How simple it is, I think, to do this with Lorraine. How grateful I am for that. How lucky I am to know her. “I’d like to come there, sometime, and tell you and Paul in person, but I didn’t want to just show up unannounced.” I’ve learned my lesson about that. “I know I sort of ran off there at the end. I’m sorryfor that too.”
Lorraine makes a funny clucking noise, tongue snapping against teeth. “I can’t say I blame you for it. Quite an afternoon, wasn’t it?”
I close my eyes at the thought of it. I’ve done my best, over the last couple of weeks, not to conjure it all up in my head—Aiden’s face especially, arrested in dread and fear and something like anger. Instead, when I think of him, I make valiant, rarely successful efforts to remember the best moments I had with him with a sort of distant placidity. This is the healthy thing to do, I tell myself, the thing that shows I’moverit—if I can just look back fondly on it all, appreciate it for the moments that were good, I’ll feel less hollow. Eventually, I tell myself, I’ll be able to see it all for what it was, what Ipromisedmyself it would be: a fling, great sex with a nice guy, all of it with an expiration date. It’d only come sooner than what I’d expected, and that’s okay. That happens.
“Well, you know,” I say, searching for a bit of that mature, thoughtful distance now, “I’m sure it made it easier for Aiden and his mom to have me out of the picture, so maybe it wasn’t all bad.”
“Uh-huh,” says Lorraine, clearly unconvinced. In the brief quiet after, I want to ask her what’s happened with the campground—whether she and Paul made their decision and announced it last week, as they’d originally planned, or whether Aiden’s and my mess had ruined that too. But I don’t think I’m entitled to ask after that information. If she volunteers it, okay—but if not, it’s not myplace to know.
“Have you heard from him?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“Not really.” I don’t want to explain to Lorraine that I ignored three calls from him, all made on that night I’d left, that I’d waited, half in hope, half in fear, for him to call again inthe days after.
He didn’t.
“Have you?” I ask, doing my best to sound as if I’m just asking after the weather.
“Paul spoke to him last week.” I want to know about that call so bad that I pick up the sponge again, just to have something to squeeze in my hand.
“Ah.” I can’t manageanything else.
“You were so convincing,” Lorraine says then, surprising me, and I slump back against the counter, waiting for what she’ll say next, knowing it won’t be easy. I should have figured it wouldn’t be so quick. “I guess I’d be more angry at that, Zoe, if I thought it was possible for the both of you to fake it so well.”
My eyes well up with shamed tears, and I tilt the phone away from my face so she won’t hear my accompanying sniffle.
“Obviously I don’t know you all that well,” she says into the quiet I’ve left there. “But I think I know him, and boy did he look at you with something fierce in his eyes.”Like protons and electrons,I think, remembering the way Kit had teased me that night, back when I’d told her all about keeping my distance.
It’s embarrassing how much I wish that what Lorraine has said is true—that Aiden watched me,wantedme, as fiercely as he’d wanted that campground. As fiercely as he’d wanted to do somethingfor his family.
But any hope of that had vanished when I’d seen Kathleen O’Leary that day. When I’d remembered, again, what mattered most to him, and what would and should always matter most to him.
His family. And I would never—couldnever—bea part of that.
“Well,” I say, lamely, “it’s complicated, I guess.”
“I guess,” she repeats,just as dully.
“Anyways,” I say, hoping she doesn’t comment on how rapidly and flippantly I’ve changed the tone. “I really appreciate you taking my call. And if you’d talk to Paul about my coming sometime—”
“Ofcourse I will.”
“Thank you.”
“But Zoe, even if you come sometime—and we’d love to have you—I hope you’re able to put this behind you. To move on.”
“Ha,” I say, the blandest possible laugh. “That has historically not been my strong suit, Lorraine.”
“Well,” she says, her voice back to the way it always is—hopeful, encouraging, kind. “Maybe it willbe this time.”
* * * *
You are qualified to file for a no-faultdivorce if you—
“Zoe,” says Marisela, and I startle in place in the storage room, the stack of pamphlets I’m looking down at rustling in my hand.
“Yes,” I say, straightening my posture. “Sorry. I was going to refill the information display case out front. Seems we always run out of the divorce ones first.”
Marisela cocks her head at me, a tiny line she has between her eyebrows furrowing. “We don’t really need you to do stuff like that around here. Focus on the calls.” She says it kindly, and I clear my throat, tapping the stack against the shelf to straighten them. Add Marisela to the list of people who’ve worried, especially when I showed up here extra early this morning, a bit restless, I guess, after my callwith Lorraine.
