I signed up with a career counselor to see what other kinds of work I might do (maybe I could be a writer! Maybe I could teach... writing!). I took tests to determine where in the country, or even the world, I might find my destiny. (North Carolina was a strong contender...)
At last, I visited a therapist and told her the unvarnished truth. She looked surprised by the revelation of what I had done so long ago, but then she surprised me. “If there is love,” she said, “everyone deserves a second chance.”
My so-far-successful quest to avoid any place that I might set eyes on Sam backfired one night when I was trying out yet another life-enhancing strategy—dining out alone at a fine restaurant. Feeling like a show-off in my white crepe Alice + Olivia pants and vest, all yearny as I watched the cooing couples around me, I told myself to concentrate on the menu. When I finally made my choice and glanced up, there was Sam nervously looking back at me from a distance of about ten feet. Across from him was a very pretty woman about his age who seemed to bedescribing an art heist. She was one of those gesturers whose hands flew around like butterflies.
Of course, she could have been a client.
She could have been a new associate at the firm.
And I could have been a pterodactyl.
The waiter arrived with my artichoke risotto. Quietly and forcefully, I asked him please to box it up. “It doesn’t travel well,” he told me with the hauteur of someone who thought that, instead of waiting tables, he should really be in movies with Ryan Gosling.
“Okay,” I said. “Then throw it out.”
The waiter rolled his eyes and sighed, oblivious to how close he was at that moment to losing a finger. I gave him my card and studied the pattern of the tablecloth until the bill arrived, then grabbed my risotto and departed.
Once out in the street, I noticed that my anguish was undergoing a transformation. I was furious. I wanted to break windshields, trip passersby, kick over trash cans.
Granted, Sam didn’t owe me any special allegiance. We’d now been apart much longer than we’d ever been together. I had told him something that would have blown anyone’s mind. And yet, we didn’t discuss it. I didn’t get a chance to tell him about the solid year I went to therapy twice a week, the volunteer work I did at the animal sanctuary cleaning up after cats that had three legs and no sphincter, the meals I prepped at the domestic abuse shelter. I didn’t get to tell him how I had learned to transform my abysmal opinion of my looks, the price for growing up alongside Nell, the American beauty, how I found the root of my anger and tore it out, how hard I had labored to see myself again as worthy.
I went back to my sister’s house and tried to sleep.
But sleep would no longer come to me.
“The curse is come upon me, cried The Lady of Shalott.”
I got up and pulled my sweatshirt on over my pajamas. I drove to Sam’s house and strode up to the front steps.
“Sam!” I called. “Sam Damiano! Come out!” There was at first no response. Then the lights flicked on. I saw a shadow at his window. “You are a coward, Sam! You don’t deserve to be a defense attorney because you don’t believe in second chances! You don’t really believe in redemption! You’re a fraud! You don’t deserve me!”
Sam appeared at the door, at the moment that the sky cracked open and a deluge of rain poured down.
“Reenie! For Pete’s sake, just come inside!”
“I will not come inside. I hope the whole block hears me!”
Nobody would hear me. Rain was crashing down like a waterfall.
I turned and ran for my car. While Sam called my name from the porch, I got in and rattled out of the driveway, my wheels spinning in the river that was now coursing down the street. Back at Nell’s house, I skinnied out of my wet clothes on the porch, sliding unseen and naked into my dark room. There I pulled on underpants from my suitcase, but my boxes were on the top tier and I was afraid of bringing them all crashing down on my head in the dark. Instead, I pulled on the first thing I could root out of one of the boxes marked with my sister’s name, which happened to be a lacy patchwork cotton maxi-dress. I fell once again on the bed.
Was I glad that it was over, really, finally over? Only as glad as you can be when a death puts an end to suffering. There would be time to mourn, time and place, but I took some comfort in the notion of freedom, of turning a clean face to the future. I really could move to North Carolina. People were probably nicer there. I could do it right after I finished this story. I didn’t need to be tied to the Midwest; my parents were going to be heading south in the near future anyhow.
Maybe I could even convince Ivy to let me work remotely, just visiting the office in Chicago once in a while. That was what more and more people with portable professions were doing.
I hadn’t been asleep for more than an hour when I heard the pounding at the door. I got up and could see, through the windows, that although it was still pouring, the sky had lightened. If it was not morning, it was close to it.
The pounding continued, growing in volume and intensity.
From within the house, a voice slurred with sleep, not my sister’s, called, “Who in the hell could be at the door? It’s goddamn five in the morning!”
“I’m handling it!” I called and then addressed the door. “Hey, crazy person! Stop banging on the door! Leave whatever you have out there! We’ll get it later, okay?” In response, the banging began again, louder and faster. Maybe someone was hurt and needed help. Maybe someone was out there with a gun. In a movie, I did the last thing you should do, the thing that would have the viewer screaming,Don’t! Stop!I undid the locks and pulled the door open.
Drenched, Sam stood on the porch with a giant bouquet of yellow roses.
“What?” I said. “What is going on?”
“Reenie,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
