by Mimi Grace
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Duncan said, as he rummaged through his cupboard for something he could use in place of a rolling pin. “Where’s this document I’m supposed to sign?”
“Forget that. You’ve not been yourself,” Anthony said. “There’s been talk around the gym.”
Duncan paused from where he was washing the outside of a water bottle and frowned at his friend. Was this some sort of intervention? “What are people saying?”
“That you’re acting more like me.”
“How?”
“You haven’t said more than two sentences outside of a class all week,” Anthony said.
Notching his chin upward, Duncan said, “I didn’t know introversion was a crime. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll smile a little more for you if that will make you feel better—”
“See,” Anthony said, pointing at him. “Twins.”
Duncan sighed, returning to the baking task in front of him. He pushed the water bottle over the dough, watching it flatten before his eyes. “I’ll be back to normal once I get through the divorce party.”
“That’s what inspired this?” Anthony asked, gesturing to his flour stained torso and cluttered counter.
Using the open side of a glass, Duncan cut out the dough. “Yup.”
“What about Retta?”
The bell went off telling him the oven had finished preheating.
“What about her?”
“You haven’t talked about what happened at the wedding,” Anthony said.
“The wedding was called off. But my job was done,” he said, focusing on placing the dough on the tray without ripping it.
Duncan had fully expected to run into Retta while taking out the garbage or arriving at work for the day. He’d even planned how he’d react and what he’d say. But in the weeks since the wedding, he hadn’t seen so much as her apron strings.
“Did you want it to be done?” Anthony asked.
“What kind of question is that? It was a fake relationship.” He tossed the tray into the oven. “Of course I wanted it to be done.”
“So, you’ve started seeing other people?”
Duncan shrugged. “I’ve been talking.” He’d only downloaded the app. “But of course business has been busy, so not a lot of time to go out.”
“Hm. You’re not too busy to bake really bad pastries though,” Anthony said.
“This is therapeutic, believe it or not. You should appreciate that since you’ve suddenly turned into a counselor,” Duncan said, discarding the dirty bowls and tools in the sink.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching a scene from a popular show play out on his TV screen.
“Also, if my memory serves me correctly, you were against this at the beginning. Why do you care?” Duncan asked.
“I know I’m probably the last person you should take relationship advice from, considering I’m hung up on…” Anthony straightened and cleared his throat.
Frowning, Duncan studied his friend. For the years they’d known each other, Anthony hadn’t been in any standout relationships.
“You’re interested in someone?” Duncan asked.
“No, n-never mind that,” Anthony said. “My point is there’s only room for one grumpy person, so maybe you should reevaluate this breakup with Retta.”
To what end? He liked her, but it wasn’t as if he was in love with her. Plus, they’d already exceeded the length of time he usually spent in a real relationship.
The oven timer went off, and Duncan pulled out the scones. He looked at the flat, misshapen product and laughed. “I view relationships like this. You can start with the best intentions—I woke up today wanting to make blueberry scones. I followed all the rules from the expert”— Duncan shook the paper the recipe was written on—“and it still ended up like this.”
He pointed at the tray of unsalvageable mess.
“Maybe she’s worth the attempt,” Anthony said, standing up and heading to the door. “And the reason your scones are fucked is because you used rice flour.”
Duncan picked up the bag and read the label then swore under his breath.
Before Anthony closed the door behind himself, he said, “The good thing is, next time you’ll know better.”
When Retta returned home from the wedding weekend from hell, she wasn’t surprised to see the world had continued to turn despite the fact she was simultaneously restless and numb.
That being said, she refused to continue to wallow. This was a “breakup” with a guy she’d grown fond of during the span of a few months, not a boyfriend of many years. That’s why she’d wasted no time in setting up another date with Steve.
“I can’t believe we finally got around to having a second one of these,” Steve said, pushing his auburn hair from his face to look at her.
It was a little before noon on a Sunday, and they strolled through a park near her apartment. Joggers and cyclists passed them, while families set up for picnics on the grass on either side of the path they walked on.
“Me neither,” Retta replied, making an effort to smile and look him in the eye every chance she got. She was determined to give him her full attention. No random thoughts about Duncan would prevail today.
“We’ve been having great weather so far this summer,” Steve said as he turned his face upward, presumably to get the full effect of the sun.
“Yeah, but I think they’re worried about wild fires up north because of the heat and the lack of rain.”
“Oh, yeah. I think I heard something about that.”
Struggling for a direction for their conversation, Retta tried to remember details from their first date they could discuss. What had drawn her to him? Why had she been hurt when he hadn’t texted back? She remembered what he was wearing, but that was because he’d been in something similar to Duncan. And she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him.
The silence had gone on for too long, so Retta regrettably asked Steve about work. “Been to any more conferences lately?” The last thing she wanted to hear about was accounting.
