He looked up, his expression wrecked but with a bit of hope lurking somewhere between his eyebrows. Like he thought I might announce this whole thing was an extremely fun and not sociopathic prank.
“How many bedrooms does your apartment have?” I asked.
3
SATURDAY, MAY 18TH
91 DAYS UNTIL I CAN LEAVE
Honestly, Miles Nowak is a good roommate.
Aside from occasional invitations to watch a movie, or texts to ask whether I need anything from the market, he leaves me to my own devices. After my request that he only smoke outside, he really must have stopped merely sticking his head out the window, because weeks pass without me smelling weed in the hallway. There’s no more mournful blasting of Jamie O’Neal either. In fact, he seems totally fine. I never would’ve guessed he was a man fresh off a horrible heartbreak if I hadn’t seen his face six weeks ago, on the day it happened.
Without discussing it, we pretty easily figured out a bathroom schedule that works. He’s a night owl, and I usually get up around six thirty or seven in the morning, regardless of whether I’m working the library’s opening shift or not. And since he’s rarely home, he never leaves stacks of dirty dishes “soaking” in the sink.
But the apartment itself is tiny. My bedroom is a glorified closet.
In fact, Petra used it as one, when she lived here.
A year ago, the meager dimensions wouldn’t have been a problem.
As long as I could remember, I’d been a staunch minimalist. From the time my parents separated, Mom and I had moved around a lot, chasing promotions at the bank where she worked, and then, eventually, helping open new branches. We never had professional movers, just the help of whichever guy was trying and failing to score a date with Mom at the time, so I learned to travel light.
I made a sport of figuring out the absolute least amount of things I needed. It helped that I was such a library kid and didn’t have metric tons of annotated paperbacks. Books were the only thing I was gluttonous about, but I didn’t care about owning them so much as absorbing their contents.
Once, before a move in high school, I convinced Mom to do a ceremonial burning of all the A+ tests and papers she’d been stockpiling on our fridge. We turned on the little gas fireplace in the living room—the only thing we both agreed we’d miss about that mildew-riddled apartment—and I started tossing things in.
It was the only time I’d seen her cry. She was my best friend and favorite person in the world, but she wasn’t a soft woman. I’d always thought of her as completely invulnerable.
But that night, watching my old physics test blacken and curl, her eyes welled and she said in a thick voice, “Oh, Daph. Who am I going to be when you go off to college?”
I snuggled closer to her, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “You’re still going to be you,” I told her. “The best mom on the planet.”
She kissed me on the head, said, “Sometimes I wish I held on to a little bit more.”
“It’s just stuff,” I reminded her, her own constant refrain.
Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile.
The men hell-bent on proving their feelings for Mom eventually gave up and moved on. The friends from the last school who promised to write faded from the rearview in a month or two. The boy who called you every day after one magical summer night outside the Whippy Dipper would return to school in the fall holding someone else’s hand.
There was no point clinging to something that wasn’t really yours. Mom was the only permanent thing in my life, the only thing that mattered.
When she put me on a plane to send me off to undergrad, neither of us cried. Instead we stood hugging each other so long and tight that later, I found a bruise on my shoulder. My entire wardrobe of solid-colored basics fit into one suitcase, and we’d shipped the jute rug we’d found on clearance, along with a mug, bowl, set of silverware, and hot pot, which Mom joked would allow me to make all of my major food groups: tea, Easy Mac, and Top Ramen.
That was two states and five apartments ago. In all that time, I’d managed to accumulate very little clutter.
Then Peter and I moved into the Waning Bay house, with its wraparound porch. That day, he scooped me into his arms, carried me over the threshold, and said three magic words that changed my little minimalist heart forever.
Welcome home, Daphne.
Just like that, something in me relaxed, my gooiest parts oozing out beyond my heretofore carefully maintained boundaries.
Until that moment, I’d carried my life like a handkerchief knapsack at the end of a broom handle, something small and containable I could pick up and move at the drop of a hat. And I never knew what it was I was running from, or to, until he said it.
Home. The word stoked an ember in my chest. Here was the permanence I’d been waiting for. A place that would belong to us. And yes, our uneven financial situations complicated that ownership, but while he paid the bills, I could focus on cozying the place up.
My minimalism went out the window.
Now all that stuff—furniture intended for a three-bedroom house—was stuffed into Miles’s guest room. Furniture wall to wall, all of it butting right up against each other, throw pillows utterly covering my bed, like I was some unhinged Stephen King villain who might handcuff you to the headboard and mother you to death.
I should’ve left all of this shit behind, but I felt too guilty about the money I’d spent, outfitting a home that wasn’t even mine.
Then there was the wedding paraphernalia, shoved into every closet the apartment had, the overpriced dress hanging on the other side of a thin laminate slider door—a telltale heart, a Dorian Gray portrait, a deep dark secret.
In theory, I’m going to sell the dress and the rest of it online, but doing so would require thinking about the wedding, and I’m not there yet.
In fact, I’ve spent the first seven hours of my Saturday morning shift pushing any thought of the Wedding That Never Was out of my mind.
Then my phone buzzes on my desk with a text from Miles: ur working
This is how he texts. With abbreviations, very little context, and no punctuation.
Is he asking me or telling me that I’m working? Neither makes sense. I have a detailed whiteboard calendar in the kitchen where he can clearly see exactly where I’m going to be and when. I check it against my phone calendar nightly, and I invited him to add his own schedule, but he’s never taken me up on it.
Yep, I say.
Another text: U want Thai
I’m guessing that’s another implied question mark, though it’s unclear whether he’s asking about ordering dinner or if it’s more of an existential question.
I’m good, thanks, I write. Every day on my lunch break, I go to one of the three food trucks at the public beach across the street. Saturdays are a burrito day, so I’ll be stuffed for hours.
K, Miles writes.
Then he types some more and stops. I wonder if he’s fishing for an offer to pick up the aforementioned Thai on my way home.
Anything else? I write back.
He replies, I’ll just c u when u get home.
Strange. On Saturdays, he’s usually in his room or out for the night by the time I get back. My phone vibrates again, but it’s just my ten-minute warning for Story Hour. I gather my supplies and head to the sunken-living-room-style Story Nook at the back of the library. Kids and their keepers are already gathering in the little pit, claiming carpet squares or heavily Lysoled gymnastic mats. Some of the older caretakers, grandparents and great-grandparents, ease themselves into the scoop chairs arranged around the outer ring of the nook, the regulars greeting each other.
The library’s back wall of windows bathes the nook in sunlight, and I can already tell who will be nodding off by book two.
Still, a chorus of ridiculous little voices rises as I approach, cries of “Miss Daffy!” and other adorable mispronunciations of my name. In my heart, it feels like little kernels are bursting into fluffy blossoms of popcorn.
