by Phoebe Fox
“Hey, Marti...guys,” I called back.
“Brook! So glad to see you! You look great! Grab a drink and join us!” Barbra “spelled like Streisand” Adams, cheerleader in high school, cheerleader now.
“Maybe later,” I said vaguely as my eyes scanned the patio.
“Where you been, girl?” Terry Tillmore, my lab partner in biology, who now ran a hair salon and day spa downtown.
“Oh, busy, busy.” Kendall wasn’t here.
“You look...different, Brook. Did you finally lose that extra weight?” Melissa Overton, in every single one of my homerooms from first grade to twelfth, by virtue of our last names. For years we had wiped a patina of civility over our mutual hatred for each other, which started in tenth grade when she slept with my boyfriend Jack Andrews while I was busy deciding if I was ready to go “all the way” with him, and continued as she spread her attentions throughout town like the Typhoid Mary of sexual favors.
“I’ll catch up to you guys another time,” I said, ignoring her as I turned to go.
“Looking for Kendall, sweetie?” Melissa’s voice was like syrup dripping into the sudden cracks of stillness on the patio. So it was common knowledge, then.
I turned around and fixed a bright smile on my face. “Actually, I’m meeting someone. Hey—how’s the TV biz these days?”
I wanted to bite my tongue as soon as I’d said it—Melissa had been fired from her on-air job at KSUN after a very public drinking-and-driving accident. I hadn’t meant to sink to the level of trading barbs with her.
“Oh, I’ve got a great new job now, hon. I’ve moved on—like a lot of people we know.” Her smile was smug and mean.
My heart tripped in my chest and I felt my cheeks heat. Had all of them heard that Kendall had walked out on our relationship? Did everyone know what had happened between us except me? All my friends that I’d introduced to him, giving him an instant social life in a town where he knew literally no one the day he met me?
“Well, good for you, Melissa.” I forced the words past a tight throat. Engaging with her only threw gasoline on her fire. Dignity, Dr. Evanston whispered in my mind. Hold on to your dignity. Even with her hands cuffed behind her back, I remembered, Dr. Evanston had held her head high. “See you guys.”
Andale’s was next. I hoped Jeffrey would be there—he would know if Kendall had been in, and if so, where he was now. But the same girl from my date with Ben was behind the bar, a stranger to me. I glanced over at the table where I had sat with Ben that night, empty now. I had never returned his call. Shame shot through me, and something else...an unsettled twist of regret.
The small bar area was packed with the suits and dresses of the after-hours business crowd, milling about like a school of sharks fighting over the same chewed-up chum. The spice of life was at a sad premium in the Fort Myers dating world.
No Kendall—thank God. I didn’t think I could handle seeing him chatting up someone new in the same restaurant where we’d gone so many times.
It had to be the Bar Belle.
I took a deep breath, trying to steady my jumpy nerves. Cowgirl up. They were my mother’s words. All you want is a rational, adult discussion. That’s the very least you’re entitled to.
I felt myself relax minutely. That was true. I wasn’t here for some dramatic, emotional confrontation. All I wanted was answers. Some closure—a hackneyed word, but still valid. I was ready for this. I was entitled to it.
The Bar Belle was packed—it was always packed, by virtue of being about the size of a bowling lane: long and skinny, so narrow that two-deep at the bar meant barely any room to walk behind. It was an uncomfortable place to try to be heard or to talk to more than just the person on either side of you, but the owners were longtime Fort Myers residents, heavily involved in the community, and as welcoming to every patron as though they were family. And if you were a regular, your drink was waiting for you on the bar before you made it from the front door to a stool, rounds of shots were often provided, and musical selections were at your whims.
Kendall had hated the place the first time we went. “Too loud.” “Awkward layout.” “Limited menu.” But I introduced him to Peter and David—the same way I’d introduced him to almost everyone he knew in Fort Myers—and they immediately created a special drink for him called the Kendalltini, and asked about his business, and complimented his shoes, and he was won over.
I should have been prepared to find him standing in the same spot where I’d met him after work a dozen times, an amber Kendalltini in one hand, the other gesturing in the air as he regaled his friend Ricky—and not some woman, thank God—with some fascinating tale of arbitrage or penny stocks or odd lots. I was prepared. But it still didn’t keep my heart from slamming inside my chest at the sight of him.
