“Congrats for what?” Sam’s voice echoed through the phone.
“Oh, hey, sorry, I was talking to someone else. Are you guys okay?” There was a delay and my heart sped up as I waited for her to respond. “Sam?”
Her voice came through muffled and I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Sam? What was that?”
It was a clumsy beginning to our conversation after not talking for so long. I felt a hollowed-out ache in my chest at what we’d become. Strangers, when we’d once been so close that our periods were synced to the day.
What I still couldn’t wrap my head around was how it happened. There was no big blowup to blame for the awkwardness. The distance between us had grown slowly, a leaky faucet, until the drip-drip-drip of our different life phases became an ocean we couldn’t cross without a major effort. Samantha had been caught up in new motherhood, and I’d been trying to navigate life without my dad. We’d tried to be there for each other but we were each depleted in our own ways.
“I said I’m fine, nothing’s wrong.” The echo on the line made it sound like she was calling from the moon. “I thought we could catch up a little before I came back. Is this an okay time to talk?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. It was nothing more than a temperature-check call to get a read on where we stood before she came home. It was still going to be weird, but at least we could deal with it before we were face-to-face. I headed back to my office and climbed over the fence to find Edith dozing on my futon. I settled next to her and she snuggled closer to me, placing her head on my lap and smacking her lips a few times. “Yup, I just finished a class. What time is it there?”
“Eight fifteen on Tuesday morning. I’m calling you from the future.”
I chuckled at the joke she used to use when they’d first arrived in Japan. “And how is it?”
“Noisy,” she answered, and I heard Mia squealing in the background.
I cleared my throat. “Are you excited to come home?” I sounded a little stilted, like I was talking to a receptionist at the dentist’s office.
“Beyond,” she said. “You’re going to be around, right?”
“Of course, you know my life. Nonstop nothingness.”
She made a noise I couldn’t translate.
“What’s new with you?” I pressed on. “How’s Mia?”
“Oh, she’s great. She’s a super-busy baby.”
“Yeah, the pictures on Instagram are adorable,” I said quickly, and realized that I’d seen them but not actuallyLikedthem and had basically outed myself as her stalker.
“Thanks. I can’t wait for you to see how much she’s changed.”She paused and I held my breath. “I mean... if you have time to hang out.”
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes to keep them from welling up with relief. “Of course I do. I’ll always have time for you, Sam.”
It struck me that everything between us had basically frozen when she left. The funeral and the mess afterward, when she tried to be there for me and I’d pushed her away. Then the overwhelming feeling of her packing up, and the speedy, awkward goodbye. And the lonely feelings that followed after she and Nolan left, like I was losing another part of my heart, but for a completely different reason.
“Okay, good. I’m glad.” Mia’s squeals filled in the silence while we both grappled with what to say next. “I miss you, Chels. Like, a lot.”
No matter how much time had passed since talking there was no mistaking the subtext in her voice. Something was up, but it wasn’t the time to talk about it.
“I miss you too.” I answered back quickly.
Admitting that our stupid exile from one another was over was enough to shift the temperature between us and it felt like we both exhaled the lingering stress at the same time.
“How’s your neighbor?”
“Yeah, that.” I snorted. “We’ve found a way to cope, I guess. It was pretty bumpy at first.”
“So we heard.”
I felt a pang envisioning the three of them gossiping about me. “Why, what did he say?”
“Honestly, nothing bad. He said you had a bunch of rules, which, duh. Has he met you?”
