“Have we reached the end of the world?” he asked.
“I think so.”
We said nothing. Sadness blew past with the wind. I sat down after a moment to look at the view, and I could hear Paul rustling through his backpack, finding the sandwiches that he’d bought for us.
It was a perfect day, clear and breezy, and we ate in silence. I wanted that. If we didn’t talk about it, I could pretend for a moment that there was nothing to say. I rose and approached the edge of the rocks.
“You still have that impulse to jump off cliffs?” he asked.
“Any second now,” I said.
He stood up, put his arms around me and held me close. “Don’t,” he said quietly.
This is going to hurt, I thought. This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt. I turned and pressed my face against him for a moment.
“So,” I said. “You start school soon? Are you still planning a trip to the U.S.?”
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “I’ve got some stuff to work out with Trish, first.” He shrugged. “House ownership, all that.”
My heart sank. Paul knew I was probably leaving. He knew that his gorgeous ex-wife was back in town. Of course he could be romantic with me. None of it had to mean anything. Mark had warned me, and I hadn’t wanted to listen.
We went back to my place after the hike so that I could shower. Paul left for an hour or two and then came back with a take-out dinner, and then we sat next to each other, looking out the window. The sun was setting earlier now than when I had first arrived, and it colored the distant water with slate blues and shell pink.
“You never told me much about your father,” he said, out of nowhere.
I shrugged. “Never in the picture. He took off and married someone else when I was two years old, and he was never even married to my mom, so…”
“That’s hard. Did you miss him?”
“Not as such. She had this long series of boyfriends, and that was harder in a way. It was hard when we didn’t like a boyfriend, and hard when we did, and then he left.”
I took a breath, looking out at the fading light. “I had a professor in college who—one day I came to class right after a break-up, visibly weeping, my whole face must have looked like a cream puff. And I think she was worried about me, so after class she sat and talked to me, even though it was way outside her job responsibilities. I refused to go to a therapist back then. I thought I was so clever that I would outsmart them, like the goal of therapy was to get to the answer the fastest. Anyway, my professor had been through some of the things I had been through, and after she heard all about my break-up, and my parents, she told me, ‘Don’t let your father win. He walked out on you, and now you’re going to think that everybody will walk out on you. And that will doom all your relationships, so just to spite your dad, you have to try to break the cycle. You can’t think,All men leave. Because you’ll be punishing yourself for what your father did for your whole life. You’ll be paying for his crime.’”
Paul nodded. “Very wise.”
“I thought so. So when I dated Farid, I decided, I’m not going to do that. I won’t doom myself. I went to therapy, and we were together for six years, and I thought. I’ve won. I’ve done it. I was so proud of myself for breaking the cycle. Even though he didn’t really believe in long-term commitments like marriage, I was still capable of a real relationship. Only it turns out he did believe in marriage.”
“Yeah.” Paul was gentle. He remembered the story.
I took a breath. “And I think what I concluded was, it’s not that allmen leave. It’s that all men leaveme.”
He looked at me sadly and then took me into his arms and kissed me. It turned into a breathtaking, consuming, end-of-the-movie kind of kiss. The thought went through my head that we were still at the end of the world.
12
“STILL NOT FUNNY”
The next morning,Paul left after breakfast to run an errand for Lisette, who had nearly run out of milk at the coffee shop where she worked—a fireable offense—and I readied myself for work. Just as I opened my laptop, my cell phone rang. It was Kedar, who hadn’t bothered this time with a video call.
“So, Abby,” he began. I knew what was coming wasn’t good, because he wasn’t calling me a ‘rock star.’ “Bad news. It’s official. For everybody. We all have to come into the office one day a week.”
“One day a week.” There was an irony to the minimal ask having such a maximum impact. “Starting when?”
“Monday. They’re going to scale up from there to three days a week.”
“Can I have a couple of weeks here to finish out my rental?”
“I tried to get you another week or two, but they know if they bend for someone, they have to bend for everyone. Look, hopefully they try it for a while and realize it’s stupid, but there’s a new VP and he wants to make some kind of a point. I hate it, too. I was only coming in two days a week. Now they want me in all five.”
