by Cassia Leo
He looks up from the envelope and our eyes meet. My heart thumps loudly, a riotous drum heightening the sense of foreboding that grips me. The anticipation crackles in the air and Houston’s blue eyes narrow as he hardens himself against the intensity of the moment.
I let my gaze fall to the name scrawled on the outside of the envelope: Houston. The shaking begins suddenly, my hands trembling as if the letter I’m holding is as heavy as the Earth. But it’s not heavy, it’s just real. It’s his name in her handwriting. In her final moments, she turned to him, not me.
I clutch the letter to my chest as tears burn hot streaks down my face, my throat a hard painful mass of anguish. Carefully, I slide the folded letter out of the envelope. The moment I see the words Dear Houston, the room seems to tilt on its side, throwing me off balance. But I swallow my nausea and keep reading, ripping my way through five pages, front and back, the sentences feeding into my heart like a never-ending news ticker, getting bleaker and more vile with each passing moment. Until I finally reach Hallie’s parting words and magma explodes in my belly, searing my throat.
I leap off the sofa, racing for the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. The meager half-cup of oatmeal I ate this morning launches from my mouth as I grip the porcelain. More retching as milky liquid spews forth, my arms shaking as sweat sprouts over my neck, sending a chill through me.
A knock at the door, followed by more retching until I’m empty of everything. All the warm, comforting lies replaced by a single cold, empty truth.
Another knock at the door.
“Go away!” I wail, my voice a shrieking rasp.
The click of the knob turning. The tick of Skippy’s nails against the tile floor as he comes to me. My diaphragm compresses angrily in my chest, attempting to rid my body of the truth. A few deep breaths and the dry heaving finally stops. I fall back, my shoulder blades pressed against the hard bathtub as I try to catch my breath.
Skippy is gone, but Houston is still there, as solid and real as the aching truth gnawing at my insides. He looks down at me, his eyes filled with regret so fiercely tangible, I could probably use it to carve out my heart. If I hadn’t already given it to him thirteen years ago.
This is not the way the story of us is supposed to go.
PART ONE: DENIAL
“Even when we want to forget, our scars have a way of reminding us where we’ve been.”
August 13th
My name is Aurora Charles, but everyone calls me Rory. Rory Charles. It’s the kind of name that conjures up scuffed knees and messy ponytails pulled through the back of a dirty baseball cap, but I could not have been further from a tomboy. In fact, when I was a child, the neighbors would sometimes come check on me because they hadn’t seen me playing outside in days. With a book or pencil and paper in hand, I could spend weeks indoors by myself, crafting stories or getting lost in my favorite authors’ fictional worlds. I always preferred the comfort of armchair adventures over the outdoor variety. Then, five years ago, everything changed.
I’ve spent most of those years trying to make sense of the most beautiful and miserable time of my life. But now I have Skippy to help me put it all behind me. Skippy’s always there waiting for me when I get home, ready with a sloppy kiss and all. And he never disappoints me or rejects me. He’s my new best friend and soul mate.
I open the door of the dog crate and Skippy prances inside, quickly settling himself down on the plush green dog pillow. His furry black tail wags behind him, splashing in the bowl of water sitting on the floor at the back of the crate. I slip my hand into the wire enclosure and he gently licks the liver treat off my palm.
“Good boy, Skip,” I coo, scratching him behind the ears as he looks up at me with those wide chocolate-brown eyes that almost seem hazel against his black fur.
Skippy is my two-year-old black Labrador retriever, adopted from a local shelter when he was five months old and still small enough to fit in my backpack. Nowadays, Skip is a hefty sixty-eight pounds and he prefers riding in my car to riding on my back. When I’m not working, Skip and I do everything together. We frequent all the dog-friendly cafés in Goose Hollow and downtown Portland. We go to the dog park where he plays with his best friend, a four-year-old boxer named Greenland, and his girlfriend Nema, a two-year-old Portuguese water dog.
