The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

The funny thing is, my dad would have gone wild for what happened at our live show. Oh, he’d absolutely be disappointed in me, but he loved when radio went off script. He craved those human moments, the times you got to see the people behind the personas.

  Well, here you go, Dad. Here’s how I ruined public radio.

  34

  My mother gets married in my childhood backyard on a clear July day.

  It’s just shy of eighty degrees, perfect for a Seattle summer, and she’s radiant in her navy jumpsuit, red hair arranged in a sophisticated knot with a few curls tumbling onto her shoulders. Phil is in a charcoal linen suit and navy tie, and neither of them can stop smiling.

  The wedding is small, only about thirty people. My parents were always proud of our backyard—lord knows my dad spent enough time maintaining it. Turns out, there’s enough space for a chuppah, several rows of chairs, and a small dance floor. Everything is adorned with yellow roses and elegant calla lilies, a marriage of my mother’s and Phil’s favorite flowers, and we strung tea lights along the fence. There’s a string quartet made up of their friends from the symphony, and later, the two of them will play, too.

  It hits me that not everyone gets to see a parent so deeply in love like this, and that makes me feel lucky, that I’m privy to this side of my mother.

  That I’ve seen her this in love not once but twice.

  My new stepsiblings and their kids are enough to make a small party feel alive and electric, and while I’m wistful for the quiet celebrations I had with my parents, I think I could get used to, well, fun.

  There’s so much to set up that I don’t get a chance to talk to Ameena and TJ, who arrive close to the start of the ceremony. I know I’ll have to talk to them at some point, but I’m putting it off as long as I can. My mother is my first priority.

  The ceremony itself is short and sweet. My mother and Phil wrote their own vows, and they’re both appropriately sappy. They incorporate the Jewish tradition of breaking a glass—after which we yell out, “Mazel tov!”—and a Nigerian tradition where guests spray money at the bride and groom, which they opt to donate to a cancer charity in honor of Phil’s late wife.

  “How are you doing?” my new stepsister Diana asks after the ceremony, while we’re in line at the small buffet next to the dance floor.

  “Oh—I’m fine,” I say, because we don’t yet have the kind of closeness where I can be fully open about the fact that I’m drowning in self-pity with a healthy dash of self-loathing. But maybe one day we will. “Just . . . job hunting. Shockingly, no one’s knocking down my door begging to hire me.”

  “It’s rough out there. Hey, if you want to babysit,” she says with a waggle of her eyebrows, “we’re in the market for a new nanny.”

  I force a smile. While I like her kids, I don’t think I could be around them for that many hours a day. I still don’t even know if I want my own.

  “Tempting offer, but I’m going to have to pass,” I say, and she snaps her fingers.

  “Damn. I was really hoping we could wrangle some kind of family discount. Nannies aren’t cheap.”

  “Are you trying to trick Shay into becoming our nanny?” her husband Eric says, heading over with a glass of white wine.

  “Yes, and it’s not working. Who are the kids terrorizing now?”

  “They’re calmly eating ravioli. At least, for the next few minutes.” He tips his glass at me. “Shay, can I get you anything?”

  I’ve had enough wine in the past week to power ten weddings, so I probably shouldn’t. “I’m good,” I say. God, they really are so nice. I don’t know why I was ever so reluctant. “Thank you.”

  Since I waited until everyone else had gone through the buffet line to take my turn, I carry my plate of food back to the only table with empty chairs. Of course it’s the one Ameena and TJ are sitting at. She’s in a lilac dress that I remember buying with her at an estate sale last year, and I wonder if she remembers the Capitol Hill boutique where I bought my powder-blue one. Everything else about her is so familiar that I can’t believe it’s been months since we spoke.

  TJ gives her a gentle nudge forward.

  And I just . . . crumble.

  * * *

  —

  Ameena and I venture deeper into the garden to talk.

  “I can’t believe everything that happened,” she says, sitting next to me on a stone bench my dad planted here so many years ago.

