Let It Go

by James, Brooklyn

  “And a great ass,” he jokes, although quite serious in his declaration as he blatantly and approvingly sizes hers up. She laughs, giving him a reprimanding glance. “Sorry. Probably too inappropriate, too soon.” He shakes his head, an apology for his boorish behavior.

  She smiles at him, biting her bottom lip. “Don’t think I didn’t take note of yours.” She inquires of his workout regimen, “What do you do to get that thing so perky? Squats? Lunges?”

  “Sprints and hills,” he says, the college football star well-versed in such drills. “So back to the kid thing. You want kids?”

  “I think I do,” she considers.

  “You didn’t want kids with him?” he speaks of Jack.

  “Funny you should ask,” she says. “That was the get-real moment for me. My sister and I were out to dinner. I was telling her about our problems and considering whether we should keep on trying or call it quits. She said, ‘Well, there’s only one way to answer that question.’ And then she proceeded to ask me if I saw him as the father of my children. That’s when it hit me.” The surprise and recognition still lingering in her voice.

  “You didn’t think he’d be a good father?”

  “It’s not that I thought he wouldn’t be a good father,” she prefaces. “It’s just that his coping skills were a little sketchy. Especially toward the end of our relationship. Very rollercoaster-ish. When it was good, it was really good. But when it was bad...whew,” Savannah emits, reflecting on the tumult of their latter years together. “I’m sure at one point, I admired that as passion.” She shakes her head, scolding at the thought.

  “Intrigue. Drama,” Brody pipes, knowing all too well the dysfunctional yet stimulating hot and cold relationship attraction she speaks of.

  “I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I heard him yell at his mama. He didn’t just yell. He brayed. And that did it.” She pauses momentarily. “You don’t yell at your mama. Any man that yells at his own mother…I mean, how is he going to communicate with his children? Bray at them?” She throws her hands out to her sides in total frustration, finally tiring of rehashing relationship past. “I don’t know. All I do know is that my clock never ticked when I was with him.”

  “Your clock?” He asks, slightly thrown.

  “You know, my biological clock.” She pats her lower abdomen, reminiscing the comical adage made famous by Marisa Tomei’s performance in My Cousin Vinny. “That internal thing that every woman has. I guess you could call it intuition. The biological need to procreate.”

  “Ah,” he concurs. “Women’s intuition, maternal instincts, biological clocks.” He chuckles. “You women come with all sorts of gadgets.”

  Savannah laughs. “I guess you men only have to consult one gadget.” She raises her eyebrows.

  He refrains from commenting, knowing fully well what gadget she speaks of.

  “That’s what the Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger says, ‘The penis is the picker,’” she quotes through a sheepish giggle. “What about you? You want kids?”

  “Oh yeah,” he answers immediately. “I love kids. I think every man wants kids, don’t they? It’s the only way the world will know you were here. Your legacy.”

  “You ever feel like you’re behind the eight ball? I mean with the whole marriage and kids thing?” Her mind reflecting on their thirty-year-old divorced status.

  “Yeah. Most of my friends are married and have kiddos. I thought I’d be there by now, too. But since we’re discussing celebrity quotes, in the wise words of Morpheus from The Matrix, ‘What happened, happened and could not have happened any other way.’” He catches his breath. “I’ll get there. You will, too. If we’re brave enough not to let the baggage that we carry bog us down,” he speaks of relationships past.

  “The baggage that we carry,” she repeats. “You don’t mind if I use that, do you? For my column? I should warn you now, anything you say or do in the presence of my company is liable to end up in my newspaper column.” She laughs nervously, knowing some of her best professional works are pages out of her personal life.

  “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so they say. Let me know if you use it. I’ll tell my mama I made the paper.” He winks at her, picking up their pace. “You ready to give that fine ass of yours a workout?”

  “I’m game if you are,” she encourages, having to work to keep up with him.

  “Sprint to the hill and then we conquer. Winner buys brunch.” He reverses the usual role of the bet, banking on his legs, fully intending to treat her.

