Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

I take another sip of my cocktail. I’m buzzy in my joints, something that only ever happens when I have liquor. I set it down and push it away. I know when I’ve had enough, and the last thing I need is to go home to drunk moping. Still, I can feel the way it’s loosened my tongue, my inhibitions.

  “We had a fight.”

  Lachelle stares at me. “What do you mean, you had a fight?”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Cecelia says, swooping in and taking one of the fake-bacon-wrapped water chestnuts from the plate in front of Lachelle.

  She groans in satisfaction. “I keep forgetting to eat,” she says.

  “Meg was telling me about this fight she had with a guy she’s dating.”

  Cecelia’s stare somehow makes me feel more embarrassed, enough that I don’t even bother correcting Lachelle again. I mean, okay, I haven’t dated much since I started the planner business, but Cecelia’s looking at me as though I’ve torn off my nun’s habit.

  But then she says, in almost exactly the same tone as Lachelle, “You had a fight?”

  I nod miserably, silently running through its worst moments all over again. That awful thing I’d said to Reid, that look in his eyes. That terrible splash of liquid on his skin. The only letters that have come easy to me this week are s, o, r, y. I sincerely hope my clients aren’t on the lookout for hidden apologies that have nothing to do with them.

  “Wow,” says Lachelle. “I’ve never even seen you get irritated, and that includes the time your movie star client made you sit in the back room for ten thousand hours over one set of treatments.”

  “It wasn’t ten thousand,” I mutter, but my face heats at this mention of Lark, who hasn’t totally ghosted me, but she has sent me two e-mails saying she hasn’t had time to call to set up our next meeting. I wonder if she’s asking Cameron for quotes to use in my termination letter.

  “I get irritated,” I add, thinking of Cameron and his terrible quotes.

  Lachelle laughs. “I’m sure you do. But you don’t show it.”

  “It’s a wonderful quality,” Cecelia says. “You’re still the best person I ever had work the desk.”

  “Hey,” says Lachelle.

  “But I agree,” Cecelia adds. “It is . . . unexpected.”

  Under their gazes, I’m the malfunctioning machine I’ve felt like all week long. A normally cheerful Meg-Bot that’s finally short-circuited itself into a show of temper. They’ve removed the tiny screws for the cover of my control panel. They are staring right in there, surveying the damage.

  “What did you fight about?” says Lachelle. “Was it the marginal tax rate? Those guys hate that.”

  “No, he . . .” Called me out. Said what he meant. Pushed and pushed, until we couldn’t keep it light anymore. “Irritates me,” I finish, half-heartedly.

  “Dump him,” says Lachelle. “There’s already a bunch of men out there to be irritated with, and that’s just on the Internet.”

  “Shuhei irritates me all the time. On our first date he told me I was using the wrong fork to eat my salad.”

  Lachelle looks at Cecelia as if she’s revealed that Shuhei has a tail. “Which hospital did you take him to after?”

  Cecelia smiles. “We irritate each other in the right ways. I probably wouldn’t have managed more than three words if he hadn’t said that stupid thing about the fork; I was so shy when I first moved here.” She sends a dreamy look across the room toward where Shuhei stands. He seems to sense it, looking up at her and smiling.

  “That’s a good point,” Lachelle says. “I irritated Sean into going to yoga with me, and now he has fifty percent less back pain.”

  “So does he irritate you in the right way?” says Cecelia, raising her eyebrows. Someone from over by the bar calls her name, and she groans. “I have to mingle. Come by the shop next week, okay? I want to know how this works out.”

  I nod and accept her hug, wondering if now it’ll be time to tighten my screws and get out of here. But when she weaves her way back through the crowd, Lachelle takes over the eyebrow-raising.

  “Does he, then?”

  I think about his curious questions, his teacup-turning, his very disappointing opinions about dessert. I think of all that, and I want to say, He does.

  Instead I shake my head.

  “It can’t be good that he gets me worked up that way. I mean, I yelled. In Prospect Park.”

  Lachelle snorts. “Believe me. You’re not the first person to yell there.”

