I don’t want you to go, I think, letting the words vibrate inside me, painful and real.
He heads out to light the grills and I put together a few last things, throw on a sweatshirt against the early spring chill, and join him.
Just the look he gives me when I walk outside—just that—makes me feel more in my body, my bones, than I ever felt with Clark.
That, that’s why this is a bad idea. All of it.
When this is over, it won’t just hurt, like with Clark, it will break me apart, inside and out.
That’s how much he means. How much he matters.
Frida and Annette show up, followed by Toni and Raf. Then the new future chef, Yemi, who’s brought something called Mandazi, which is a fried Nigerian dessert that tastes like coconut and heaven in your mouth.
There’s a handful of buskids who work for me mostly during the summer when the patio opens and business triples. They’re all high school and young college students. Cora and Riley finally arrive and the party gets going in earnest.
There’s food and drinks, music. Annette, Raf, Yemi, and the buskids dig a football out of Lord knows where, Frida pulls out her guitar and starts singing exactly like Joni Mitchell, and Cora and I grab fleeces and blankets and watch as Jake lights the improvised fire pit he literally just built in my backyard with a handful of bricks from my basement and a shovel.
“What are you thinking?” I ask Cora as we sip on hot toddies and look out at the crew, happily enjoying the event.
As always, my eyes go back to Jake—always to Jake—as he heads out to join the others at football.
“I think I totally misread things a while a back,” Cora says.
“Huh?” Jake catches the ball with a theatricaloouufffsound, searches for someone to pass it to, and picks Raf, the smallest, shyest person out there. When he throws it, it’s with the easy, unconscious grace of a guy who knows his way around a football. And a restaurant. And a woman’s body.
There’s that feeling again. The emptiness. The loss.
I hate it, but nothing will make it go away.
“The Jake thing,” she replies.
I turn to look at her and she cackles, joint and mug in one hand, while the other slaps her knee. “Yeah.” She points at me. “Yeah, we got your number, right Frida?”
“Hm?” Frida asks in the middle of singing about holy wine tasting bitter and sweet. “What?”
“Jake will be missed.”
“By all of us,” I say, my cheeks the kind of red that comes from a blustery spring and a too-close fire and women I respect trying to pry their way into my soul.
“By you,” they say simultaneously and, without warning, the tears come.
“Oh, oh, honey.” Cora’s up and scoots over to my side of the fire, while Frida keeps strumming, her dark eyes warm and knowing on me. “Oh, come on, no. No! Frida!”
“What? Can’t stop Joni midway through.” She tilts her head over to where the others are still playing. I glance over and catch Jake watching me and go redder still. “They’ll hear us,” she stage whispers and, I guess she’s right.
“He’s leaving,” I say, as if they know everything already anyway. Which they probably do. I’m the one who’s been fooling myself that a restaurant’s not just exactly like a family. “Five days,” I whisper, voice clogged.
“He’ll be back.”
I shake my head. “No, he won’t.”
“Wouldn’t be so sure,” Frida half-sings in a low, bluesy voice.
Cora’s arm tightens around my shoulders. She blows her smoke away from me. “You guys have kept the whole thing awfully secret.”
“It’s not a relationship.”
The women share a look. “Sure looks like one.”
