“Lucas—”
He’s already backing away. He’s made up his mind. “It’s better this way, Daisy. Really. At least I know where we stand. You’re looking out for yourself. Maybe it’s time I start doing the same.”
“Oh Lucas!” Mariah says, peeping back around the corner. She’s likely heard our whole exchange, but she acts innocent enough. “Coffee run. Do you want anything?”
He uses her interruption to escape back down the hallway. I don’t hear his reply to her, and the rest of the day he avoids me. I try to corner him between patients, but he’s adept at staying busy and out of my way. I think to stand outside his office door until he shows his face, but Dr. McCormick sees me and smiles.
“Not waiting on Lucas are you? He left early, said he had some personal business to attend to.”
What personal business? Lucas doesn’t have personal business.
When I go back into my office there’s a key sitting on my desk with a note: Use it. I won’t be back until later.
It makes me feel worse because even though Lucas hates me right now, he doesn’t want me to be left stranded with no place to go.
I break and call my mom on the way to Lucas’ apartment.
She sounds so chipper on the other end of the phone.
“Is there any way we can go back to the house early?” I plead. “Say tonight?”
“Sorry Daisy, not unless you want to huff all those neurotoxins for a few days. Is everything okay? Are you getting on well at Lucas’ apartment?”
I’m not surprised she knows about my living arrangements. We’re in Hamilton, Texas, after all—word always gets around.
“No, not exactly. I want to go home.”
“Not this time, Daisy.”
“What?”
“I said not this time. You’re too old to be running up to your room to hide from your problems, waiting for them to go away. If something is wrong, you have to work it out with him.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
My mom has clearly shacked up with some kind of hippy in the last few days, because she’s spouting self-help mumbo jumbo that makes absolutely no sense. I tell her so and she laughs. Then I hang up before she can continue our therapy session.
Even though I have no clue what I will say, I hope to myself that Lucas is home as I unlock the door to his apartment. He wasn’t wrong earlier. For 28 years, I’ve wanted nothing but to annihilate him, and now that I have my chance, I should take it. It’s finally checkmate. No one would blame me.
“Lucas?” I call out.
No one answers.
The silence is torture, like a parent who should be yelling but instead sighs and shakes their head in disappointment. I want to tell Lucas he was wrong. That I never, not even for one second contemplated taking that position. That as much as I’ve hated him, I don’t want it to end like this.
I need to say it out loud to believe it myself.
I try his cell phone, a sequence of numbers I have dialed maybe three or four times in my entire life. He doesn’t answer. I pace the apartment, looking for clues for where he could have gone. His gym bag isn’t hanging by the door and his tennis shoes aren’t where he left them yesterday. My guess is that he’s working out, but I have no clue where. I could go to every gym in Hamilton? Shout his name from the doorway until they kick me out?
It’s a solid plan, but I don’t leave. I want to stay right here until he comes home, until he walks through the door and I convince him to hear me out, to try to see that somehow, during all our years of fighting, I’ve turned into a half-decent human being. I clean out the lint screen in the dryer, I help elderly people cross streets, and I don’t stab people in the back, even if I have spent my whole life competing against them in a backstabbing match.
Lucas, where are you?!
I make myself a snack. Change my clothes. Pace. I wander back into his guest bedroom and sit down on the bed, regretting that I chose to sleep in here and not with him the last two nights. It felt like too much, a little desperate. Oh, sorry. I need a place to stay and a bed to sleep in, how about yours? It all seems trivial and stupid now. I add it to the list of things I will tell him when he walks through that door.
Which he finally does an hour later.
I’m sitting on the couch, staring at my phone and willing him to call when he walks in. He hangs his gym bag by the door and kicks off his shoes. I stand and wait for him to see me. He pretends I’m invisible and walks into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
“I’m not going to take the job,” I volunteer.
I’m hoping my words are a spell. I will say them, Lucas will understand, and bippety-boppety-boo, we will go back to banging on his kitchen counter.
He shakes his head and finally turns so I can see his face. He’s defeated. Shoulders slouched. Face crestfallen.
I say the spell again, just in case it didn’t work right the first time.
“I wasn’t going to take the job!”