“I can’t keep his stuff around anymore. I could be a real bitch about it and donate it all, but I don’t have it in me.”
I step out the door ahead of her, only so I can hide my eyes. I talk a flippant game, but that’s all it is. A ruse, and the only person I’m deceiving is myself.
We finish loading up the bed of the truck. After I shove in the final box, I turn to her. “I’m selling the house, too. I’ll findsomewhere smaller.” I can’t afford to live here. Not when I’m the only person paying the mortgage.
“Makes sense, considering you don’t have a job anymore.”
“I’m not destitute. You know I made money when Joseph and I sold the practice.” I struggled with the decision to return, but Joseph made the choice for me when he called and told me he was ready to spend his days at a beach, not listening to people bitch. I laughed, because I’d just left my last session with Dr. Ruben. I don’t feel great about getting a degree and not using it, or spending all that time going in one direction only to backtrack. Losing my career didn’t have the impact it would’ve had if I weren’t already hovering near rock-bottom. There wasn’t much further to fall.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Cam says with exasperation. “But I can’t figure out what you do with your days.”
“I volunteer at the animal shelter?—”
“Which is bizarre,” Cam interjects.
I chuckle. Oddly, I’ve found a sense of purpose in helping care for these animals. “I’m helping Dad with the books for his new business.”
“Consulting,” scoffs Cam. “Sounds like code for ‘unemployed.’”
Our dad started his own business because he wanted to have more time, but has ironically ended up having less free time than before.
“I’m thinking about writing a book.” I feel embarrassed saying it out loud. Who do I think I am? Who would want to read anything written by me? “I found my notebook, the one I used to write in when Gabriel was on shift at the station and I had trouble sleeping.”
Cam’s eyes light up. “That’s the best idea! You know Dani’s aunt is a literary agent, right? In New York. I bet Dani could get her to talk to you and?—”
“Whoa, whoa,” I say, but I’m laughing at my sister’s exuberance. “I don’t have a solid premise yet.”
Cam exhales hard, like I’m exhausting. “Tell me when you have asolid premise”—she exaggerates the words—“and I’ll get Dani to call her aunt.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Excitement ripples inside me, but I try to keep it at bay. I know someone who knows a New York literary agent. That is HUGE. I’ve read personal accounts from people who say they queried one hundred agents and never heard a peep back. It took away my desire to even try, but now? That desire is suddenly burning inside me.
“I better take off.” Cam pulls me in for a hug. “I love you, Baxter. You got this.”
“I love you, too.”
She leaves, and I go back into my house to grab my purse and my keys. Very little has changed, at least on the surface. All the furniture is still here, the knickknacks, the rug Gabriel and I chose. He’d insisted we christen it that first time we laid it down in the living room, and I ended up with a rash on my back.
I climb in the rental truck. It’s twice as big as my car, and it takes some time for me to adjust to how much space I’m taking up on the road.
I keep thinking about what Camryn said about Dani’s aunt. Storylines and ideas bounce around my mind. I’m so deep in my thoughts I nearly manage to forget what it is I’m going to do.
The Woodruff home.I haven’t been here since before Gabriel went to prison. They learned about the divorce through a phone call from Gabriel, and then Corinne called me. She told me she was devastated for me, for how everything turned out. There wewere, two women connected by a common thread, both knowing we contributed to its downfall. And yet, we are ultimately not at fault.
I feel differently about Corinne now. I see her as a person trying to make it through the worst kind of heartbreak, clinging to memories and expectations because it was all she had.
Both Corinne and Doug answer the door. I can’t tell what Doug is thinking, but Corinne has her emotions written all over her face.
“Avery.” She smiles at me, tentative. This is such tricky territory. Corinne was once mine, in the way Gabriel was my dad’s. Legally tethered, but connected by the heart. Does a snip through the binding mean a cut into the heart connection as well? Am I allowed to still care for his family if I’m not married to him?
Corinne looks over my shoulder at the vehicle in the driveway. “You rented a U-Haul truck? Are you moving somewhere?”
I rise on my toes, then slide back down on the balls of my feet. This is more difficult now that we're face-to-face. “I boxed up Gabriel’s things. I just thought”—my intertwined fingers form a single ball and bounce on my thigh—“that eventually he will need his stuff. And if I give them to you, and you tell him you have it all, he’ll know where to go when he’s released.”
Corinne’s lips purse. “Right.” She nods. “Of course.”
It hits me that Corinne and Doug will now have a second son whose belongings are in boxes. Gabriel once told me his mother got halfway through boxing up Nash’s belongings, then stopped. She never restarted, and since then Nash’s room is half packed, half the way it looked the last day he left it.
Doug steps out from behind his wife, and on his way by me he squeezes my upper arm. His touch is the next best thing to being near Gabriel, and the sting of tears touches the backs of my eyes.