“No, not since the last one you saw me at,” he said, placing his hands into the pockets of his khakis.
She nodded but a follow-up question didn’t come to mind.
“Pretty flowers,” Steve said, pointing to the well-kept banks.
“I love the daisies.”
Steve pretended as if he was writing down that statement in an invisible notebook. She laughed but immediately felt weird imagining him delivering her a bouquet.
Before her mind could insert a specific man she’d like to receive daisies from, she nodded toward an ice cream cart ahead. “Do you want to grab something?”
“Funny,” Steve replied.
Retta frowned, slowing her pace. “Why?”
“Lactose intolerant,” he said.
Right.
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” Retta said. They’d had a fifteen-minute conversation on their first date about dairy alternatives.
Long after they’d passed the ice cream cart, they still hadn’t landed on a conversation topic of substance. Maybe they’d used up all their interesting stories during date number one.
When they moved out of the way of an approaching cyclist, Steve grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling into the large garden bed. As they straightened, she looked at the place where he’d been holding her. She felt nothing. It wouldn’t be so notable if she couldn’t imagine the sparks that would run across her body if—
God. When would these incessant thoughts end?
“I need to tell you something,” Steve said when they stopped to watch some geese swim in the pond.
Was he not feeling it either? That would be the best-case scenario. They could go their separate ways without any hard feelings, and Retta wouldn’t feel like this bad date was her fault.
“I googled you,” Steve said, picking up a pebble from the ground and skipping it across the water.
Not what she expected.
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tell you, but I was worried you might think it was creepy—”
“Oh. Steve, don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
He said something else after that, but she didn’t hear it because dread was setting in. She’d have to find a way to let him down easy after all.
“You’re not enjoying yourself,” Steve said, his statement cutting through all the mental noise.
She almost protested, but he’d handed her a perfect segue. “It’s not you.”
A cliché. Brilliant.
Steve smiled. “I suspected this might happen.”
Retta straightened and looked directly at him. “Why?”
“When we bumped into each other at the conference, you told me you were seeing someone, and you looked really happy… You also called me ‘Duncan’ when we got out of our cars today.”
Retta closed her eyes. “No, I didn’t.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m so sorry. I-it’s complicated.”
Steve only reacted with a slight head tilt. “How complicated?”
“I think I’m in love with him,” she said before letting out a big puff of air.
When the hell did that happen?
Steve nodded for an extended amount of time before saying, “Oh, okay. Cool.”
She thought she had this under control, but her subconscious had decided to shove the truth to the forefront. Now she was back where she was a year ago: in love with someone who wasn’t in love with her.
“We can talk about it,” Steve said.
Retta massaged her temples. “Why would you want to hear all that?"
“Both my parents are therapists. I grew up talking everything out. It helps. Also, it’s clear I have no chance.”
She was about to reject the offer and simply wait till she saw her friends to unload, but she was still buzzing from her admission. “Fine. Sure. We can do that.”
They found a vacant bench facing the pond where Retta told Steve everything. Halfway through her retelling, she thought she might regret sharing so much. But Steve seemed actively engaged and unbothered by her rapid speech and expressive hands.
“Have you told him any of this?” Steve asked once she’d finished.
“No. Of course not. I know what he’d say.”
There’d been a moment in her Grandmother’s house when Duncan was about to leave, where she could have expressed her feelings as rudimentary and unclear as they were at the time. But she already knew what his response would be, so she saved both of them the humiliation.
“No. You think you know what he’d say,” Steve said.
She frowned at his words.
“What if he surprises you? What if he has had a change of heart?”
Retta’s head tipped backward. “You sound like my best friend.”
Perking up, Steve asked, “Is she single and not in love with someone else?”
“No,” Retta said as she laughed for the first time that day. “She has a man and a whole baby on the way.”
Shrugging, Steve said, “I tried. But in all seriousness, let’s say you tell Duncan your feelings and he rejects you. At least you know for sure. There’s no guessing, and more importantly, there’s no regret.”
“But it’ll hurt,” she said.
“And you’ll recover.”
Retta didn’t say anything for a moment. She’d run away from her emotions for so long but doing so never truly made her feel better. Sometimes it even made her feel worse and do weird things like take a fake boyfriend to her ex’s wedding. Maybe it was time for a new strategy.
Looking up at Steve, Retta said, “If you’re this good with the advice, I might have to book an appointment with one of your parents.”
“I’m waiting for this to get less weird,” Gwen said, as she approached and handed Duncan a drink.
His parent’s divorce party was being held in a private room inside a generic restaurant, and the overall mood was light. They remained glued to each other’s sides, laughed with guests, and kissed the other as if they were in attendance for an entirely different celebration.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said.
“On the bright side, they look happy,” Gwen said.
Duncan sighed and looked at his sister. “There’s still time for them to fight about something.”