His golden brown hair carried a curl he hated and I loved. It was longer—not much, probably no more than it ever got between haircuts, but I hadn’t noticed it so much when I saw him every day. Now it made him look a little bit different. Softer, younger. He wore a suit—he almost always wore a suit—and a tie I didn’t recognize.
He didn’t see me, and for one quick beat of time I had him to myself. Until the moment when he would look up, catch my eye, and whatever would happen after that would happen, he was only mine for this one second—mine to look at, mine to love.
That hit me like a fist. I’d expected to see him and hate him. To be filled with rage, with hurt, with fury. Not to feel this wave of love for him crash over me, suck me under. For this frozen space of time he was simply mine again, and I ate him with my eyes.
And then he did look up, and I saw the exact moment when he realized the woman he’d been idly checking out down the length of the bar was me. His eyes grew wide; his whole body seemed to contract; he plunked his drink down on the bar and miscalculated the distance, Kendalltini sloshing over the sides.
Then it was like a domino effect. Ricky saw Kendall seize like an epileptic and turned around to see what caused it. Behind the bar David snapped to attention at the spilled drink, heading Kendall’s way to clean it up; his gaze followed Kendall’s and he saw me too. His expression was more gratifying: He managed to convey greeting and welcome all at once. Peter saw David looking and his head turned toward me, and suddenly I felt spotlighted at the end of the bar, the old gunslinger come to chase the new kid outta town.
It was my imagination that things grew silent as I forced my feet to carry me forward, a factor of the roaring in my ears, drowning out the buzz of the bar that logic told me still carried on around me. The drama building up like a cloudbank was confined to one tiny segment of the room’s population; the rest of the clientele drank on, unaware of the storm brewing.
As if it were a close-up in a movie, I saw Ricky reach up to Kendall’s sleeve and tug—Let’s get out of here, man—saw Kendall’s arm flop toward him and then back, as if he had no muscle control. And then all I could see was Kendall’s eyes, glued to me as he watched me approach. They were shadowed into dark pools from here in the dim light, but I could see them perfectly in my head: light blue, a tiny center of gold rimming the pupil. I’d lost myself in those eyes and their unusual golden centers—evidence that Kendall was special, different, extraordinary.
I moved through the press of people in the narrow space as if I were covered in oil, bodies seeming to just glide off to the side, out of my way, as I moved like a barracuda toward a flash of metal glinting in sunlight.
And then we were in front of each other, only inches away because of the packed bar, and Ricky’s panicky face fell out of my peripheral vision, and all that filled it was Kendall.
“Hi.” I mouthed it, tried to speak it, but my voice had dried in my throat.
“Brook.” He didn’t say it like I was anathema. He didn’t say it like I was someone who’d finally caught up to him when he’d been studiously trying to avoid her. He said it like water a
fter a long hike, like rain after a drought. “Brook...”
It would have been so natural to lean forward and sink my lips into his. The same way we had done hundreds of times, almost instinctively. And I wasn’t blind to his reaction—Kendall would have kissed me back. Would have welcomed it.
But Dr. Evanston and my mother and my own rationality “ahemed” in my head, and I remembered why I was here. What answers I needed. I’d gotten the first one—did Kendall still care about me? “Yes” was evident in every line of his body that strained toward mine. But that didn’t address the list of other questions about his withdrawal that I had to have answers to before I gave in to the pull I felt even now to fall into him, let his arms wrap around me, bury my face in his neck and forget all the pain and bewilderment and hurt of the last few weeks.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and it was hard to tell in the loud Bar Belle, but it sounded like his voice was hoarse.
“Kendall.” It was Ricky.
“Man, not now.” He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a wallet, threw money on the bar. Reached for my arm, and I felt floaty and light.
“Ken!” Ricky’s voice was loud, even in the noise of the crowd. A few people nearby stopped talking to look our way. Ricky had leaned in to Kendall and had hold of his arm, tight, and was furiously saying something close into his ear. He looked like a jilted girlfriend.
