Page 81 of Anywhere with You
Then there was no way I could stop. So much for being a grown-up. I leaned into my mommy.
She and Dad hugged me from either side, and I tried to let go of everything I’d been carrying. But there was too much. There was still Cara, who I’d abandoned, who’d lied to me about my own marriage. There was the stress of worry over Badger. There was the store, rescued from the brink of bankruptcy, and mine, truly mine.
I cried over every good and bad and hard thing, every change that had come, and all the challenges still ahead of me.
And for a moment, I tried to look at it all the way I’d looked at the canyon, at the stars, at the sands, the way Mary Oliver would, as something vast and unique, something pushing the boundary of the wordbeautifulto make it bigger, make it encompass more.
Because if I couldn’t see my own life that way, what was the point of any adventure?
Eventually, I pulled myself together as much as I could and told my parents the lie that they’d probably told me often, growing up.
“I’m just tired,” I said. “It’s been a long day, and I’m sure all I need is some rest.”
I rejected my mother’s pleas to stay in my old room, told them I’d call tomorrow, and took Badger home.
Just inside the front door of my house, I hugged him close to me again, then put him down, letting him run around with joy and bounce against my legs only to run around again and again.
It was wonderful to be home again, almost as much as it hurt. I went straight for the wine.
Badger sniffed corners and jumped up on all the furniture, barked at a plant, then rolled onto my feet, begging for belly rubs.
“You’re a pest,” I told him. “But I don’t know how I could’ve faced this without you.”
Chapter Thirty-two
I spent the next three days with my head in the store’s books, planning.
We were going to be in the black this month, for the first time ever. I wanted to recklessly double Florence’s and Doug’s salaries, but I knew what a blow it would be to them if I couldn’t keep it going. I settled on a one-time bonus, a thousand each for now, until we saw how long our luck would last.
And every time I took a break, I opened Mesmio.
Bridget and Lorenzo had returned from their cruise, their hair lighter, their skin darker, but that elation I’d seen in her earlier videos was still there. They looked into each other’s eyes, even while speaking to the camera. They touched constantly, as though afraid to find that they’d imagined it all, as though confirming that they were both there, together, every moment.
I wondered, not for the first time, how long they had loved each other.
Then I switched over to the videos of buff women chopping logs, as a palate cleanser.
But mostly, I watched Cara’s reels.
I hadn’t seen all the videos, even the ones she posted while we were traveling together. Others, I’d seen in their original versions, but Cara had edited and uploaded them, so I’d never watched the final product. She was good at video editing, probably better than she realized.
I started at the beginning and watched through to the end.
There we were, chatting together around the alien autopsy table and confiding in the bow-tied alien bartender. Then Cara was filming herself as she gleefully sledded down hills of white sand. Then we weretogether on the dunes, pointing out the mountains in the distance. We walked through the cliff dwellings. We shared the Grand Canyon. She had even taken a short clip of us, stuck in an elevator, talking about outrunning scorpions, our voices echoing. There were diners and hotel rooms and so many clips of us being ridiculous in the car. There were Mildred and Jeffrey, Mechanic Bill, and a video we’d taken with Lane just a couple of days before. I’d already forgotten. There was me, with my guitar. And there were the two of us at the hot springs, the incomparable beauty of the desert around us.
There were dozens of Mesmio reels, more than I could’ve imagined.
And then, of course, there were the new ones.
Cara sat in the cactus garden. Her eyes were swollen and teary, like when she’d come into my store just last week and asked me if I had known that her husband was cheating.
I hadn’t. She had, but it hadn’t crushed her any less. I knew that.
Now, she looked straight into the camera. “It looks like I’ll be finishing this adventure on my own. And it’s my fault, so keep that in mind when you comment.”
She turned the camera to show the cacti, like a terraced garden, in pots of varying heights around those in-ground. She showed a few of the blooms up close, even catching a glimpse of a hummingbird hovering over a blossom, and then there was her face, a little calmer than it had seemed before. It was seconds in Mesmio time, but it could’ve been hours later.
She smiled. “The world is still beautiful.”
