was giving Gregory a layer of powder. A series of prop mirrors lined the long tables of the little room, many of them fitted with light bulbs so bright I broke a sweat. It was the second Saturday of our three-weekend run, and Gregory had been telling me about a Best Buy commercial he’d landed.
As I finished, he stood, surveying himself in an oval, gilded mirror once used for a production of Snow White. His pale, silvery tunic shone against his brown skin, now coated with a ghostly sheen.
“Sickening.” He lifted his chin in a model pose. “You’re doing this for me for the Oscars red carpet someday.”
Two mirrors over, the actress playing Gertrude snorted.
“Gregory!” the stage manager hissed in the doorway with more urgency.
“Break a leg!” I called as he hurried off.
I began to set up all the palettes for the next series of ghostly transformations, and flowers for Ophelia—I’d found a way to make them look as if they were growing out of her skin. As Act II came to a close, I heard a familiar voice.
“Knock, knock.”
I waved Ted in, soon followed by Zoey, darting across the room to touch a rack of costumes, and Franny, more reluctant, staying close to the door as if preparing for escape.
Ted grinned his nervous grin, swinging his arms. “These two want some Pixar, and I forgot my laptop upstairs, so I figured we’d swing by and say hello.”
“Well, hello!” I was setting a small container of white creme at each mirror. I glanced at the laptop Franny was holding. “Why do you need your computer? Do you not have a TV, Ted?”
“Nope. Terri and I agreed. No TV.” At Franny’s glare, Ted’s firmness seemed to waver. “It was more Terri’s decision, but I . . . I see the merit.”
“But you do watch TV . . .” I said to Ted. “Just on a laptop.”
“On a crappy laptop,” Franny muttered.
“We watch movies on my laptop,” Ted corrected.
“Ted,” I said, grabbing a handful of freshly cleaned sponges. “Just get a TV. Watch movies the way they’re supposed to be watched. On a big screen.”
“Well, excuse me, Martin Scorsese.” Ted shrugged, glancing at Franny and me. “I just don’t see the difference!”
I handed Zoey the sponges and directed her to place them next to each container of creme, which she did with enthusiasm. Franny began to argue her case—not for the preservation of cinema but because all her friends had TVs—and I was reminded suddenly of my own dad. Sneaking out of bed on the rare nights he and Mom weren’t out partying after the restaurant closed down. Resting my head on his shoulder, clutching his arm in delighted fright as The Shining flickered, my fear dissipating with his belly laugh.
“The difference is in the details,” I added when Franny’s rant was over. “With a better screen, you can see the guts glistening in Alien. Or It. The rotten cracks in the clown’s pancake makeup.”
Zoey looked a bit disturbed but intrigued. Franny held up an entreating hand in my direction. “See?”
“Ho-kay,” Ted said, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “Not everyone needs their supernatural villains in disgusting detail.”
“The beautiful things are more beautiful, too,” I said, laughing. “I can’t think of any right now, but you know. The fantasy.” I slid over and elbowed Ted. “The romance.”
“Ew,” Franny said.
“Eeewww,” Zoey repeated, looking at her sister for approval.
Just then, the large actor playing Polonius shuffled into the room in a doublet, wiping fake blood off his fingers with a wet wipe. We must already be deep into Act III—we had to get moving.
As the actor plopped into his chair and began to apply the face creme, he glanced at Franny, Zoey, and Ted, who were watching him with fascination. “’Sup,” Zach said.
“Watch how we do Zachary’s face,” I told the rapt Kim family. “All the little details.”
And as I moved in front of the actor, the rest of the room fell away. Everyone’s skin in the cast was a different hue, requiring different shades of purple and blue, different types of fake frostbite depending on how long they’d been deceased and the method of their passing. Ophelia I would keep almost preserved, like wax, as if she’d stepped into the freezing river for a bath. The fake flowers grew out of her chest and neck, twisting and forming a crown in her hair, which I would coat with the same icy effect I’d given everyone else. That night, like most nights I’d spend at the theater, I would come home and collapse into bed—sometimes Jake’s, sometimes my own—and sleep heavily, peacefully.
Now, I stepped away from the ghost of Polonius and assessed how Zach looked under the lights. One more touch of black for the tip of his nose.
“So creepy,” Franny said behind me, shuddering a bit.
“So fun,” Zoey said, picking up a brush with curiosity.
“Morbid,” Ted said to me, shaking his head. “But amazing.”
“Yeah, Robin’s the GOAT,” Zach muttered, breaking the spell of his appearance.
“We should get going,” Ted said.
