Always Something There to Remind Me

by Beth Harbison

Or so I thought.

  Because as soon as I stepped out into the twilight, a car pulled up. A neighbor? His mother?

  But, no, it was worse. Far worse.

  It was his wife.

  The pieces came together for me with swift, horrible certainty as I realized who that was.

  His wife.

  Theresa.

  * * *

  When we were in high school, Theresa was always the one who was boy-crazy. She’d be with one guy one day, then another guy the next, and sometimes a third guy on the third day. Literally.

  Not that she was a slut, really—she was always looking for love. The problem was, she was always thinking she’d found it, no matter how unlikely a package it was in or how obvious it was to the rest of us that she had picked another loser.

  Nate used to be right on board with Jordan and me when it came to Theresa. He was kind to her, and about her, but he certainly never harbored any secret lust for her. I mean, he might have—one might even argue that he must have—but I hadn’t seen it. And I was really sure I knew him inside out.

  Evidently, something had changed.

  But when I saw her out front of his parents’ house, in that one brief moment between recognizing her and having to say something to her, time stood still and a million thoughts raced through my mind.

  The ring. N & T.

  They’d gotten married. They’d had rings engraved.

  They must have fallen in love.

  In love enough to get married. Grown-up love, not the youthful kind that ends in tears on the front stoop and calls that are never returned.

  Had they always had a spark between them that somehow I’d just missed?

  Two people I’d once imagined I’d know and love for the rest of my life had floated out of my awareness and into each other’s. Was that not as shocking and devastating as it felt?

  Maybe I had no right to be pissed or proprietary about that. But I was anyway.

  How astonishing that on this day, which had started out weird and then had a delirious moment of completion, had now come to this.

  “Oh, my God!” Theresa gasped. “Erin? Oh, my God, is that really you?”

  “Yes,” was all I could say. There were so many ways she might have meant it.

  Of course, I had information she didn’t.

  She threw herself into my arms. She was skinnier than she’d been in high school. She felt bony against me. “I can’t believe it! I just saw your mother at the grocery store and she said you were over at her place! I actually thought about going by!”

  “Really.”

  “I swear it!” She beamed and looked at Nate. “Can you believe this?” She raked her hand through her short dark hair. It looked cute on her, I hated to admit. Sort of pixieish with her super-slim frame.

  “No,” he said evenly. His gaze was impassive, like he was looking at his neighbor or something instead of his wife. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I had to take those old clothes over to the church for the women’s shelter and I felt sorry for you, doing all this work on someone else’s house, so I decided to stop at the Giant and get you some fried chicken. I hope you haven’t been working on an empty stomach.”

  I felt like I could empty mine. “Theresa,” I said, “it is so good to see you, but I just came out for a run and really should get back to pick up my daughter at my mom’s house. She has a … thing tonight. A”—I thought quickly—“birthday party to go to.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Did you and Nate get to catch up, at least?”

  I felt the blood race into my face and she had to have seen it. “A little bit. It was such a surprise to run into him, though, that we only had a minute. He was just telling me you two were blissfully married when you drove up.”

  She went over to him and slipped her hand around his waist.

  It was a small gesture that would have gone unnoticed if her husband were anyone else, but we all knew she was doing it to mark her territory as surely as if she’d peed on him.

  And there was a small part of me, there really was, that wanted to turn and run away from a scene that—as small as it was—felt like it might be more than I could bear. Because that gesture with that guy used to be mine. And she knew it, she’d known it then, she’d been around when it was NateandErin and none of us ever would have dreamed that someday she would be the one putting her arm around him and I would be the one who had no right to even think about it, much less feel jealous that she was doing it.

  He was her husband.

  Nate was Theresa’s husband.

  Theresa’s.

  It just didn’t compute.

  “This is so strange, isn’t it?” she said to Nate. “We just saw Todd two weeks ago.” She looked at me. “He lives in Sacramento now, has the cutest twin daughters, just two years old.” She smiled, remembering, then added, “And here’s Erin. It’s like no time has passed at all!”

  And there it was; the reason everything had gone so badly, the reason everything had blown up in my face, the reason Nate had not spoken to me for years, the reason my teenage years had ended up as shadowy memories of dark depression and anxiety, the reason—however indirectly it might be—that Nate was now married to Theresa and not me: Todd.

  Todd, who’d gotten drunk, made a pass at me, been uneventfully rebuffed, but then had fucked up in getting the hell out of my space, and, in so doing, had kind of ruined my life.

  Now Todd was happily oblivious to all of that, no doubt, living in Sacramento with his lovely twins and no doubt lovely wife, being visited by his pals, Theresa and Nate …

  Todd hadn’t paid one penny’s debt for the mess he’d created, because Nate hadn’t seen him as the bad guy. I was the only bad guy.

  I owed the price. And I’d paid it. I’d paid it right into an emotional debt that had lasted for years.

  “How is Todd?” I asked grimly.

  “He’s Todd,” Nate said. “Same as ever.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Do you see him often?”

  “Last time was our wedding,” Theresa said. She looked at Nate and tightened her arm around him. “So that was, what, a year and a half ago?”