  She’s not even finished speaking before I start again, propelled by my buzz or by my block or by my utter exhaustion at having thought about this all week.

  “I said things to him I regret. I hurt him.” I swallow, curl my hands back around my glass again, if only to have something to hold on to.

  “Meg, take it easy on yourself. Everyone loses their temper sometimes.” I look up at her, her soft, nonjudgmental smile paired with a gently furrowed brow of concern.

  “You know what you said before about never seeing me get irritated?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “No, you’re right. It’s on purpose that I’m this way.” I clear my throat. “When I was growing up, my parents—they fought a lot. Loud fights, quiet fights, whatever. Nothing physical, and they were good to me, but they were awful to each other a lot of the time. They couldn’t wait to leave each other. My whole life, I tried to stay above the fray.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  I shrug. “Lots of people have parents who don’t get along. But when I got older—” I break off, reaching a limit, something I don’t want to say. It’s astounding how much I’ve told her already. Maybe my cocktail has truth serum in it.

  “When I had my own fight with them,” I say, adjusting for my limit, “I guess . . . I felt so out of control. We all said things we can’t take back, and nothing’s ever been the same. So I really try to—I keep the peace with people. I don’t like the way it makes me feel, to fight.”

  Lachelle leans back, looking at me with some blend of sympathy and surprise, the latter probably because I’ve spent most of the years I’ve known her talking to her about pens and window displays, new shops in the neighborhood, sales at stores we both frequent. And that old chestnut, the weather.

  “Of course you don’t. No one’s ever taught you how to do it.”

  I make what I hope is a sarcasm snort, though I suspect it sounds pretty unpracticed. “I told you. I learned from the masters.”

  “No, you didn’t. I haven’t been married for as long as the happy couple over there, but I’ve been with Sean for fifteen years, and I had to learn to fight with him the same way I had to learn how to fight with my sister, and with my roommate in college. Even a few times with Cecy.”

  Surprise must show on my face at that last one, and she shrugs.

  “She could’ve won that window competition, you know. The point is . . . sometimes fighting isn’t about leaving, it’s about staying. It takes practice to get it right, and it’s painful, but if you want to stay with people, you do it.”

  Something sparks in my circuit board then, some wire livening with its new connection. I haven’t fought with anyone in years and years, have shoved down even the smallest inclination. Boyfriends I drifted away from for one thing or another—one who lied to me about smoking cigarettes at night, one who never let me finish a sentence before trying to complete it for me, one who I always suspected was seeing someone else, too. No great losses, but it wasn’t as though I tried to press the point. Worse is the thought of friends I have scattered throughout Manhattan and here—including Lachelle, including Cecelia—who I’ve kept at a distance. I had Sibby, after all. Sibby who already knew all the hard things about me, and I’d never have to fight with her.

  Except I do, I think, straightening up in my chair, suddenly feeling starkly, shockingly sober. I have to start a fight with Sibby, if I want us to stay friends after she leaves. I have to continue a fight with Lark, if I want us to become friends.

  And
I have to finish a fight with Reid—I have to do it right this time—if I want us to . . .

  If I want us to be more than friends.

  It’s a revelation, but it’s not an easy one. Even at the thought of it—more confrontation, more moments of getting it wrong—my palms feel clammy, my fingers weak. I think fleetingly about my desk at home, the wasteland of attempts and failures from the last week. Holding a pencil has felt like holding a thousand pounds of weight.

  “Practice,” I repeat, and I can hear the way it sounds disbelieving, suspicious.

  “Listen, Meg,” she says, reading my tone. “You didn’t come to this city and teach yourself your craft and start your own business because you’re weak. And you don’t make nice with your clients and get them to trust you the way they do because you’re weak, either. You practiced getting along with people. You can certainly practice not getting along with them, too.”

  It’s part compliment, part assignment, and Lachelle delivers it with the unbothered confidence of a person who has had a ton of practice being right about everything from your back pain to your window display to your deep-seated emotional damage. She looks quickly down at her watch and her eyes widen. “Shit,” she says. “I better go.”