“I’ll be back in a few hours. Love you.”
His tongue laps at my palm in what I deem a show of affection or appreciation, but in reality he’s probably just trying to get the crumbs left behind by the liver treat. It’s easy to anthropomorphize our pets. We love them. We tend to assign human characteristics to almost anything we love. We name our pets, our cars, even our body parts, as if they have a life of their own. So what does it mean when we have trouble naming something? That we don’t love it? How about when you’re trying to name a piece of art?
This is one of the few topics that was never covered in college when I studied creative writing. How do you come up with a title for a book, a poem, a play? Is it the same way you name a baby or a pet? Do you pick your favorite title and stick with it? Or do you assign it a title that has a special meaning?
My mother likes to brag that she named me Aurora because I was conceived in Alaska under the northern lights. It’s a good story, whether or not it’s true. But it doesn’t help me one bit. I began writing my book five years ago on an uneventful day, under a cloudless summer sky while riding the train home from the University of Oregon.
Maybe I should name my book Uneventful Day. Yes, I’m sure readers would clamor to bookstores for that one.
Of course, that day was only uneventful because my life had blown up a week before and there was nothing good left to salvage from the wreckage. I had no choice but to head home for the summer with my head slung low and my tail between my legs.
I grab my bike helmet off the dining table, ignoring the car keys sitting in the glazed blue dish on the kitchen counter. A hacking sound gets my attention and I sigh when I see Skippy has vomited his morning meal onto the green doggy bed. I let him out of the crate and work as fast as I can to scrub most of the vomit off in the kitchen sink. Then I grab the old dog bed I keep in my closet as a spare and lay it down inside the crate.
After I call my mom and ask her to come check on Skippy while I’m gone, I head out the front door of my one-bedroom apartment in Goose Hollow, a small community in Southwest Portland with a spirited car-free culture. I get in the elevator and press the button for the lower terrace level. When the stainless steel doors slide open, I slip the helmet over my head and buckle it tightly under my chin, wincing as I pull one of my auburn hairs out of the clasp. It’s a beautiful August day in Portland, Oregon. Perfect day to ride to work.
I reach the bike storage room near the gym and laundry facilities, and enter my code on the digital padlock securing my bike to the wall rack. Pulling the bike off the wall, I double-check that the straps on my backpack are nice and tight. Then I hop on and set off toward the bridge. The vomiting incident has made me ten minutes late. I need to ride my ass off today.
I hit some gridlock on the way, so I arrive at Zucker’s grocery store on Belmont twenty-three minutes late for my five-hour shift. After hastily locking up my bike in the employee rack behind the store, I enter through the back door. The refrigerated air blasts me in the face and my heated skin bristles at the change in temperature. The warehouse is always freezing and smells of stale lettuce. Edwin, the warehouse supervisor, waves at me from behind the window looking into his office where he’s speaking to Minnie, the inventory-slash-payroll clerk.
I wave back and power walk to the time clock to punch in before Edwin can come outside to make small talk and realize I’m late. I tuck my green T-shirt bearing the grocery store logo—a beige Z in the middle of a circle—into my black skinny jeans and head straight for Jamie’s office.
Jamie Zucker is the great-granddaughter of Winifred Zucker, the woman who opened the first Zucker’s market in 1948 at the ripe age of forty-three
. Their family suffered greatly through the Depression. Then Winifred lost her husband, Jacob Zucker, in World War II, leaving her to care for the twins, Jeffrey and John, by herself. Winifred, known to most as “Winnie,” worked day and night for four years as a seamstress to save enough money to open her own shop. When the twins were old enough, they took over the market and turned it into a small chain of natural foods stores. Winnie insisted they would never sell the mass-produced junk she saw on the shelves of the big-box supermarkets. They struggled through the ’80s and ’90s when America experienced a cheap junk food explosion, but the organic food movement of the 21st century breathed new life into their business. And they were now opening their fifth location in East Portland, which Jamie would be running mostly by herself.