“Yeah, it’s going to get crowded in here,” I said. I nudged Franny and Zoey. “Hey, keep working on your dad about the TV. He’ll come around. In fact, I wouldn’t be doing all this . . .” I waved my hand across the makeup stations, toward Zachary “. . . if I didn’t have a TV growing up.”
“You’re a bad influence,” Ted said, but he was smiling.
Zoey carefully set the makeup brush she was holding back into its place, her face still struck with awe. “So this is your job?”
“Uh, no, I guess it’s not,” I said, taken aback, though it wasn’t immediately clear why the question threw me off. In a way, it had become a sort of job. “I do it because I like it. I love it,” I added.
“Can we stay and see this play?” Zoey asked her dad.
“No,” Franny commanded. She was halfway out the door now.
“Sorry, sweetie,” Ted said, steering her toward the exit. “This isn’t for kids.”
Zoey resisted, calling back to me, “Are you going to do another play, then?”
At this Ted, too, paused, raising his eyebrows at me as if to say, Well, are you?
I didn’t know how to answer. It had started as a favor—never had I thought I’d be doing anything like this, even when I was having fun on Halloweens past. I loved it, this was true, but I knew what another play meant. It meant another commitment, more time taken away from Jake, from helping Mom at the Green River, from the things that were supposed to matter most.
“I don’t know,” I said, and before I could say anything else, Ted and the girls had to step aside for Ophelia. I couldn’t think about the future right then, anyway. Act III was over, and the next phase of the play was about to begin.
We waved a hasty goodbye, I picked up my flowers, and I was lost to the world again.
Had it really only been six weeks since St. Patrick’s Day weekend? It felt like a lifetime. Now, on a Monday in May, my phone buzzed in my pocket halfway through a presentation on equity in the corporate workplace . . . Some things hadn’t changed, I supposed. The Honey Bun waiting for me in my office, for one. My boss glared from his seat. I glared back and silenced the phone.
The buzzing wasn’t Marcy or Jake, I discovered later as I tore into my snack. It was a calendar alert. Welcome Back Drinks with Manuel @ Wine Bar!
Who the hell was Manuel, and why had I scheduled drinks with him?
Then, I remembered: Manuel was someone I’d chatted with on Bubbl before Jake and I decided to become exclusive. He was a short, stocky, handsome bodybuilder type, I recalled, with thick black hair and a cute gap in his front teeth. He was going out of the country for a few weeks, he’d told me then, but would I like to grab happy hour with him when he came back? Sure, I’d said, and apparently we’d even picked a date and location. At that point it had seemed so far away. After Jake and I had gone on our epic forty-eight-hour date, I’d been smitten, so the only reason I was still on Bubbl then was my flimsy promise to Gabe to use the app for a full year.
Now, my only problem was that I had no way to contact Manuel to cancel, unless I wanted to reactivate my profile. I couldn’t do that. It felt too symbolic, like reactivating the old Robin. Besides, who knew if the chat I’d started with him would even still exist? Who knew if he would even remember me or the plans we’d made? Probably not.
But I found myself taking a turn toward Wine Bar after work, anyway. What if this guy did show up, waiting for me, wondering? I knew how it felt when people on Bubbl suddenly disappeared, and I imagined it would be ten times worse in person. I didn’t want to do that to Manuel—he seemed lovely. And even without the possibility of actually dating, even if it wouldn’t turn into clubbing with an Instagram-famous DJ or running through a corn maze or creating Thing 1 and Thing 2 on the fly, I had become fluent in what the hell, why not. Random calendar event with a world traveler? You say yes.
Manuel was sitting at the bar, looking up intently at a game of soccer playing on the TV above the bar. He had the sleeves rolled up on his crisp white shirt, which was tucked into a pair of well-fitting jeans. When I tapped his shoulder, he startled, almost knocking over his bottle of Michelob Ultra.
“Hi! Robin?”
“Manuel?”
“That’s me. I didn’t know if you would show up,” he said as I scooted onto a stool next to him.
“Have I got a story for you,” I replied.
“Oh, yeah?”
His smile was a bit shy—perhaps because of the gap in his teeth—but when I explained my situation, he laughed, and it spread across his face brilliantly. “Of course you’d nab a boyfriend while I was gone. You’re a catch. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” I smiled into my Sprite. His attention was warm and genuine, but no longer overtly flirty. He was good at this. I felt relaxed. “How was your trip?” I asked.
“Absolutely amazing.” A friend of his had gotten married in Spain, he told me, so he’d used the opportunity to travel. He’d gone to Sagrada Familia and the Gaudi houses in Barcelona. He’d seen Louis XV’s expansive Place de la Bourse and the Miroir d’eau in France. He stayed in cottages carved into hillsides and modernist glass condominiums that seemed to float above the skyline. “But my favorite was this Airbnb in San Sebastián,” he said. “Giant windows with bay views. Built-in bookshelves. Ample patio. Greenery everywhere.” He took a sip of his beer.