  Chapter Five

  A perfectly tepid Monday morning rolls around, and the start of the work week is in full swing at the Savannah Sun Times. Savannah and her cubicle mate, Tami Lynn, return from their lunch break.

  “So…he didn’t ask you out again?” Tami Lynn asks, still trying to figure out gym boy Brody’s, angle. “He didn’t secure the next date?”

  “No,” Savannah says very nonchalant, surprisingly disinterested in analyzing his decision.

  “What do you think that means?” Tami Lynn taps the end of her pencil against her chin, deep in concentration.

  “I don’t know, Tami Lynn.” Savannah continues with the work at her desk. “Maybe it means he’s taking it slow. I told you he’s been married and divorced, too. Or, maybe he’s just not that into me.”

  “Did he call last night?”

  “No, Tami Lynn. He didn’t call last night. We spent the better part of the day together yesterday. Why would he call me?” her rhetorical question certainly not begging for a reply.

  “Maybe he’s waiting until day two, to avoid looking desperate. You know that whole guy code thing.” Tami Lynn rolls her eyes with the term. “But you have to stop talking about your ex and his ex. That’s dangerous territory, Savannah. Although, it’s promising that the man is talking about his future with you. Kids and all.”

  Savannah shakes her head, joking, “Would you like to name our children?”

  Tami Lynn gives her the infamous head-cock. “I’m just saying. Do you know how rare that is? That a man initiates that conversation, telling you on the first date that he wants the whole enchilada…wife, kids, home.”

  “I think the topics of date-talk conversation vary from your twenties to your thirties,” Savannah considers their ages. “Besides, he didn’t say he wanted any of that with me. He was just talking about things that are important to him. He’s very direct. I like that. And it wasn’t a date.”

  “Whatever,” Tami Lynn dismisses. “What about you? Think you’ll ever get married again?”

  “I’m divorced, not dead, Tami Lynn.” Savannah’s laugh settles with an afterthought, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe I’ll take a page from Goldie Hawn’s book. She and Kurt Russell have been together for years without being married. Maybe they’re onto something.”

  “Maybe,” Tami Lynn acknowledges. “So…what are you going to do? When he asks you out again?”

  “Guess I’ll figure that out, if he asks.”

  “How long has it been?” Tami Lynn begins. “Since, well, you know…”

  “A looong time,” Savannah answers, knowing her sex life has finagled its way into the conversation. “Too long,” she reviews. “Still trying to figure out how that happened.”

  “What?”

  “Here I am, thirty years old…just beginning my sexual peak. And I don’t have anyone to enjoy it with.”

  “I know, right,” Tami Lynn sympathizes. “When we’re young and hot and sought after by every man on two legs…in his sexual prime, it doesn’t have the same significance. And then, bam! Thirty rolls around and all the juices are flowing, and we’re left to consult the shoebox.” She refers to the location of her most prized vibrator.

  “Jac has been telling me, ‘Get ready for your thirties, Savannah. You’re going to feel like an eighteen-year-old boy,’” she quotes her eldest sister. “I thought she was exaggerating.” Savannah throws her pencil down on her desk. “That’s a
ll I think about these days. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex!”

  “Did somebody say SEX,” their associate editor, Sam McDonald, inquires, stopping at their cubicle on his way through the office space. His pretty-boy face beams, sitting atop a lean and toned physique. “Who’s having it? Who wants it? Spill.” He props himself upon the corner of Savannah’s desk.

  “Sorry to burst your bubble,” Savannah says. “We’re pretty boring here. Nobody’s having it, but we want to.” She grins.

  “Speak for yourself,” Tami Lynn pipes, offended with the inclusion into such a category, even though it is the truth. “Savannah here is all hot and bothered.”

  “Heterosexual dating will do that to you. Why do you think I’m gay,” Sam states. “We sideline all of the dating, meet and greet, get-to-know-each-other rubbish. And skip straight to the goods. What we’re all really after, the pièce de résistance.” He smiles proudly, his French accent impeccable. “I’ll never understand why you straight people insist on torturing yourselves.”