Jamie was only twenty-six, but she’d been working at Zucker’s for ten years. Her grandfather, John Zucker, still came in once in a while to see how Jamie was doing. He was really there to check how she was running the store. Though it appeared on the outside that he had little faith in her, you could see by the way his eyes lit up in her presence that there was no one he adored more than Jamie. I sometimes wondered what it would feel like to have a grandfather, or even a father, who looked at me like that.
I stride purposefully past the displays of organic Braeburn apples on my left and the dairy case on my right into the rear-right corner of the store. Reaching the office, I knock three times and hear an Oh, my God! before Jamie yanks the door open.
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this,” she says, her freckled cheeks flushed red and her blue eyes wide with horror. “I need you to pretend to be me.”
“What?” I chuckle as she pulls me behind her desk toward the black leather office chair.
“Sit,” she commands. “Just hear me out.”
She takes a seat in one of the visitor chairs on the other side of the desk, where I normally sit. She pushes her hand through her thin blonde hair as she stares at me, biting her lip as she contemplates what she’s going to say. I can’t help staring at her one crooked tooth, the top-left pointy cuspid that hangs slightly over her bottom lip.
“Jamie, what’s going on? You’re sort of freaking me out.”
“Rory, I need you to do something for me. As a friend.”
A friend? Jamie and I are not enemies, but we’re far from friends. We’re only two years apart in age, but we’re from two different worlds. I graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in English—with a minor in creative writing—and she dropped out of high school to manage a grocery store. She’s engaged to her high school sweetheart. I’m not dating anyone and I never had a high school sweetheart, unless you count the hopeless unrequited crush I had on my best friend’s older brother.
Still, even if Jamie’s tossing the word friend around to get me to do something for her, it does feel good to be needed.
“What do you need?”
She sighs with relief. “I have a meeting with a supplier today. He’s coming in to pitch, but Grandpa John’s coming. I don’t want him to see the guy.”
“Why? Isn’t he the one who said you needed to keep the selections fresh, or something like that?”
“It’s the guy from the beer company coming to discuss the joint venture for the wine bar. Grandpa is dead set against it, but the board is pushing for it.”
My heart thumps painfully as I realize what she’s asking me.
Management at Zucker’s markets has spent the past two years discussing a project to turn some of their in-store espresso cafés into bars that sell wine, beer, and coffee. They’ll do wine and beer tastings on Friday and Saturday nights. The bars are being opened only in the locations with a high walk score. A walk score is a rating given to a city based on how easy it is to get around without a car. Goose Hollow has a walk score of 90, which is higher even than New York City. All the board members agreed that the uptown shopping center in Goose Hollow is the perfect area to implement the wine bar idea. Then someone suggested they implement it across all their Portland stores and suddenly our store has been seeing a flurry of meetings over the past few weeks. Apparently, Grandpa John is not supposed to know about these meetings.
I want to get up from Jamie’s chair and leave. I didn’t realize how safe I felt in my cashier position until now.
“Jamie, I can’t pretend to be you. I don’t know anything about this wine bar deal.”
She holds out her hands to stop me when I attempt to stand. “You don’t have to know anything. And you don’t really have to pretend to be me. Just thank him for coming and ask him to take a seat. Then you can just sit there and nod and look pretty while he pitches you his beer. I’ll try to get Grandpa out of here as quickly as possible. As soon as he’s gone, I’ll come in and take over.”
My entire body tenses with nervous energy just imagining this scenario, but I can’t leave her hanging. She’s my boss. And it does seem like a fairly simple favor to grant.
I draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sure. I think I can handle that.”
“Thank you!” she shrieks as she leaps out of the chair. “You stay here. I’ll go out front and wait until the guy gets here, and hope he doesn’t get here at the same time as Grandpa.”