Gwen nodded. “Of course, I said they looked happy. I didn’t say they miraculously turned into different people.”
As the two siblings stood there watching the scene in front of them unfold, Gwen’s boyfriend, Eric, joined them.
“Hey, man, long time no see,” Eric said as the two men embraced.
“Yeah, welcome back,” Duncan replied. “How was the trip?”
“Good. Really good. Montreal is gorgeous. It made the job offer look even more appealing,” Eric said, taking a bite from his vegetarian hors d'oeuvre.
This was the first time he was hearing about this. Duncan expected there’d be an engagement in the future for the two, but he’d never thought he’d live in a different city than his sister. That would be an adjustment.
“You got a job offer?” Gwen asked, frowning. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“We’ll talk about it,” Eric replied.
The couple seemed to silently communicate several more points before Gwen turned to him and asked, “How’s Retta? I’m thinking of getting some baked goods for my class for the start of the school year.”
Duncan winced.
“Oh, God, don’t tell me you’ve broken up already,” Gwen said.
“We were never really together.”
“Okay, fine, but you liked her,” Gwen said before turning to her boyfriend. “You should’ve seen him the first time I met her. He spotted her, and it was as if I was no longer there.”
Eric raised his brows. “Then what’s the problem, man?”
“There’s no problem,” Duncan replied. In fact, he was doing well. His mood wasn’t as sour, and he had plans to go out next weekend to a bar for the first time in months.
Before they could engage in a back and forth, a delicate tinkling sound drew their attention to the front of the room. It was time for speeches. In all honesty, Duncan had done his best not to think about this function too much. And as a result, today would be the first time he looked at his speech since he proofread it several weeks ago.
One by one, people got up to stand behind the podium and tell stories about Trudy and Malcolm’s lives together. A lot of those stories made their marriage sound like a quirky sitcom where the main couple simply bickered about empty milk cartons in the fridge.
“They look great together,” Duncan’s aunt, his mother’s sister, said during her speech. “I think they stayed married this long because they were scared they wouldn’t find better-looking people than each other. I can’t blame them. It’s rough out here.”
Each speaker would end their spiel by raising a toast to an amicable separation and continued happiness. And when his sister was up, it was no different. She delivered a speech that was absolutely beautiful but wholly skimmed over the mess in their childhood.
By the time it was Duncan’s turn, he was mildly irritated. He walked to the front of the room, looking out to the dining area that held forty people who’d played some role in his life in the past twenty-nine years. Duncan studied his cue cards and said, “Good afternoon, distinguished guests… and Uncle Peter.”
There was laughter as everyone turned to the man who’d shown up to the event in jeans and a Toronto Maple Leafs cap.
“I thought this was a casual thing!” he shouted good-naturedly.
Duncan looked down at his notes where his next points were perfectly laid out. He was supposed to share a story about how his family missed their flights one summer because his parents couldn’t stop arguing long enough to get them to the airport on time.
But the combination of the previous sanitized speeches and thoughts that had bee
n ruminating since Anthony’s pseudo-intervention, made him pause. Duncan was so opposed to risk, to conflict. It had been in the very fabric of his childhood and that made it especially tiresome.
He looked back up to the audience, who must’ve thought he’d suffered some sort of stroke because they were looking at him with furrowed brows.
Discarding the cue cards on the podium, Duncan pulled out his phone where he’d typed out the vent speech Retta had suggested he write. He’d written this alternative reflection a week or so after he’d returned from the wedding. There’d been a night when he had trouble falling asleep. Instead of scrolling through social media, he’d opened up his notes app and let the words flow.
He knew the whole point was not to read it out loud, but it wasn’t like he cussed out his parents in it, so what the hell.
“We’re gathered here today to celebrate the demise of my parent’s marriage,” Duncan said. “At first, I was annoyed that this celebration was even happening, but if we can’t celebrate these two agreeing on something, what can we celebrate?”
People in the room laughed.
“My parents loved my sister and me. Still do from what I’ve been told, but I won’t lie and say growing up with them in the house was easy.”
The mood in the room shifted with his last sentence.
Looking up he said, “I won’t go into detail because that’s probably best done with a therapist. Which, while I speak, I’m realizing I should probably get one.”
He took a breath and read once again from the screen. “You both taught me a lot. Mom, you never believed in gender roles, and I credit you for me being self-sufficient.”
He’d been around too many grown men who didn’t know how to cook or only changed their bedsheets twice a year to take that aspect of his rearing for granted.
“Dad, you’re curious and humble. I’d ask you the most inane questions and instead of brushing me off or pretending like you knew the answer, you’d tell me you didn’t know. I’d forget I even asked the question, and two days later, you’d come to me with an essay with all the information you’d found. I thought it was the teacher in you, but now I think you just gave a shi—crap.”