I’d been rapt, imagining every place he described. I’d never been to Europe. I’d never even been out of the country. “You must really love architecture,” I said.
“What can I say? I’m in real estate.” He took another sip. “And you? What do you do?”
“Oh, I just show up down the street and cut checks.” I shrugged. “I don’t love my job, but it’s fine.”
“You know what? That is fine. Our generation puts too much emphasis on finding our bliss or whatever. Sometimes you can show up. Go home. Have your fun after work.”
“Yep. About to do some of my own traveling, in fact,” I said with a little laugh.
“Oh, yeah?” Manuel wasn’t acknowledging the sarcasm.
I blushed, realizing how pathetic my little joke actually was. “There’s a setting on the treadmill at Anytime Fitness,” I explained. Sometimes, when Jake couldn’t go out and run in the bad weather, he would train for his next event indoors, and I would use his guest pass to run next to him—more like shuffle, more like galumph. Ragnar—the race for which we were supposedly training—sounded like a relay designed by Satan himself, I told Manuel. Every year, teams of masochists willingly traveled two hundred continuous miles on foot, each runner covering their segments in different shifts, camping for a night along the way.
This year, Jake’s Saturday running-club team needed one more runner. My initial answer was no, twice over. Then, at one of Smitty’s potlucks, they had surrounded me—Jake’s good-natured friends with their wide-eyed encouragement and their healthy glow—and I’d said yes. A little exercise would do me good, I figured. When we first started, it was as torturous as I imagined, my feet made of lead, my body screaming with resistance. Then I started to realize that when I stopped thinking about how torturous it was, time melted away. “Anyway, my favorite part is the virtual trails,” I finished. “Sometimes the treadmill takes you to downtown Seattle!”
Manuel nodded politely. “Ah, cool.”
I gestured to his beer, which was now almost empty. “I should let you finish that and get back to Brokenridge.” Better to get out now, before I made myself sound even more lame than I already was.
But he turned to me with curiosity. “Oh, you live in Brokenridge, huh?”
“I do, yeah.”
“That’s right. I remember now from your profile.” He hesitated, looking at the soccer game for a moment, then back at me with a newly focused expression, though his demeanor was still friendly. “Can I ask, do you rent or own?”
“Own,” I said. “Why?” What was he getting at?
He raised his dark eyebrows. “Brokenridge is about to be a big market. They’ve got that data-mining company building headquarters just down 35. Lots of new workers in your area.”
“Interesting,” I said, but just to appease him. It made sense that a Realtor would pay attention to that kind of thing, but it made no difference to me. I stood and held out my hand.
He stood with me and took it. His palms were soft and warm. “Hey. Thanks for not standing me up today. You’re sweet.”
“Happy to,” I said. “Good luck out there!”
Before I reached the door to Wine Bar, it was Manuel’s turn to tap me on the shoulder. “Before you go.” His smile was shy again. He put a stiff, shiny card in my hand. His business card. He’d written his phone number in pen under his name and photo. Manuel Arenas. “If you ever think about selling.”
“Ha! Right.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “You could get a great price. Quit your boring job for a while. Pack up. Go running around the Pacific Northwest for real.”
I stared at the scrawled numbers. Sell the farmhouse? Then again, I was the last holdout. Everyone in Gabe’s family was now scattered, back to Minneapolis, to Chicago, some of them on his mother’s side even back to Guatemala. When the rest of the Carrs had sold off their plots, Gabe’s parents had eventually given in, too, selling off parcel by parcel until they finally moved, leaving Gabe and me the last fertile acre. The last of the Carr-Morales land, where I now parked the Volvo and DVRed Bride of Chucky. But where would I go? There was no way. I tried to give Manuel back his card, but he refused to take it.
“Think about it,” he said and went back to the bar.
21
The hallmark of a good relationship is . . .
An agreed time to leave for the airport.
A month later, I found myself back at the Lee County Fair, taking shelter from the afternoon sun in the animal tent. It was the first time I had been back since our pre-chemo trip with Gabe, and it was just as hot as it had been then, just as lively. It was almost as if the same gaggle of Red Oaks teenagers butted in line for funnel cake as they had that day three years ago, the same kid vomited popcorn in the trash can near the tiny but mighty Gravitron, the same Prince-themed seed art won first prize, though that was every year. The biggest difference, of course, was that Gabe was not here, and today, Levi was the manic one.
HELP, he’d texted. This chick on Bubbl wants to do a “group hang” instead of a date. Please come with and be in my “group.” Please.