  “Huh.” I wanted to go. I really wanted to get out of there. But I couldn’t help but ask, “How long did you date?”

  He shifted his weight and moved out of her grasp, his eyes fastened on me.

  I moved my gaze from her to him and back again, waiting for her answer.

  “Two years?” She wrinkled her nose and looked skyward. “I think it was like two years and two months. And maybe a week.”

  Oh, Jesus, leave it to Theresa to know the exact count. “That is really interesting. How did that…”—I looked to him again—“how did that come about?”

  It was crazy the way this gave me the feeling I’d just missed as far as seeing him again. If it had only happened sooner, maybe he wouldn’t be married to Theresa now. Maybe everything would be different.

  He looked miserable. For the first time I noticed that his eyes, which had always been large and kind of sad-looking, were lined in a way that made it look like he’d had a lot of stress in his life. Of course, there were smile lines—he’d always been quick to laugh if something was funny—but the feeling I got from looking at him was that he wasn’t happy.

  And I wasn’t happy about that, even while it was painful to imagine that he was happily married to my friend.

  “We ran into each other at church,” Theresa said.

  Church.

  I had to have misheard.

  “You were in church?” I asked Theresa; then, to Nate, “You were in church?” I’d seen him in church exactly once, and it was for a friend’s funeral. Apart from that, any talk of God or church had been pretty much limited to him teasing me for wearing a cross since I only did it because it was a cool-looking one, not because I was making a statement.

  “My grandfather died,” he said, going to examine the molding by the door. “The funeral was there.
I was getting the flowers to take to my grandmother.”

  “Oh! Oh, wow, I’m sorry.” I was sorry. But, of course, it had been many years and Nate’s grandfather wasn’t exactly young when I’d known him. He would have been well into his nineties now, which wasn’t impossible, but still … I thought of the man as he’d been the last time I’d seen him, hearty and hale, at his farmhouse, telling ghost stories and cooking steaks on the grill over peach bark.

  And I felt the loss.

  “I was there helping with a charity thing they had going on,” Theresa said, and smiled, glancing back at him, presumably to see if he was yet again within grabbing reach.

  I couldn’t just stand here and mourn the loss that was now years past for them. I focused my attention on Theresa as much as I could. “How nice of you!”

  She shrugged. “I work for the National Coalition for Women’s Rights, so we’re involved in a lot of local charities.”

  Great. So she was adorable, and thin, and even nicer than ever, and she’d been there to help Nate through what I knew had been a tremendous loss for him.

  “Good for you,” I said, too heartily. “That’s … wow, that’s”—maybe the only way possible to make me feel even worse about what just happened—“just great.” I had to get out of this twilight zone.

  If I stuck around any longer, who knew what would come up next? Had she administered CPR to save his mother at some point? Cured some rare disease? Would two children toddle out and be introduced as their offspring, little Theresa and little Nate?

  “I’ve really got to go,” I said, my voice thick with emotion that I hoped they couldn’t hear. “But I’m…”—I swallowed—“I’m really happy for you two.” With any luck, I’d be able to act normal until I was out of their sight.

  “Let me give you a ride,” Theresa said, coming toward me jingling her keys. Suddenly she seemed like the least intuitive person I’d ever met. Or, wait, maybe the most. “I’d love to meet your daughter! Of course, I did meet her when she was born, but, my God, it’s been how many years?”

  “Probably fifteen since you saw her.”

  “Wow! Let me take you, then.” She made a move.

  “Oh! No. No, no.” I shook my head. Kind of frantically. “No. Really. I need the exercise.” I patted my stomach, which probably still had remnants of Nate’s sweat on it. “I ate a ton earlier when we cooked out. Hamburgers. Hot dogs. You know my mom, always over … cooking.” I was babbling.

  Nate’s eyes were on me.

  Instinctively, out of a habit that should have been long dead, I turned to him for help.

  He totally got it.

  “I’ll give her a ride,” he said, neatly clipping the keys out of Theresa’s hand as he walked past her. He took me by the elbow, his grip firmer than it looked from the outside. “I’ve got to go pick something up at Home Depot anyway.”

  “But—” Theresa sighed. “Wait! How about dinner next Sunday?”

  We both turned back to her and asked, “What?” at the same time. And in the same disbelieving tone.

  “All of us. Erin, your mom told me you’re engaged.”

  I felt Nate turn and look at me.

  “Bring him along and the four of us can have a nice dinner, maybe some wine, and get reacquainted. Or acquainted, in the case of … what’s his name? Rick?”

  Good God, she even knew his name? How long had my mother and Theresa talked?

  Long enough to make this reunion as awkward as possible, apparently.

  “Actually, I have an event on Sunday,” I said.

  At the same time, Nate said, “I’m already committed for Sunday.”

  “Where are you going Sunday?” she asked him, then said, “Never mind. Monday.” Before I could come up with an excuse there, she said, “Or Saturday. Take your pick. We’re free anytime.” She narrowed her eyes at him, but it was more playful than anything else. They had private jokes. A private rapport. “Except Sunday, evidently.”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said vaguely. “Thanks!”