I lean forward in the leather swivel chair as I watch her leave. She closes the door behind her and my heart races at the thought of what will happen the next time that door opens. Will it be Jamie? Will it be the beer guy? Will it be Grandpa? How will I explain sitting on this side of the desk if it is Grandpa John?
Too many questions for too small of a task. This is nothing. It will be over in a few minutes and I’ll be able to get to work.
Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes and take another deep breath. The knock at the door startles me. I almost trip and fall in my haste to get out of the chair and answer the door. I manage to catch myself by grabbing on to the edge of the desk, but the damage is done. My nerves are ratcheting up again.
I shake out my arms like a prizefighter getting ready to enter the ring. Reaching for the door handle, I force my lips into a smile, then I open the office door.
I’m frozen at the sight of him.
Houston Cavanaugh.
The first boy I ever loved. And boy, did I love him a long time. I loved him until he was a man. I loved him until he loved me back. At least, I thought he loved me.
His eyes narrow and he appears confused for a moment. “Jamie?”
My heart drops to my feet.
He doesn’t even remember me.
“No,” I say with far too much emotion.
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I… I know you.”
I clutch my chest, unable to breathe. Then his eyes widen with what can only be described as pure terror.
“Rory? Aurora?”
I let out a sharp puff of air. “Yeah.”
His lips are still moving. I want to hear what he’s saying, but my thoughts are pounding in time with my heart. Images flash in my mind: our bodies tangled in his sheets; the breakfast bar littered with sticky shot glasses and empty beer bottles; my empty dorm.
“Rory?”
I blink a few times to focus on his face and he looks at the floor, as if the weight of our history is pulling his head down.
“I’m sorry. Maybe I should come back later.”
“What? No!”
He looks up, startled by my outburst.
“I mean, you came to talk about the contract, so… let’s talk. I’m…” I nod toward the chair for him to sit down, then I close the office door behind him. “I’m sorry for spacing out. I was just a little surprised to see you.” I take a seat in Jamie’s chair and yelp as it begins to tip backward. “Shit!”
Houston laughs as I scoot forward and lean my elbows on the desk, hoping he doesn’t notice how the sound of his laughter makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
“Sorry. Obviously, I don’t sit on this side of the desk very often, but Jamie didn’t want to reschedule this appointment. She sh
ould be here shortly.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” The left corner of his mouth pulls up in his signature half smile and I grit my teeth against the surge of emotions welling up inside me. “I’m actually kind of glad we ran into each other.”
“Really? You hardly remembered me a minute ago.”
He chuckles again. “Yeah, sorry about that. I was just surprised.”
I can’t argue with this when I just used the same excuse. But it’s no more true coming from his lips than it is from mine. We’re not surprised to see each other. We’re terrified.
All the times I’ve imagined running into Houston, I never once imagined he wouldn’t recognize me. I haven’t changed much. I still have the same long auburn hair he used to bury his face in and twist around his fingers. I’m still carrying the extra ten pounds I put on my freshman year at UO, my softness, he used to call it. I still don’t wear a lot of makeup, though back then I avoided makeup because I never knew when I was going to burst into tears. Now I avoid it because I’m comfortable in my skin. This is who I am. If someone doesn’t like me—or recognize me—that’s their problem.
I swallow the lump in my throat and force a smile. “So, Houston—would you rather I call you Hugh?”
He flashes me an uncomfortable smile, but it takes him a moment to respond. “Houston is fine.”
His family always called him Hugh, but he hated it. I always made it a point to call him Houston. Every time I said his name it was like a promise to be true to him. The real Houston. I wish I had known then that you can’t promise to be true to a ghost. Ghosts aren’t real.
“So… you’re the beer guy?” I say, trying to break the awkward silence.
“The beer guy? Is that how I’m referred to around here?”
Houston’s gaze is focused on the desk so he doesn’t have to look me in the eye. His elbows rest on the arms of the chair and his hands are clasped in front of him. That’s when I notice the wedding ring.