Page 6 of Anywhere with You
Not that I’d burn downtheirlove nest. But I’d probably spend a lot of time sitting across the street and thinking about it. Or about buying a bag of crickets from the pet store and leaving it outside their bedroom window. Smearing their cars with canned tuna. Getting a Realtor to put their house on the market. Reporting them to the police for smuggling illegal cheeses.
Definitely better not to know.
On Sunday, Bridget and Lorenzo posted another Mesmio reel, kissing on a pier in Galveston, seagulls shrieking alarmingly close by, as though mistaking her phone for food.
Bridget looked like she’d been out in the sun a lot. Her face was tanned, her hair gold streaked. She had a new tattoo on her wrist, some kind of butterfly.
Lorenzo looked like Johnny Depp, if Johnny Depp had been beaten up too many times, but that was how Lorenzo always looked.
I was pretty sure that Bridget was walking along that pier now, gleefully telling Lorenzo that their latest video had been watched seventy-six times. She had no way of knowing that seventy of those views were mine.
I still expected her to call every day. After Cara said that Lorenzo had called, I was sure that I had one coming, too. I spent all weekend with the phone on my desk in front of me, ringer on. I even called from the store phone to check the volume. The horrible default ringtone annoyed Florence, Doug, our one customer, and me. My phone was working fine.
But Bridget hadn’t spoken to me since the day she moved out. She hadn’t even called to ask about our dog. Not once. I couldn’t imagine that degree of heartlessness.
Sunday evening, I set up an amp in the store. We hadn’t had any customers in a while, and Doug was deep in the latest Elizabeth Acevedo novel. I sent him to the break room to keep reading so I didn’t interrupt. It was a really good book.
I played through my favorites—Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” some Nirvana and The Kinks.
My mother always insisted that I must want to perform onstage, write my own songs, be a rock star. It was funny because she loved the trombone and never wanted to play onstage either, but she thought it had to be different if the guitar was your instrument.
I was never the most self-aware kid, but I had known this about myself: I wanted to play, not perform.
And I wanted to talk to other people who loved to play. That was how the idea for the shop began. I tried giving lessons as a side gig. I tried writing for music sites. But one day, I went into Guitar Center, one of those big, chain music stores, and I thoughtyes. I can do this, and do it much, much better.
I was halfway through my own version of “Jolene” when the door opened.
I had the amp turned up too high to hear the bell, but I saw the door out of the corner of my eye and stopped playing.
My last chord reverberated, and Cara stopped just in front of me in a tight beige dress, her head held high.
“I have an idea,” she said.
Chapter Five
“You want to go on a road trip to make our exes jealous?” I asked twenty minutes later, making sure I’d understood her plan.
We sat on stools near the rows of guitar cases. They were mostly black, but Cara found a bright blue one and absently ran her fingers against the rough plastic. Her nails were short with a beige polish that matched her dress. I kept mine short for playing guitar, and I had a sudden urge to ask why she did the same. Grading papers? Frog dissections?
Cara’s cheeks were red, but she didn’t seem embarrassed by my words. “No,” she said firmly. “I want to get out of town and have an adventure because we deserve it. I want to post reels on Mesmio along the way so that they—and everyone else—know we’re even happier now that they’re gone.”
I looked at her blankly for a moment, wondering if she believed any of that. I had a framed picture of my wedding day on my bedside table that had been held so much that the glass had grown semi-opaque with my fingerprints.
“So, we’re not pretending to date or anything?” I asked. “Because I’ve seen that movie. I know how it ends.”
“No,” she said again. She had a way of sounding like her calmness took considerable effort. It made me want to keep trying her patience. I wondered if her students ever felt the same. “We’re friends,” she explained. “We’re not pretending anything.”
“No offense,” I said, running my fingers down the guitar strings, “but we’re barely friends. Bridget and Lorenzo were childhood buddies. We’re the tagalong spouses. Or we were.”
Cara didn’t flinch, and for a moment, I wondered if I’d underestimated her. I’d seen her as frail, bulldozed by her husband’s infidelity, and that was based on what? The fact that I’d seen her crying? Had toxic masculinity somehow so infested my female brain that I judged someone for publicly expressing an emotion?
I vowed to do better.
“So now’s our chance to change that,” Cara said. “Think of it as a chance to become better friends. Think of it as a vacation that you don’t have to take alone. To be honest, I don’t care about your motivations. I just…”
She stopped, looking at the white lilies embroidered along the hem of her dress, and I did think about it.
I thought about getting away from my house, full of memories, from the dread of running into Bridget or Lorenzo at the grocery store, and most of all, from the unopened envelope on my desk.
