Page 37 of Nutcracker with Benefits
And I wonder if Clara has told anyone in her life about me. Would she have talked about me to her newest friends that she’s made in Australia? Or caught her online friends up on what a moron I’ve been?
So I tell them everything. I tell them about how I’ve loved Clara for years and how I wanted her to see that New York would be a place she could love.
“That is pretty manipulative,” Fritz says.
Great. Now Fritz is smarter than me.
“It’s not like I could just say, ‘hey, maybe you should scale back your work and hang out with me more often.’ That’s less manipulative but still a bonehead move.”
“Bonehead!” Molly shouts from the dining room where she and Ricky are coloring.
“Well, you suggested she change a lot,” Whitney points out, “but what are you changing?”
“I guess…nothing. I thought Clara would be ready to move back here someday, and clearly, she’s not. It makes sense to me because my whole life is here, and Clara’s family is here, but the rest of her life is anywhere but here. Clara pointed out that I’ve never even taken a trip somewhere fun.”
“’Be the change you want to see in the world,’” Fritz says.
Whitney and I stare at him. “Did you just quote Gandhi?” I ask.
“I don’t think it was Gandhi,” he says. “But whoever it was, I think they just told you to take a vacation.”
14
Clara
I call Dad from the ship in Sydney Harbour where I watched the fireworks show half an hour ago. “Hello from the future!” I say when he answers.
“Hey, Sugar Plum, how’s life in the new year?”
I make a big show of looking around, even though Dad can’t see me. “Looks about the same.”
“Figures. Where are you right now?”
I tell him about the cruise I’ve been on, about the view of the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the fireworks show from the top of a forty-meter vessel.
“Sounds amazing. Oh, guess who’s here,” he says. I suck in my breath. I wondered if Nash was spending the evening with them, but I haven’t spoken to him or asked about him since I left his apartment on December twenty-seventh.
I thought I would be mad for longer, but I had barely sat down on the first airplane before I replayed the whole thing from a different perspective.
The what if perspective.
What if one of us had said, that first weekend Nash visited me at college, that we wanted more than a casual thing? What if after college, I’d gotten a career in the travel industry instead of forging my own path?
What if I’d spent more time with Nash, even just a week. Would I have fallen in love with him? Did I ever even give Nash a chance?
By the time I arrived in Sydney, I realized that I was very good at compartmentalizing Nash, putting him in a New York City-shaped box, and keeping him at arm’s length because I had somewhere else to be.
There’s some clicking around and background noises, and then I hear Uncle D’s voice. “Happy New Year.”
I return the greeting, relaxing. Of course, he meant Uncle D. Why am I disappointed to talk to my favorite stepdad?
“Is your trip to Sydney everything you were hoping for?” Uncle D asks.
“So far, yeah. I did the opera house tour and climbed the bridge and a bunch of other fun things. No kangaroo or koala sightings yet, but I’m headed up the coast after this. How are things at home?”
“Good.”
There’s a pregnant pause, and I can picture Uncle D’s steady gaze, waiting for me to break down and ask what I really want to know: How’s Nash?