  “I can’t wrap my mind around it, either,” I admit. “Sometimes it feels like a bad dream, but then I wake up and nope, I’m still extremely unemployable and extremely embarrassed.”

  She squeezes my shoulder, and I lean into her touch. “I wish I could have been there for you. I don’t hate Seattle, I swear. I was just so eager for a change. Everything I said was completely out of line.”

  “Maybe,” I agree, “but I don’t think you were entirely wrong. The weirdest thing about this is that I feel relieved underneath everything. Relieved I don’t have to keep lying. And a little relieved that I can figure out if there’s a job for me out there that isn’t in public radio.”

  “Shay Goldstein not in public radio,” she says with an exaggerated gasp. “What is the world coming to?”

  That’s the most terrifying part: that I’ve defined myself by public radio for so long that I’ve never wondered who I am without it.

  Maybe the truth is that I’ve been scared to find out.

  Ameena opens up her beaded clutch. “I know it’s not traditional to give the daughter of the bride a gift,” she says. “I actually had these made before our fight. I was going to give you yours before I left, but . . .”

  “Holy shit. You didn’t.” I unwrap a custom-made silver bracelet with WWAMWMD printed on it. “You got me a WWAMWMD bracelet.”

  “So you never forget,” she says with a grin.

  “Tell me you have a matching one?”

  She pulls out a second one and slips it on. “Duh.”

  We continue catching up. Ameena tells me more about her job, about Virginia, about the humidity her hair was completely unprepared for. After a while, TJ finds us and asks Ameena to dance. She lifts her eyebrows at me, and I gesture to her that it’s okay. We’ll be okay, too—or at the very least, we’ll try to be.

  I venture back to the wedding guests, sliding into an empty seat next to my mother.

  “How have you been dancing for two hours and you still look flawless?” I ask her.

  “Oh, stop,” she says, but she’s glowing. “I know you put on an act out there for the wedding, and I appreciate it, but you can be honest with me. How are you doing?”

  I appreciate that she hasn’t judged me for lying on air to thousands of listeners. She must have known I had enough of it from every corner of the internet.

  “I’m not okay,” I admit, running my fingers along the petals of a nearby calla lily. “But I’m trying to be.”

  “And Dominic?”

  “He’s back at PPR. As a researcher.” His apologies must really have been empty if he was okay staying on their payroll, working with Kent. The fact that he’s still there, siding with Kent over me, feels like a tremendous betrayal. If only my heart could realize it. “I think I got so caught up in the idea of the show that it didn’t matter that we were lying to people, that they were giving us money because they bought into the lie, and when you think about it that way, it seems . . . really shitty.”

  “You wanted to make good radio,” she says simply. “You made an error in judgment. From the sound of it, Dominic made the same one.”

  “It would all be fine if I could just stop loving him.”

  “You know how many times I thought things would be so much simpler if I could stop loving your dad?” She shakes her head, and maybe it’s strange to bring him up on her wedding day, but this is the proof that he’s never gone. “All the years of therapy, lone
liness, grief . . . if I could flip a switch and just stop, it would have been easier, right?”

  “That would have been awful,” I say. “Easier, sure, but still awful.”

  Now I’m thinking back to all the times in my past relationships I said I love you too soon. I’m certain I meant it, but it didn’t feel anything like loving Dominic. I crave the smallest, simplest things: his rare dimple, the jokes about our age gap, his passion for cast-iron cookware. The way he felt in my bed, yes, but also the way he trusted me with his painful memories, and the way I trusted him with mine.

  Maybe not so small and simple after all.

  The quartet transitions to a cover of “September,” and more dancers rush onto the floor.

  But my mother appears lost in thought. “You know, I used to be jealous of the two of you. You and Dan.”

  “You what?” I say, positive I heard her wrong.

  “It’s silly, isn’t it? Or at least, it sounds silly now. You and your dad had this thing you were both so in love with. You’d fully inherited his passion for it, and it was fun to watch the two of you, but . . . sometimes I wished, just a little bit, that you could have liked music, too.”

