Rae sneezed into the blanket. She accidentally remembered what Dustin had said, that one day she’d sneeze out poems.
“I love you too, Stu.”
Thetoodidn’t strike her as a tack-on, as it used to. It reminded her of the number two, so much better than one, ironic because it sounded likewonbut was really a loss.
AndI love you too, Sturhymed, and though she’d once preferred free verse, she was newly attracted to the levity of rhyme scheme and the way the predictable patterns worked as a team.
Stu patted the floorboards of his truck. “Hear that, Marlene? I tricked my dream girl into falling in love with me.”
“You didn’t trick me,” Rae said, thinking she’d never fallen in love with anyone as intentionally as she’d fallen back in love with him. It was true, what people said about love not just being a feeling but a choice.
Relationships weren’t only a checklist, but they werealsoa checklist—making sure you were picking someone who was happy within himself and didn’t disappear or shut down when you asked questions.
For so long, she’d clung to the hope that Dustin would beat his depression, that one day he’d wake up and be over it. But she finally understood now, looking back at the jagged patterns of their relationship, that depression wasn’t something that was ever fully beaten, ever conquered. It never surrendered and it never disappeared. Even if Dustin felt like himself again for days or even years, it would always be in him, mutating like a virus, plotting new strains, new ways to grip him again. It was so clear now that Dustin would never be in the clear. Rae had done what she’d had to do to keep her own life from getting taken over by it too.
Stu was marriage material in all the ways Dustin would never be. Though Rae had persuaded herself into believing she didn’t care about finding a husband anymore, that she was perfectly fine if that never happened for her, being back in Indy around all the contented couples made her feel like she’d just been telling herself that to justify staying with Dustin on theirTitanic, and then to justify why she’d kept clinging to the sunken shipboards at the bottom of the ocean.
She’d learned her lesson by going for the high-risk, high-reward option and winding up both broke and broken. Now it was time to choose the reliable investment, the emotionally stable man who wouldn’t let her down. Before now, she hadn’t had the maturity to value this kind of steady return profile, but she valued it now, and that was what mattered. She’d woken up and adjusted her portfolio strategy before it was too late.
She’d never admit it to her mom, but she was starting to find herself daydreaming about an outdoor wedding featuring Stu, a live country band, and spiked-lemonade pitchers. The images elicited a certain kind of pride deep within herself, like they were proof that she was the type of person who made good decisions.
“After a robust diligence process,” Rae said to Stu now, “I choose to loan you my heart.”
They rolled their eyes in tandem about how she just couldn’t help making bad finance puns when they were professing their love.
“Hope you’re not expecting me to give it back,” Stu said.
“I’ll accept back rubs as your interest payments.”
“I suppose we can work with that,” Stu said with a wink as fireflies blinked. Scooping her into his lap, he began massaging her shoulders.
Eyes half closed but never more open, Rae located the lovestruck stars from her story, now abandoned by the veil, which had swept far across the sky though not out of sight, and she wished on the faraway suns that her relationship with Stu would keep appreciating in value against the Midwest market backdrop of cricket-chimed bedtime rhymes.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE POETRY IPO
“The Post-it Poet, in print!” Stu said, jiggling open Rae’s apartment door with his spare key. He walked inside, balancing a stack of newspapers up to his nose.
It was a Wednesday night in late August. Rae was in the kitchen, drying the dishes after making a tomato-and-basil quiche. Omelet-to-quiche was her latest egg evolution.
Stu set the newspapers on the kitchen table with a thud. “I stopped at every gas station on my way here to buy out the copies. There are more in Marlene, but we’ll take those to your mom so she can frame them.”
Rae’s first-ever piece of writing had been published today, under the Post-it Poet pseudonym.
With her improved work-life balance, she’d been feeling increasingly guilty about not using her free time productively, and so a few weekends ago she’d shut herself in her apartment for a fourteen-hour write-a-thon. It had been cut short when Stu had shown up to take her on a double date with his friend and her wife, which he’d forgotten to tell her about.
She hadn’t quite reached her twenty-poem goal, but it was progress at least. After looking up the top literary journals to submit to, she’d decided she wasn’t ready for that kind of reception yet—or that kind of rejection. Instead, she emailed the top eleven poems to the Arts & Culture editor at the localIndyStar, and one had been deemed decent enough for the paper’s shrinking circulation.
From the bathroom at work today, Rae had read the online version, but she’d waited for Stu to arrive before looking at the physical copy.
Picking up one of the flimsy papers, she flipped to the Arts section. There it was, on the bottom of page F7, wedged between a review of a local high school play and an article about how the city’s main bookstore was closing down.
“A Note to New York, from a Flyover State” by the Post-it Poet
Keep your volatile skyline,
I’ll take the mellow sweet pines.