  I’m grateful for the small distractions of wrapping up the evening—both of us settling our bills, waving quick goodbyes to Cecelia and Shuhei. It gives me a few minutes to process what Lachelle has said, to consider what I have to do, to let myself feel a fragile hope.

  When we get outside, Lachelle taps out a quick text message to Sean to let him know she’s on her way. Then she looks up at me again and says, “I think you should call him.”

  That fragile hope dissipates. I may not have spent the last seven days planning to practice my confrontation skills with Reid, but I have made an effort to apologize.

  “I tried,” I admit. “He sent it to voice mail. Three times.”

  Lachelle winces, as though she’s picturing the same thing I have—Reid looking down at his phone, seeing my name pass across the screen. Pressing the button that reads DECLINE. Helvetica Neue. Cold as ice.

  “What’d you say in your messages?”

  I blink at her. “Nothing, since I’m under fifty and this is the twenty-first century. Who leaves messages?”

  She laughs. “Fair. But I think you should try again.” She lifts a hand in acknowledgment of the Uber she called pulling up at the curb. “Maybe what’s wrong with him is that he likes voice mails.”

  When she’s gone, I stand under the restaurant awning for a few seconds, my phone in my hand, wondering if nine thirty on a Friday night is too late to start practicing. I’ve got no doubt I’ll get sent to voice mail again, but this time, I have to listen all the way through his crisp, short message. I have to wait for the beep, I have to—

  The phone I’m holding rings.

  For a second I stare down at it as though it has some kind of magical power. Since I don’t recognize the number it’s probably a telemarketer, but I guess all my cruel imaginings related to hitting the decline button have warned me against doing the same.

  “Hello?”

  There is an unholy amount of noise on the other end. I have to move it away from my ear.

  “Meg?” A woman’s voice shouts through the clamor. “Meg Mackworth?”

  “Hi, yes, this is Meg.” I try to make my voice loud enough to compensate for wherever she must be. A shouting convention, by the sound of it.

  “Hey, I’m Gretchen. I tend bar over at Swine? You know it?”

  “Uh . . .” I don’t have much of a nightlife these days. And if I did, I’m guessing a place called Swine would not be part of it.

  “Brooklyn!” she yells. She tacks on an intersection to narrow it down for me.

  “Okay?”

  “Do you know a guy called Reid?”

  “I do!” I press a finger to my ear, now desperate to hear better, a bolt of anxiety landing straight in my stomach. “Is he all right?”

  She laughs. “He’s fine and dandy. Probably he wouldn’t want me calling you, but I think he might’ve lost his phone or something.”

  “Oh,” I say, confused. Who would ever describe Reid as “dandy”? Why is he at a bar called Swine? And, for the purposes of my absolute selfishness in regard to this particular matter, did he lose his phone before or after my attempts to reach him?

  “I don’t—I’m not sure why you’re calling me?”

  “Well, honey,” Gretchen says, laughing over a loud clatter of ice being put into a glass. “He just tried to pay his bar tab with your business card.”

  It isn’t where I’d want to have my first fight practice.

  Swine is the kind of bar that might make a tourist happy, that might make it into a guidebook for its gimmicky theme, its eagerness to attract a crowd. Oddly enough, the exterior is something Reid and I might’ve snapped a photo of on a walk—a white brick wall with bold, black block lettering, a big drop shadow with diagonal grading, a crude but clever outline of a pig, its various good-for-food parts blocked out and labeled in a thin slab serif. Over an arched opening in the wall there’s a curving script indicating a “Biergarten,” a patio from which plumes of woody smoke rise into the night sky.

  But outside of its clever lettering, everything else about this place tells me Reid—and I—would’ve wanted to keep on walking. So far as I can tell, there’s about ten million people in that Biergarten, and every man I can see is wearing some version of the same outfit: boat shoes, no socks, cropped-style khakis or slim-cut shorts, pastel-colored shirts. I almost check my phone to see if I’ve teleported out of Brooklyn into some college town’s rush week.

