I was never doing this relationship stuff again. Any of it.
I’d always told myself that what happened to Mom with Dad was isolated. That most men didn’t walk out on their pregnant wife and eight-year-old daughter, leaving them homeless and destitute. I believed in love. And when I met Nick, I’d believed I’d found the one. I was almost snide about it. See? There are good men out there. I knew lots. Zander, Gibson, Benny—and now I’d found one to be the love of my life too.
But having men as friends and peers and family is very different than having them as partners.
Everything Mom had told me my whole life about being in relationships with men turned out to be true: They can’t be trusted. They can’t be relied upon. Men will always hurt you and leave you and let you down.
What Dad did cut even deeper now, because he’d given his son his rare blood type but didn’t bother to stick around to give him a kidney when he needed one. The bitterness twisted in my gut like a knife.
I was done. Done with men.
From now on I’d use them the way they used women. For entertainment. For sex. For convenience. I would never live with a man I was dating and I’d sure as hell never get married again. Ever. And kids? No. Not if it meant I’d be attached to their father for the rest of my life.
I was so disgusted, so severely disappointed by what Nick and Dad ended up being. And it was reinforced daily, with every battered woman who came into my ER and every idiot I met on Tinder. It didn’t even surprise me that I couldn’t even find one decent enough for casual sex. The only ones on the dating apps who seemed to have their shit together always turned out to be married, which only further confirmed my opinion of dating men in general.
Jessica was right. I was better off with the cat.
For the next three days I packed Benny’s apartment and moved him in. His best friends, Justin and Brad, came to help with the heavy lifting. They set up Benny’s treadmill in the den, put his furniture in storage, and got him situated. Having his friends over at least got him to shower and put on clean clothes, so that was nice.
I made arrangements for a home dialysis machine to be delivered. I spent a full day washing the trash bags of dirty clothes I’d packed up from his apartment while he depression-slept. Then I spent five minutes holding a cold cup of coffee and staring morosely at the giant hideous cat-scratching thingy that now lived in my living room next to the equally hideous pink floral sofa that Mom bought in 1994.
I currently lived in the house I grew up in.
When Mom married Gil, she refused to give up her house. Even when he retired and they moved to Arizona, she still wouldn’t sell it. Mom said, with men you always need a fail-safe. To never put all your eggs in their basket.
Looks like once again Mom was right. When I left Nick, at least I had someplace to go.
I’d never decorated Mom’s house when I moved in. I didn’t really plan on still being here a year later, and decorating it made my situation feel permanent. So I just lived here in the faded remnants of my childhood. The whole place looked like a time capsule from the 1970s. Macramé wall art, oak cabinets and brass hardware, brown shag carpet, peeling linoleum in the kitchen. It was depressing. And now there was a cat tree the size of a real tree in here too.
Why did I live like this?
I could afford an apartment. I could afford a house. But I felt paralyzed by the idea of it. Like I’d had just enough strength to leave the home I’d made with Nick, but not enough to make a new one for myself. So I just squatted here like a castaway trapped on a deserted island.
Maybe a part of me was afraid to leave the island. Because then this was all real.
I took an extra day off work to finish moving Benny in. By the time I went back to the hospital on Wednesday, I was a zombie. I felt totally numb. Like the Nick thing and the Benny thing and the house thing were a horrible third-degree burn, so severe the nerve endings were gone and I could feel nothing.
It occurred to me that this was the worst time of my entire life.
I mean, when Nick cheated, yeah, that was bad. But at least Benny still had his kidneys then. At least I still had Alexis nearby. I had hope.
Now I had a dialysis machine getting delivered in a few days, Benny wasting away mentally in a bed down the hall, and a litter box in my laundry room that only I was going to clean. My best friend was two hours away and too busy with her new life to be the diversion I needed to not think about all this.
There was nothing for me to look forward to. Even the chief position was at a standstill. I had no dating prospects. No joy in my life. Not a single distraction. I hadn’t had sex in a year. I was just getting older. Heading in the wrong direction in every way, my life crumbling around me.
And I was bored.
That was the worst thing of all. The boredom. The monotony of my uneventful, unremarkable, depressing fucking life.
If Benny wasn’t a factor, I’d do Doctors Without Borders or something, walk the earth. What was the point of being in Minnesota? It was cold here, everything reminded me of Nick, or, worse, Kelly. I was alone. I didn’t even really want the chief position if I was being honest with myself. It just seemed like something everyone expected of me after Alexis left, and I figured why not, what the hell else was I doing? At least I’d be building my résumé.
This wasn’t the life I wanted. And I didn’t know how to change it. It was quicksand.
Jocelyn was at the nurses’ station when I came onto the floor clutching a triple cappuccino and feeling as tired as I looked. I had no idea how I was going to make it through the day.
“Hey, someone left something for you.” She nodded to a spot behind the counter.
I leaned over wearily to look. There was a jumbo-sized red velvet cupcake with an envelope taped to the container with my name written on it.
I smiled for the first time in days. Alexis?
“Who’s it from?” I asked.
“Don’t know. It was here when I got here yesterday.” She tapped a pen on the counter and eyed me. “Hey, you okay? You called out.”
“Fine,” I said, leaning down to pick up the card. I set my coffee on the counter and slid a finger under the seal on the envelope.
It was a letter. A long letter. Handwritten.
From Dr. Maddox.
I blinked at it. Dr. Maddox? Why?
I looked around, like he might be somewhere watching. I didn’t see him.
“Who’s it from?” she asked.
“Nobody. I’ll be right back.”
I grabbed the cupcake container and hurried to the supply closet. I shut the door behind me, sat on my toilet-paper box, and pulled the letter from the envelope. It was in black fountain pen, clear and careful writing.
Briana,
I sometimes find that journaling helps me organize my thoughts. I seem to be having a hard time saying and doing the right things recently, so I figured writing this down might be best.