“Emma, can you get it?” Jeannie’s voice rang out from upstairs. “I’m a bit busy at the moment!”
“No problem!” I shouted back, relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about Odysseus’s vacuum powder consumption or lack of language mastery for at least the next few minutes. Not that it was really my problem anyhow. But as his aunt and his godmother—not to mention someone who loved him—I was concerned about a lot of things.
Straightening my wrinkled T-shirt and combing my fingers through my hair (when had I last washed it anyhow?—somehow I had stopped caring), I walked down the front hallway and pulled open the front door. My jaw dropped when I saw who was standing there in khakis and a button-down shirt, his brown hair neatly combed, his square-jawed face freshly shaved, and a bouquet of red roses in his hand.
“Hi, Emma,” Brett said. He looked me up and down for a moment, vaguely confused. I guessed he hadn’t expected a rumpled, unwashed, disheveled version of the previous me.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted out.
Granted, it wasn’t the most tactfully phrased query. But really. What was he doing on my sister’s doorstep?
“I heard you were back in town,” he said. He appeared to be studying the wrinkles in my shirt with some consternation.
“You heard?” I repeated. I stared at him for a moment and sighed. “Let me guess. Jeannie called you.”
Brett shrugged. “Yeah, well,” he said. “She thought I might want to see you.”
“How nice of her.”
Brett paused. “I, uh, brought you flowers,” he said, holding out the roses.
I stared at them. “I can see that,” I said flatly. I made no move to take them. Eventually, he lowered them to his side.
“You weren’t going to call?” Brett shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“I didn’t think we had much to talk about.”
Brett tried one of his charming smiles, the ones that used to win me over. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think we have a lot to talk about. Can I come in?”
I sighed and thought about it for a moment. “Fine.” I turned away and let him follow me down the hallway into Jeannie’s living room. Not surprisingly, she was already standing there.
“Oh, Brett!” she cooed, shooting me a look. “How very nice to see you!”
“You, too, Jeannie,” Brett said. They gave each other European-style pecks on the cheeks, which made me want to laugh. What looked so natural a greeting in Paris seemed pretentious and awkward on the two of them. And they had no idea.
“Well, I’ll leave the two of you alone,” Jeannie chirped after a moment. “I’m sure you have a lot to talk about!” She shot me another meaningful glance and added, “I’d forgotten how perfect you look together!” She clapped her hands together gleefully and flounced out of the room, yelling “Odysseus! Odysseus! Mommy’s coming!” in her ridiculous baby-talk voice.
I rolled my eyes. I needed to get out of here.
I sat down on the living room couch and gestured vaguely and unenthusiastically for Brett to sit on the love seat opposite me. Instead he sat down beside me and looked at me with baleful eyes. “I’m so glad you’ve come back, baby,” he said. My stomach turned, and I scooted away from him. Brett looked insulted. “Emma, I’ve never stopped loving you. You know that.”
“Really?” I asked sweetly. “Were you loving me when you were screwing Amanda?”
Brett’s eyes widened and he coughed. “I was just trying to get over you, you know,” he said. “It didn’t mean anything.”
“Ah. Of course not. How silly of me to be upset that you were screwing my best friend.”
Brett looked annoyed. Evidently, this isn’t the way he had expected things to go. I suspected that Jeannie had implied to him that I thought, as she evidently did, that he was the answer to all my prayers. And Brett had been dumb enough to believe that he could dump me, hook up with my friend, and come back to a blanket of full forgiveness.
“So I guess Paris didn’t work out,” Brett said after a moment. He looked a little smug. “You must have been unhappy there.”
“Actually,” I said, “it was the happiest I’ve been in my life.”
Brett looked surprised. “What about when you were with me?”
“As I said,” I repeated calmly, “being in Paris was the happiest I’ve been in my life.”
He looked completely baffled, as if the thought that the world didn’t revolve around him had never before crossed his mind. He stared for a long moment and then cleared his throat. “Look,” he said. “We’ve both made some mistakes here. But don’t you think it’s time to put that all behind us?”
I was about to respond when Jeannie whisked into the room, balancing Odysseus on her hip. He was waving some sort of little plastic truck around, making vroom-vroom noises and smacking the back of Jeannie’s head every few seconds. She didn’t seem to notice.