  It’s so incongruous to imagine Reid here that I don’t let myself wonder at my surroundings for long. I push through the heavy front doors into the non-Biergarten part of this sideshow and am met with a wall of noise. The crowd in here is different, more skinny jeans and beards, even a few leather bracelets.

  So it’s pretty easy to find the man I came for.

  He’s at the end of the long, dark-stained wood bar, wearing his weekend jacket over his weekend T-shirt and jeans. To anyone else, I’m sure his posture looks out of place: upright, overly formal. But I realize I know Reid’s body so well that I can see how his broad shoulders hunch, ever so slightly, over the short glass of amber-colored liquid in front of him, the fingers of one hand curled around it.

  That doesn’t look right, I think, ridiculously. It should be a cup of tea.

  It’s this final incongruity that propels me forward, no thought to whether this’ll end in a confrontation. I only want him out of here, out of this place where he doesn’t belong. I take the empty stool next to him and right away he turns his head to me, his eyes widening briefly, those barely hunched shoulders straightening immediately.

  “Meg. Hello.”

  He seems all the drunker for pretending not to be. His voice is extra deep, extra stern, and I should not be attracted to that, given that he’s probably compensating for an inclination to slur. But there’s no helping it: He sounds great.

  “Hey there, Reid.” I catch the bartender’s eye, give her a wave of acknowledgment that I made it. She smiles and makes a discreet gesture to the register and I nod, indicating that I’ll take the check.

  “You’ve got cats all over you,” Reid says.

  I look down, remembering the gold Hello Kitty faces. I truly wish I was wearing something less absurd, but when I look back up at Reid he doesn’t have the perplexed furrow in his brow I expect. Instead he’s got a sloppy version of that swoonsh, as though he is entirely charmed.

  As though we haven’t fought at all.

  And I admit—I’m tempted to give in to it. Yes, part of me is thinking, look at my silly dress and forget about Prospect Park. Finish your drink and we’ll walk it off, look at some signs together. We’ll forget this ever happened. We’ll never talk about it again.

  Instead I ask him the most direct question I can think of at the moment. “Did
you lose your phone?”

  He meets my eyes, his crooked smile fading. “No, I left it at home. I needed a break from it.”

  I swallow, feeling stung. Three calls isn’t that many. Still, I stay in my seat.

  I stay.

  “From work,” he clarifies, seeming to read my mind. He turns his glass a quarter-turn, but makes no move to pick it up. “I called in sick today.”

  I search his face and realize there’s something more drawn about it tonight, the already-carved planes along his cheeks sharper than when I last saw him. As with his posture, his face probably looks perfect to the untrained eye—but I can tell the difference. I wonder if he’s been across the river all week, as blocked with his numbers as I’ve been with my letters, adding up sums that don’t make sense. Like me, he ended up at a bar with a drink in his hand, but unlike how it turned out for me, no one here—with the exception of Gretchen—looks even half as cool as Lachelle.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He seems to ignore the question. “I’ve never done that before, called in sick. I’m sure it’ll cause—” He breaks off, shakes his head, and starts over. “What you saw, in the park. I get the flares when I’m stressed.”

  “Reid,” I say quickly, almost sharply. I’m curious—I’m so, so curious—but I suddenly feel as clear about how this night needs to go as I’ve ever felt about anything. Reid this way, not quite himself—this is no time to practice, because this isn’t a fair fight. I’ll settle the bill; I’ll get him a cab. I’ll insist he calls me tomorrow. “We can talk about this later.”

  Reid starts to speak again, but I get an assist from Gretchen, who shows up with the bill. I’m reaching into my bag for my wallet but am surprised when I look up to find Reid holding out a credit card to her.

  “I thought I paid,” he says, but it’s not accusatory. It’s . . . confused.

  She slides my business card back across the bar to him, and for a good five seconds the three of us are frozen in an awkward tableau—me with my oversized wallet, some random receipt stuck in the zipper, Gretchen with her hands on her hips, her heavily lined eyes moving back and forth between these two proffered payments, Reid’s head tipped down, his gaze frozen on the business card.