***
It was scary crying. I didn’t do it much, not even after terrible breakups, but this time I let it consume me because it was Reece who drove away. Not some other guy from my past who I learned was completely inconsequential. No. This was Reece. And I let him go.
I curled up on the couch under the pergola and wept bitterly. I couldn’t do it inside with Poppy. I couldn’t look at her. She sat at the front door waiting for Reece to return, like he’d gone to the grocery store for milk and would be back in five minutes. I didn’t hear the latch lift. It wasn’t until Soledad took me in her arms that I noticed she was even there.
“Bailey, Bailey,” she said softly, rocking me side to side. “Tu corazón duele.”
“I let him go!” I cried. “I let him go!”
“Shhhh,” Soledad said. “Sólo llorar se puede. A veces esa es la única cosa que podemos hacer.”
I clung to her, listening to the rolling, fluid sound of her foreign words. And I understood all of them. She was comforting me, trying to soothe the pain that lay heavy like a cinderblock on my heart.
“I had to,” I said. “I had to do it! I don’t deserve him. I never did!”
Soledad talked on and on, her tumbling words sending me out to sea on my surfboard, floating up and down and up and down on soft waves. I wanted her to keep talking. She could lull me to sleep, and then I’d have peace for a while. I could pretend in my dreams that nothing had really happened. I could put the earth back together under my feet, rework the shifted plates, and wake up in the morning to see Reece standing in our back yard, asking me if I wanted pancakes or eggs.
“Keep talking,” I whispered. And she did.
She rocked me to sleep, singing a love song in Spanish, or at least that’s what I imagined. I drifted into a memory. Him. Already a memory.
In the morning, everything looked different. I was scared out of my mind but determined to see it through. Reece deserved better. And I was not better. I was worse off than before my dad died. I watched him gather his clothes from the closet, Poppy at his heels, worried and whining. When his car was packed, he just stood there, car door open, waiting for me to say something.
I gave him the ring. He resisted.
“Please take it,” I pleaded. “I don’t deserve it.”
He slipped it in his pocket without a word. And then he left. For good.
***
Christopher tentatively walked through the door carrying beer and a box filled with spicy chicken wings. He heard the sound of Reece’s favorite band floating from the back bedroom. They sang a depressing tune that complemented the mood of this “long December.”
“Reece!” he called.
He watched his friend emerge from the bedroom, disheveled and dazed. He wore a ratty white T-shirt and even rattier pajama pants. He shuffled down the hall and into the kitchen, leaving a faint acrid stench behind him.
“Dude,” Christopher said under his breath, then plopped dinner on the kitchen counter. “I love you, man, but you stink.”
Reece ignored him and grabbed a beer. He trudged to the couch—the only piece of furniture in his living room.
“Where your dishes?” Christopher called.
“I don’t know.”
“Reece, did you leave your box of dishes in storage?”
“I don’t know.”
“You got any napkins?”
“I don’t know.”
Christopher paused. “What day is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“For Christ’s sake, man! When’s the last time you ate?”
Reece guzzled his beer.
Christopher took a deep breath and peered into the box. He pulled out some napkins and packets of wet wipes, then brought everything over to the couch.
“You lucky they put some napkins in here,” he said, setting the box between them on the middle cushion.
“I have toilet paper,” Reece offered.
Christopher snorted. “Man, you use toilet paper on your hands after touchin’ one of them wings, and you tell me if you like it.”
Reece smirked.
“You plannin’ on takin’ a shower any time soon?”
“What’s the point?”
“It’s called being a human being and living,” Christopher said. “Brush your damn teeth!”
Reece slurped his beer.
“When you comin’ back to work?”
Reece shrugged and turned on the TV.
“You made sure to get the cable working, but you couldn’t be bothered to have plates and, oh, I don’t know, furniture and shit in your place?”
“This isn’t my place,” Reece replied. “It’s just temporary.”
Christopher grew quiet. The men ate a few wings before Christopher dared to broach the subject.
“Did you fight hard enough?” he asked tentatively.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Kind of tired of being discarded, Chris. I know you don’t understand that, but when you’re a kid who gets shuffled around from home to home throughout your entire childhood, it’s bound to give you a complex.” Reece finished his beer. “I’ve got a complex.”
“She does, too,” Christopher pointed out. “So how does that work?”
Reece grunted. “She’ll come to her senses. This is temporary.”
Christopher took a deep breath. “Reece, you gotta be okay with it if this winds up being your permanent place. And maybe get you a chair in here and a table or something.”
“What are you saying?” Reece asked, alarmed.
“I’m just sayin’ that you can’t function like this much longer. You gotta get yourself together. Come back to work. Dan’s only gonna be so patient with you.”
“Is she back?” Reece asked.
Christopher nodded. “Yeah. Bailey was back on Monday.”
“How?” Reece asked. He couldn’t comprehend it. She pushed him out of her life on Saturday night. How could she be fine to go to work Monday morning? Wasn’t she as heartsick as he was?