  “Come on,” he said under his breath, and bustled me to the car. Obviously I could have wrested my arm away and left, but that would raise questions neither of us wanted to answer.

  So I was going to have to get in the car with him, drive down the street, and kill him when he stopped at the corner.

  “I’ll call you!” Theresa said. “Your mom gave me your number and e-mail address.” She laughed and it made her look nineteen again. “I just can’t get over what a coincidence this is!”

  “Neither can I,” I tossed over my shoulder, then looked at Nate and added, “Seriously.”

  God works in mysterious ways, all right.

  I got in the midsized Honda sedan—probably registered in both their names—and looked straight ahead as Nate got in.

  “It’s better than her driving you,” he said, clearly knowing I was pissed at being put in this position.

  “Not really. At least I don’t have her all over me. And in me.” I couldn’t help it. Tears started to fill my eyes. I swiped them away roughly. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d cried.

  He was silent for a moment before speaking again.

  “So you’re engaged, huh? You didn’t mention that.”

  I turned to him in disbelief. “One, I’m not, and two, you’re fucking married. To my old friend! Which you failed to mention.” I could have screamed. “That is so messed up.”

  “What is, that I’m married to her or that I didn’t tell you?”

  “Both!” I couldn’t believe it. “Do you have kids?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “There’s no of course here anymore.” It was everything I could do not to cry. “How could you have married her? You wouldn’t even know her if it weren’t for me!” The more I thought about it—and I was sure I was going to think about it plenty in the coming days—it really made me mad. “I mean, she was one of my best friends. She was there for me when I sobbed myself half to death every night after you blew Dodge with barely a word. What the hell is with you two hooking up? What’s wrong with you?”

  He shifted a glance in my direction. “I know, it sucks when you think someone who meant a lot to you hooks up with a friend.”

  “Oh. My. God.” I could have strangled him. “How many times do I have to tell you nothing happened?”

  “I know.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. “You know? You know what?”

  “I know nothing happened that night.”

  “Really.” This was news to me. It took some of the wind out of my sails. “How long have you known that?”

  He shrugged. “Todd told me the whole truth a couple of months after it happened.”

  Somehow that felt like a blow. As long as I’d felt Nate believed I’d truly wronged him, the wrongs he’d done me made some sense. I could justify the pain somewhat, understand his sudden and strong determination to stay away, because I knew he thought I’d really betrayed him. He thought I’d become someone unrecognizable and that made him someone unrecognizable.

  But now to find out that he’d known—known—virtually the whole time that he’d hanged me for nothing … it was a shock.

  “If you knew nothing happened,” I said, the tension making my voice so tight I didn’t even sound like myself to my own ears, “why did you let me suffer for it for so long?”

  “Suffer for so long?” he repeated, as if the concept were foreign to him. “You moved on, dated other people. Maybe technically nothing happened with Todd, but the intention was there, you wanted something else, something other than me, and you got it.”

  This was so completely, insanely opposite of the truth that I didn’t even know how to answer.

  I just gaped at him.

  “Look, you went out with other people several times while we were going out…”

  “Once.”

  “… and I think it was pretty clear that you wanted to explore other options. You weren’t totally innocent that night
with Todd, you invited his attention.”

  It was true, I couldn’t deny it. “I wanted your attention.”

  “Yeah, well, you got both. So even if you didn’t really do anything physical, you told me a lot about where I stood in line.”

  “It had nothing to do with my regard for you, I was a stupid young girl, trying to make you jealous. I didn’t date Todd. I didn’t fuck him. I didn’t marry him. You abandoned me and let me think, for years now, that it was because you believed I’d done something with your best friend. Then”—I gave a short laugh—“you ended up doing that very thing with Theresa!”

  “It’s not the same.” He shifted his grip on the wheel.

  Absurdly, the gesture made my heart ping. I remembered those hands so well. Long, dexterous fingers but bad knuckles from fighting when he was younger.

  “It is exactly the same,” I said, forcing myself to look away. “It’s not different at all. Except that I was the wounded one, not you.”

  We were about halfway to my mother’s house, directly in front of the high school. He jerked the car into the parking lot, stopped abruptly, and rammed it into park. “You were the wounded one?” he repeated, looking at me with dark eyes. “Only you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Bullshit.” He said it like a slap.

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks now. I didn’t even care. “It is not bullshit. Nothing happened between Todd and me, and now I find out that you knew it. The way you did that, the way you left and wouldn’t talk to me, nearly killed me. I swear to you that’s not an exaggeration, it nearly killed me.” And it wasn’t an exaggeration, unfortunately. “And two months later, you were just fine and dandy with him again, but you never so much as talked to me again!”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He gave a small shrug. “Maybe it was a mistake.”

  A mistake. Such a tiny dismissal of such a colossal devastation. “You asshole.” I sniffed.

  A muscle twitched in his jaw and he looked away. “It was no harder for you than it was for me.”

  “Oh, clearly,” I said, and my voice caught. “I mean, look at us. We’re obviously on exactly the same wavelength here.” I took a wavering breath. I had absolutely no control over my crying. None.