  “Maybe because it’s been drilled into our heads by Dear Abby and every other relationship goddess, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free,’” Tami Lynn mutters.

  “Well, there’s your problem,” Sam says. “You wouldn’t go to a mechanic about problems with your plumbing, would you?”

  Tami Lynn and Savannah look to each other and at Sam, their confusion evident in their expressions.

  “You’re going to the wrong source,” Sam begins to explain. “Dear Abby is a relationship expert. Now if it’s sex for which you’re seeking advice, you go to a sex expert. Like Talk Sex with Sue Johanson,” he briefs them on Canada’s foremost sex educator.

  “You mean that old woman with all the sex toys?” Tami Lynn asks, mortified. “I saw one of her shows where she featured her favorite toys. She had a rubber duckie, dressed up in bondage gear with a vibrating beak!” Tami Lynn bugs her eyes out. “It was called I Rub My Duckie. A waterproof vibrator.” She waves her hand in the air, quelling the illustration relived in her mind. “There is just something so wrong with a prehistoric woman talking about clitoral stimulation.”

  Savannah and Sam laugh with her animation. “Bet she has a lot more sex than Dear Abby,” Sam jousts, causing Tami Lynn to gag, her hand quickly covering her mouth at such imagery. “You ladies suit yourselves.” Sam rises from the desk, his tone counseling. “You sit right here and wait for your men to make the first move, when all the while the ball is in your court.” He looks at Savannah. “Miss Hot and Bothered…I don’t know the object of your affection. But I do know, all you have to do is ask. Throw the poor fellow a bone.”

  “Woof, woof,” Tami Lynn calls after Sam as he walks away.

  “Easy Old Yeller,” Savannah giggles. Grabbing up her pencil, she finds a sticky note. “Where would one find this show, Sex Talk with Sue?” she fumbles the unfamiliar order of the title.

  Tami Lynn shakes her head. “Just Google it.”

  “Savannah,” a voice, that of a female intern, comes through the intercom sitting to the side of Savannah’s desk.

  “Yes,” Savannah answers.

  “You have a visitor, at the front,” the intern informs. “He says he’s your husband.”

  “Jack,” she whispers, disproving of the conjugal title. “I’ll be right there.”

  “He’s still calling himself your husband?” Tami Lynn says, her eyebrow cocked with concern.

  “This is a new revelation.” Savannah departs the cubicle.

  “You want me to come with you?” Tami Lynn calls after her, her curiosity piqued. Employed with the local paper, the perfect disguise for her inherent nosy personality. Savannah waves her off, making her way to the front.

  Jack paces in the lobby, the intern eyeing him nervously, wishing he would take a seat as prompted. Savannah reads the angst in his body language as she walks through the door to the open waiting area.

  “Jack,” she greets him, her low vocal tone brimming with caution, her body language now on guard.

  “Were you jogging with some big son of a bitch? At Hutchinson Island yesterday?” He interrogates, stepping closer to her, his voice strained and hushed.

  Savannah looks to the intern, giving her an uneasy smile, attempting to mediate her concern. Wrapping her hand around Jack’s elbow, she quickly leads him toward the elevator.

  “I was at the station. On an overtime shift. Smith,” he refers to a fellow firefighter by his last name, “said he saw you and some jock all smiles, chumming it up over a run.”

  Savannah coaxes him inside the elevator, her finger mashing against the ground floor button, thankful they have the big metal box to themselves. “And you felt the need to come all the way down here to ask me that?” she finally responds. “What about your shift?”

  “I left. Told Captain I was feeling sick,” he sputters. “I am. Sick to my stomach with the thought. What are you doing, Savannah?”

  Ding! The elevator stops on the ground level. Savannah pulls him off the ride, extending forced nods and greetings to familiar faces they pass on the way out the front door.

  “Who is he? Where did you meet him? Is that why you signed the divorce papers? Because of him?” Jack continues.

  Savannah drags him out the door and to the side of the building, away from foot traffic. “Jack, you cannot do this. You can’t come to my work, all amped up, firing away twenty questions. Would you want me to do that? To you? At the station?”