  Oh. I had no idea my mother felt this way. It’s reality shattering to hear your parent confess something so . . . human.

  “Mom,” I say quietly. “I—I’m sorry.”

  She waves this away. “It’s not your fault! You liked what you liked. I couldn’t force it on you. You tried piano lessons, and you tried violin lessons, and you tried choir, and you just didn’t click with any of them. And that’s okay.”

  She’s being generous. I was terrible, no rhythm and no patience. Music on the radio, especially the kind of music my mother listened to, didn’t excite me the way NPR did. And maybe I was the only nine-year-old geeking out over Car Talk, but I didn’t care.

  “I loved that the two of you had that special bond,” my mother continues. “But you go into parenting hoping, maybe selfishly, that your kid will love the thing you love, and you can share that with them.”

  “And I let you down.”

  “No,” she says firmly. “Especially now, I’m so, so glad you had that time with him.”

  I lean my head against her shoulder, and she combs her fingers through my hair until Phil tows her back onto the dance floor. I watch the couples as the sun dips low in the sky and the stars blink on, but I don’t feel like the odd one out, the third or fifth or fourteenth wheel. I’m not lonely, exactly. I don’t need someone next to me, and I’m not rushing to fill an emptiness. It’s that I want one person in particular, and it’s the person I don’t know how to forgive.

  I used to think that without my dad, I’d never be whole again. But maybe that’s what we all are—halfway-broken people searching for things that will smooth our jagged edges.

  35

  Dominic eventually stops texting. I guess it confirms that whatever we had, it’s really over.

  I don’t expect to miss it as much as I do, but the love lingers like a bruise, aching even when I’m not actively thinking about it. My past breakups never made me this miserable. Maybe it’s because I was forcing those guys to fill a space I thought needed to be filled, while Dominic slid into my life so naturally. A want, not a need.

  Every now and then, Ruthie texts to check in. She’s still processing, but she says she wants to be there for me, wants to remain friends. I don’t think I could have forgiven myself if I’d torched that relationship, too.

  I have enough savings to last me through January if I manage to avoid any major crises, but I’m not used to being idle. So I focus on my job search. If Dominic can be content working at Pacific Public Radio, then I can at least send out a few résumés. I don’t know what’s out there for a disgraced public radio host. I try a TV station, a few PR firms, a handful of companies looking for whatever the hell a content creator is. But I don’t get any bites. Maybe I’m unqualified, or maybe they’re googling me and don’t love what they find.

  In mid-August, I get a text from Paloma Powers that nearly knocks me out of my kitchen chair.

  Heard what happened. Kent’s a fucknugget. Let me know if you need anything.

  Before I can overthink it, I message her back, and just like that, we have lunch plans for the weekend. I’m not sure what I’m going to get out of meeting with her, but I’ve worked with her longer than anyone. The rapidly shrinking optimistic part of me wants to believe she can help.

  * * *

  —

  Paloma and I meet at a new restaurant she claims does the best panzanella in Seattle. It’s such a Paloma thing to say that it comforts me immediately.

  She’s in one of her lighter shawls for summer, and her hair is longer, skimming the tops of her shoulders.

  “I can’t seem to find a producer as attentive as you were,” she says with a sigh between sips of her turmeric juice. “But it’s going well. I thought I liked jazz, but turns out, I love jazz. So that was a relief. And it’s much less stress than what I did on Puget Sounds. That’s the last thing I want in my life at this point.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I say. It’s strange, this lunch with her. When we worked together, I’d never have considered us friends. We never grabbed lunch. It wasn’t that I didn’t like working for her. I respected her, and there was a hierarchy. Or it felt like there was.

  We both order the panzanella, which I’m thrilled to learn is a bread salad. It instantly becomes my favorite kind of salad.

  She steers the conversation like a talk show. “Kent has been a sexist piece of shit as long as I’ve known him,” she says. “He hides it well.”

