Page 62 of Eleanor & Grey

“Oh, gosh, working for your first love—I couldn’t even imagine that.”

“I’m still trying to picture it myself.”

Shay and I sat on the couch and settled in to watch some bad reality TV together. Once a week we cancelled all plans to binge terrible shows we DVRed. Our favorites were the dating competitions because they were so ridiculously over-the-top. Give us marathons of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, and we’d be happy for days. Yet, that afternoon it was a bit hard to let go of my thoughts. A big part of my mind couldn’t stop thinking about the new Greyson East. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like working for a man who’d defined such a big part of my life.

It had been over fifteen years since we said goodbye, a decade and a half of growth and change, ups and downs, and moving on. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy that cold man used to be. I couldn’t help but think back to our first hellos and final goodbyes.

I wondered if he was thinking about them, too.

After Shay and I finished our TV binge, I headed to my bedroom to call my father. I sat on the edge of the bed with my cell phone in my left hand and a glass of wine in my right.

“Hello?” the deep voice said before he coughed a bit and cleared his throat.

“Hey, Dad, it’s Ellie,” I said, shutting my eyes. “I was just calling to check in on you.”

“Oh yeah, Ellie. I was going to call you, but I figured you were busy. How’s everything been?”

I grabbed a pillow and hugged it close to me as I bit my bottom lip. “Well, yeah. I mean, everything is good. How are you feeling? Did the stomach bug pass?”

“Oh, yeah. It was weird, but I’m feeling a bit better. My head was in the toilet all day and night, but I’m good now.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Have you been taking your insulin each day? I know you forget sometimes.” He’d been living with type two diabetes for quite some time now, and he was the worst at dealing with it properly. I used to get into screaming matches with him to try to get him to eat healthier. It got so bad that I would find soda cans hidden under the bathroom sink. I tried everything to get him to eat better, to lose weight, but it was a useless effort.

You couldn’t force a man to better his life if he didn’t want to change for himself, and every time I pushed him, our relationship suffered. That was why I’d left all those years ago. He had gotten fed up with my attempts to help and pushed me away.

I just had to learn to love him from a distance even if that meant me worrying day in and day out about his well-being.

“Yep, taking it every day like I’m supposed to,” he said.

Lies.

I knew it was a lie, too, because I knew my father.

We both went silent, which was pretty normal.

He never said much, so neither did I. I often wondered if our silence was due to the fact that we didn’t have anything to say or because we’d waited too many years to ever speak up. Perhaps our heads were filled with deep, meaningful conversations we wished to have with one another and we just didn’t have a clue where to begin.

That was okay, though. At least we still had the phone calls every once in a while.

Even so, sometimes I missed the words.

He cleared his throat. “Okay, well, hey, I gotta get to cleaning up a bit around here. Thanks for calling, Ellie. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Oh, okay.”

“And Ellie? Thanks for the money you sent me. You didn’t have to do that, though. I wish you’d stop, but yeah, thank you.”

“Always, Dad.”

“We’ll talk later, alright?”

He always did that, ending the conversations early, which was probably for the best. Otherwise, I would’ve just held on to the cell phone, listening to his erratic breathing and wishing we weren’t the people that we were.

“All right, Dad. I love you.”

“Yeah, you too. Buh-bye.”

He hung up without giving me the words I needed to hear most, the ones that might’ve given me a bit of comfort.

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