Page 18 of Marriage (Red, White &) Blues

Could we call this a crushing blow? Yes. Did my eyes rim with tears? Yes, again. Did I let them fall? Not on your life. It took a good chunk of the day to get us to the airport. Blake bought his ticket and then kissed me goodbye. But this kiss felt different than our others—like he really was saying goodbye.

Though before I left him, he promised to call. What was I supposed to believe, the man or the kiss?

Moses drove me back to the lodge and I spent the next few days swimming in the pool, eating fine food, and animal-watching all alone.

While I sat at the airport waiting for my flight to England, I went over my books and realized that thanks to Blake I still had plenty of money left, but the idea of continuing on this trip without my traveling companion sucked. I decided to head back home once I landed in Heathrow. This sadness could suck my big left toe. I knew it was bad when the draw of London wasn’t enough to keep me.

What felt like five million hours later, I finally touched back down in Detroit. I didn’t call anyone to let them know I’d returned. Well, other than to schedule an Uber driver to pick me up. But that didn’t count.

My mother wasn’t home when I arrived. No surprise there. What did surprise me was that there weren’t any perishables in the fridge, which meant while I was away, she’d been staying with Carl. What other explanation could there have been?

I thought a couple of times about calling Blake to let him know I’d arrived back safely, but if he really cared, he’d contact me.

“I’m falling for you…”God, I’d actually believed him. I just might’ve been the biggest idiot on the planet. Thank the good lord we’d never had sex because that would’ve made this ten thousand times worse.

Two weeks of me alone in this house, sending out applications to crappy jobs and jobs in different locations that I’d actually like to work, went by before I let Pen know that I was home. How? Fake pictures on my social media accounts. I wasn’t above subterfuge to keep my privacy for a while longer.

My mom never showed up. No clothes hung in her closet. Everything, every picture still hung on the wall, little knickknacks still sat on the shelves exactly like when the four of us—mom, dad, my grandma and me—lived here. But now there was only me.

“Gloria?” Pen said my name with such excitement when I called. “Where are you now?”

“Home.”

“Home? Is Blake with you?” she asked and like a damned fool, I burst out crying.Crying.I never cried. Maybe an errant tear here or there but a full-on sob? Never. “Honey,” she said softly and that just made it worse.

Somehow, I worked up the ability to say, “I’ll call back later.” Then I hung up. But here was the problem with unleashing a torrent of tears on one of your best friends and then hanging up. They don’t let it drop.

About an hour later, I heard a knock at the door. Pen stood there with Sierra and they had a smorgasbord’s worth of food bags in hand from every takeout place this side of Detroit, and Sierra held one paper bag that immediately caught my attention. I distinctly saw the red lid to a giant bottle of tequila peeking out of it.

I stood aside, holding open the door for them. “Come on in,” I said and since the living room was right there behind me, Si and Pen walked over to the sofa to drop their bags onto the coffee table.

My friends laid out a spread of Chinese food cartons, foil containers from the Mexican restaurant, Coney dogs, friedchicken, burgers, fries, fried mushrooms, and mozzarella sticks from a local bar. Sushi. Poke. Several foil containers from a local Indian place. And all the ingredients to make margaritas.

Both Pen and Si followed me to the kitchen to grab mason jars, plates, and forks. Then I got a pitcher from the cupboard over the refrigerator and filled it halfway with ice for the margs. We filled our plates and I downed one full mason jar of margarita before Sierra looked at me and cracked her neck from side to side.

“Where does he live? I’ll kill him and make it look like an accident,” she said.

“I won’t bother with making it seem like an accident. My family comes from enough money to hide that scandal and make sure I don’t do time,” Pen replied.

It was nice that they cared, but killing Blake seemed like an overreaction. Maybe just hire someone to break his kneecaps—no. He hadn’t really done anything wrong besides not wanting me to go back to Vermont with him and not calling. It hurt but I’d come to terms with the fact that I’d been his vacation fling—could you call it a fling if we’d never slept together? Without clothing, I mean.

“Guys, he’s allowed to change his mind about me. We met on my first day in Paris. We apparently both had the same idea to eat lunch by the Seine. Only, a bird flew off with half his lunch.”

They started laughing.

“I felt bad for the guy and went over to offer to share mine,” I continued.

“A meet cute,” Sierra said.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“What happened, then?” she asked.

“We enjoyed each other’s company so much that he asked me to go to a festival in Norway with him. I did, and it sort of took off from there. We never left each other’s side as we toured Europe.”

“Was this a ‘just friends’ kind of arrangement?”

“If ‘just friends’ meant copious amounts of kissing and him telling people that I was his girlfriend.”

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