  “I guess I was always quick to find an excuse for it, or I’d be afraid to say anything because, well, he was my boss.” I think back to the way he trusted Dominic’s opinion over mine, or how he’d ask a woman at a meeting to take notes, never a man. Because the woman was “so good at details.” He made it seem like some special treatment we were getting. “But it was so clear he loved Dominic, and I felt like I was second tier, even though I’d been at the station so long.”

  “That’s how he works, the sneaky fuck. He’s overly nice to make up for the fact that he doesn’t fundamentally respect women. He might not even be aware of it—internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug. But that doesn’t excuse it. I’ve also heard him brag about hiring people of color, like he’s single-handedly solving this industry’s diversity issues.” She leans in conspiratorially. “And did you know that he asked me out once?”

  “What?”

  “Yep. I wasn’t out at work yet, and when I told him I wasn’t interested, he played it off like it wasn’t a big deal. He was head of the news department back then, and I was a reporter, and he started assigning me stories no one else wanted to cover. Stories so bland the station probably shouldn’t have been covering them at all, and then sometimes he wouldn’t even air them. I tried to talk to him about it, but he insisted I had to pay my dues. It went on for a year before I got tapped to host Puget Sounds—by the board, not Kent.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “Paloma, I’m so sorry.”

  “What made it worse was that everyone else seemed to love him so much, respect him so much,” she continues. “And because of that unspoken hierarchy, I couldn’t say a damn thing.”

  Our food arrives, and we’re quiet for a few minutes as we dig in.

  Finally, I find the words to tell her about my own insecurities. “I felt some of that hierarchy when I was working with you,” I admit.

  “You did? Because of me?”

  And she looks so stunned that I want to take it all back, but I push forward. “It’s this strange dynamic between producers and hosts, I think. You’re the ‘talent,’ and our jobs rely on making it easy for you to do your job.”

  I realize I say our like I’m still a producer, like I didn’t just host a successful but doomed show. Maybe a
t my core, I still am.

  “I’m sorry,” Paloma says after a beat of silence. Then she a cracks a smile. “If it helps, I get my own chia seeds now. I’ve been humbled.”

  “Was it hard to leave public radio?”

  “It was hard getting pushed out,” she says. “I’m sure Kent had been looking for a reason to get rid of me for years. But I think it was time for me to move on, even if I was reluctant to do it at first. I definitely don’t miss the pledge drives.”

  “Wait, you don’t like begging strangers for money?” I say, and she laughs.

  “Public radio doesn’t have to be your identity,” she says. “Ahem, speaking as someone for whom it was their whole identity. You’re still at the beginning of your career, and people have short attention spans. If you want to go back to radio, you can. This doesn’t have to take it away from you. I’d be happy to write you a recommendation, if you think that might help you out. But if you’re not sure, and if you have the ability to do so . . . there’s no harm in taking time to figure out your next step.”

  “I’ve just been doing radio for so long that I don’t know what else I’m good at.”

  She gives me this strange look. “Shay Goldstein,” she says, “if that’s what you think about yourself, then you’re not the person I thought you were.”

  36

  I slide the WWAMWMD bracelet up and down my wrist. Ameena’s been sending me photos of her new apartment, and yep, it’s much bigger and cheaper than anything in Seattle. We’ve tentatively planned for me to visit in November, once she’s more settled.

  Ruthie’s girlfriend Tatum works at a vegan café in North Seattle, and she supplies us with free food while Ruthie and I send out résumés and commiserate about unemployment. The free food helps. Free alcohol helps even more, but honestly, I should cut down on the day drinking.

  My weekends don’t feel as empty as I thought they might, though maybe it’s because my weekdays are still a bit empty, too. I had a job interview earlier today as a copywriter at a marketing agency, which I was unsure I wanted—they just happened to be the first place that called me. In the middle of the interview, someone knocked on the door and asked to talk to the HR manager, and when she came back in, she was decidedly chillier than she’d been before.