By three in the afternoon, I’m leaning back in my chair, and I’m chuckling with a chocolate supplier over a meme he just showed me. For the record, cat memes are always funny.
Everything is fine here, thank you very much.
Just another day of normal.
Another day of I’ll get through this.
As six in the evening draws near, there’s a rap on my open door. Ginny pops in. “Hey, you.”
“Hey.”
“Call me crazy, but you look a little . . . how shall we say . . . like you’ve been sucking on lemons all day.”
That sounds like a better way to spend the day than fighting off thoughts of the woman I love.
Wait.
I’m not thinking of her.
I pick up a pen and twirl it between my thumb and forefinger. “Nice to see you too.”
She steps inside my office. “Are you bummed out about how the scavenger hunt ended? Because we’ll live.”
“No, I’m not. It’s fine. It’s whatever.”
“‘Whatever’? You’re not a whatever person.”
But maybe I should be. Maybe I should say whatever to this whole upturned mess, since I don’t know how to fix it.
“I’m turning over a new leaf. Thinking of becoming a whatever person.”
“Is this because of what happened in the park?”
I say nothing.
She shuts my door, moves some papers, and parks herself on the edge of my desk. “Listen, you didn’t ask for my advice.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“But I’m going to give it to you anyway.”
“I had a feeling you would.”
“The father of my child?”
I sit up. She never mentions him. Never talks about him. “Yeah?”
“He didn’t get his act together when I told him I was pregnant.”
“Okay.”
“But now he wants to be in my kid’s life. Now. When she’s ten. And can you add up what that means?”
I’m good at math, but I have no clue how to perform Ginny’s arithmetic. “No. I can’t.”
She pauses dramatically. “It means he missed ten years of her life.”
“But Lulu’s not pregnant.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“Do you want to miss ten years of your life?” Ginny leaves the question trailing behind her as she hops off my desk and squeezes my shoulder. “A bunch of us are going to this new place up the street that has pinball games. Let me know if you want to join us.”
“I’ll think about it.”
But the more I think about it, the less I want to be with anyone tonight.
When moonlight blankets the city, I shut off the light in my office and leave, the last one to do so.
Once I’m home, the silence of my apartment cinches unwelcome arms around me. I try to pry them off, but it’s powerful.
I’m not in the mood for silence.
I’m not in the mood for anything.
I turn to the walls in my home. “Fuck off.”
