CHAPTER 27
Felix is leaving for Portland on Monday. Not for good. He’s only going for the week to help with setting up the new office, interviewing some potential new employees from the West Coast, meeting with the mayor and various people in Energy, Waste Management, and City Planning, preparing for the Big Move.
The Big Move is happening June first, four months from now, and Felix has already begun packing up his apartment. Katie is curled up on his couch, drinking Chardonnay, watching him remove books from his bookcase, stacking them into cardboard boxes.
“You wanna watch a movie?” she asks.
“Yeah, lemme just finish up this shelf.”
“I don’t get why you’re doing that now.”
“One less thing I have to do later.”
She shakes her head, not comprehending him. If she were in charge of packing, those books might get thrown into boxes four days before the move, but not a minute before then. It’s not simply that she’s a procrastinator. What kind of person wants to live in a living room full of brown cardboard boxes for four months? What if he wants to read one of those books before June? She shakes her head again. She imagines all of her books packed into moving boxes, and her stomach sours. If she were moving to Portland in four months . . . The sentence hurts too much to finish it.
“What do you think about next week?” asks Felix, holding a copy of Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick.
“Whaddaya mean?” asks Katie, playing dumb.
“Are you coming with me?”
“I dunno. I’d have to find subs for all my classes, and it’s kind of last minute.”
“Jesus, Katie. You’ve known about this trip for weeks. You’re totally dragging your feet. I think you don’t want to come, and you’re afraid to tell me.”
She’s afraid of a million things right now.
“That’s not it.”
“Then come with me. We’ll explore Portland together, see what’s there. You’ll love the microbreweries. We can go hiking, maybe find a cool space for your yoga studio. And we need to look for an apartment. The move is coming up fast, and we still don’t have a place to live.”
She winces without meaning to with every “we” and hopes he didn’t see her. He “we”s her all the time. He’s being positive and hopeful, even charmingly persuasive if she’s in the right mood, but today each “we” rubs her the wrong way, a bra strap on a sunburn, a callous assumption on the edge of bullying.
She hasn’t told him she’s not going.
“I’m okay with you picking out an apartment without me.”
“I think we should do that together. Let’s go find a place, and then we can really start imagining our future there.”
The only place she can imagine her future with any clarity is in a nursing home. And there’s no “we” there.
“I’m not sure I’m coming,” she says, tiptoeing toward the real answer.
Felix stops packing and rubs his bottom lip with his thumb. He has beautiful lips.
“Do you mean Monday or June?”
Katie hesitates. She doesn’t want to talk about June. She wants to drink wine, snuggle on the couch, and watch a movie.
“Both.”
Felix pinches his lips. He stares at her hard, as if he’s trying to see through her eyes, into her mind or maybe her soul. Or maybe he’s trying to see whether he sees Huntington’s in her eyes.
“This is about HD,” he says.
“Yes.”
He leaves the books and boxes and sits down next to Katie on the couch.
“What about HD is keeping you from coming with me to Portland on Monday?”
“I dunno.”
“You know you don’t have HD now, even if you’re gene positive.”
“I know.”
“And you might be gene negative, so all this planning around you having HD someday might be a colossal waste of time.”
“I know.”
“Then come with me!” he says, smiling, trying to persuade her with his dimple. That usually works.
“It’s not that simple.”
“You know you could line up the subs if you wanted to.”
She shrugs out of instinct, feeling like a kid in trouble with her parents. When cornered, it’s better to say nothing.
“If you get the test results, and it’s positive, are you breaking up with me?”
“I don’t know.”
Maybe. Probably.
“Jesus. You don’t know if you’re coming with me on Monday. You don’t know if you’re moving with me in June. You don’t know if you’re going to find out your test results. You don’t know if you’re breaking up with me if you have the HD gene. What the fuck do you know, Katie?”
She doesn’t blame him for getting frustrated and mad at her, but she can’t stand it. She hangs her head and stares at her claddagh ring, imagining her lonely finger without it. She wants to shrug or say I don’t know again and avoid him. She’d like to avoid everything—her test results, thinking about June, watching her dad fidget and fall, thinking about HD, being a depressing source of anger and frustration for Felix. Maybe she should break up with him now. His life would be so much easier without her.