  “Well, at least I might think you care,” he says.

  “So, this is your way of caring?”

  “Who is he, Savannah?” Jack continues with a one-track mind.

  “He’s a friend, Jack. You know all about friends, don’t you.” She folds her arms defiantly over her chest.

  “Back to the phone calls,” he bites flippantly.

  “Yep,” she pipes. “Speaking of which, seems you couldn’t wait to leave my house the other night to call her up.” Savannah references his immediate and lengthy phone call to one of those infamous numbers that continues to receive his undivided attention on their phone bill. “You giving her the blow by blow, Jack? If you’re going for the sympathy angle, let me give you a little tip. Women don’t care to hear about other women. You’ve got seven days to get your own phone account,” she adds, the last of their joint bills that needs tending.

  “Fuck!” He slaps the side of the brick building with his hand, quickly pulling it away, shaking the appendage to relieve the pain.

  “Go ahead,” she says, her tone calm and detached. “You want your hand to end up like your foot?” She references a past argument where he kicked a tree, resulting in his foot finding its new home inside a boot cast for six weeks. “Or your phone?” she continues. “How many phones have you been through in the past year?” Seemingly one of his recently acquired venting mechanisms, slamming his phone against the ground.

  “Savannah, don’t patronize me.” He paces the sidewalk. “At least I care, which is more than I can say for you.”

  “Then why are you here? If I am so uncaring, unloving…incapable of giving you want you want, then you should be jumping for joy that we are divorced. Go. Go find what you want. Who you want.” She throws her arms out to her sides.

  “I’m never going to find anyone like you. Don’t you get that?” He stops pacing, facing her. “I didn’t want any of this.” He speaks to his resistance to the separation, divorce.

  “I didn’t want it either, Jack,” her voice softens. “It’s just sometimes what we want and what we need are two different things.”

  “I told you, you never really needed me. I knew it,” he deflects yet again. “You’re going to go on, just fine. You’ll be great.” He kicks at a pebble on the sidewalk. “My life sucks.”

  Savannah huffs, the inside of her palm slapping lightly against her forehead. “And here we go,” she says. “You’ve been saying that now for the past three years. If your life sucks and you’re married to me, what message am I supposed to ta
ke away from that?”

  “I don’t know,” he answers sarcastically. “How about sticking with me. Hanging in there. Seeing it through. That’s what you do when you get married, Savannah.”

  She chuckles, the action completely opposite of the contempt in her voice. “Why didn’t I think of that,” she spars. “What do you call the last three years, Jack? You weren’t open to therapy. I can’t make you have a better outlook on life. I can’t make you change the way you perceive and react to things. The only thing I can control is me and my reaction. I’m done. I’ve had it up to here.” She throws her hand up over her head.

  “You know I have a lot of issues. My childhood. My parents’ divorce. Anybody I’ve ever loved has walked out on me, Savannah. I never thought you’d be in that category.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, quieting the urge to point out his exhausting poor-pitiful-me focus. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sorry I’ve hurt you, really, I am. I don’t know what else to say.” She pauses. “I mean, the only thing I know, if you don’t like where you’re at in your life, it’s up to you to change it. I want you to be happy, Jack.”

  “Have you told your family? Your mom? Your sisters? About the divorce.” He asks, knowing they all like him and treat him as one of their own. “Bet they’re not too happy about it,” he bites on her word.

  “No, they’re not,” she says. “I don’t think divorce is something people get elated about.”

  “What about the kids? Vangie’s kids…Zoey and Luka.”

  “You’ll always be Uncle Jack to them. You can see them anytime you want. Vangie and Payton.” She smiles with the mention, hoping Jack’s friendship with Vangie’s husband will give him something to look forward to. “Payton will still expect to see you for the monthly poker game, nights out with the boys, golfing tournaments. All the good stuff. You and I, our status doesn’t change any of that.”

  “What about your mama?” he continues, still playing the family card, hoping it’s enough to guilt her into changing her mind.