Ricky, who probably loved having Kendall to himself every night now, who’d probably whispered in his ear just like this a hundred times while we were dating, I realized with dawning anger: Get rid of her. She’s cramping your style, man. You don’t want to be tied down. Ricky, who had his playmate back now and didn’t want to lose him. Ricky...the enemy. I waited, still and inert, to see which life Kendall would choose.
Kendall had stopped pulling away from Ricky’s tentacled grasp and was listening. The look on his face was confused...torn...rebellious. I latched on to the latter and staked all my hopes to it.
Ricky made one last plea, and finally Kendall yanked away, shrugged his shoulders angrily, straightening his suit jacket. He picked up the bills he’d flung to the bar, and my heart sank. But as he tucked them into his jacket pocket he leaned to me and touched my arm, and the contact swept through me like a riptide.
“Outside. Where we can talk.” His voice in my ear made me shiver.
We’d be under the watchful eye of mother-hen Ricky, in the safe environment of a bar populated with people we both knew, instead of alone together at Kendall’s condo, where I knew we’d been headed minutes before. It was only a partial victory—but it was a victory. He’d chosen me...at least for now.
I nodded and turned to the rear door for the patio, where wrought-iron patio furniture created an outdoor sitting area made inviting with string lights and swags of fabric. The temperature was probably in the sixties, but Floridians’ have thin blood, and the tables sat empty in the slight coolness of the March night.
Kendall lagged behind, turning to Peter behind the bar, who’d watched our whole exchange with avid eyes. Ricky kept up his stream of poison the whole time—I turned to see him grow animated as Kendall determinedly faced forward. Soaking it in? Tuning him out? I couldn’t tell.
I pushed out the door and picked the rearmost table, in case anyone else came outside. The breeze blew the rich, clean smell of the Caloosahatchee over me as I settled into the hard seat, my head curiously light, my body numb, my heart racing and aching and full.
He pushed open the door with a hip after a couple of minutes that felt like hours, both hands full with a drink for each of us. A gimlet for me—he hadn’t had to ask. He set them down, sat, and finally we were alone.
And I had no idea what to say. There had been so many versions of this moment in my head over the last weeks that now they all blended together in an unintelligible cacophony, and with Kendall finally here, in front of me, attentive and listening and present, I couldn’t think of what more it was that I possibly needed to know.
Kendall was never good with awkward silences. He finally had to fill it. “I...I am so, so sorry.”
It spread over my heart like ointment on a wound. More. More.
“I screwed this up.”
Yes. Maybe there was nothing I needed to say. Maybe I could simply sit here, just make myself an audience so that Kendall could say it all, everything I had dreamed of hearing. I messed up. I made a huge mistake. I love you. I want you back.
But the script stopped too soon. Kendall lapsed into silence and contemplated his Kendalltini as though mermaids might breach from its surface.
I leaned toward him, moving my hand but stopping just short of resting it on top of his where it lay on the table. Too soon.
“Kendall.” God, it was good to let his name fill my mouth again. “Kendall... What happened?”
He slumped forward as if someone had replaced his spine with rubber, elbows on the table, looking down through the wrought-iron waffling of the table to the dingy bricks below it. “I don’t know.”
I had to resist the urge to slap him. My reaction caught me by surprise; all I had been feeling since I saw him was melted. But I kept my voice modulated, calm, neutral.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
He fingered the base of his glass, and I wondered if he’d answer.
“I...guess I got scared,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“I need more than that, Kendall.”
“Yeah. I know. Okay...scared of... We moved so fast. Everything all of a sudden started happening so fast. And the next thing I knew you were about to move in.”
I must have looked as incredulous as I felt, but Kendall wouldn’t have seen it. He hadn’t looked up at me once since he’d started talking.
“Kendall...you’re the one who asked me to move in.”
“I know!” he exploded. “I know! Why do you think this has been so hard for me?”
No, Brook—don’t follow that path. If you get sidetracked on that comment, you’ll never get back on the road to where you want to go.
Dr. Evanston? My mom? Sasha? I couldn’t tell whose voice that was, but I didn’t care—it was good advice. I literally bit my tongue and clenched my jaw against the retort I wanted to swing at him like an anvil.
“Can you explain what you mean by that?” I was therapizing him—Sasha would have caught it in a second, but Kendall was too involved in whatever was happening inside his head. And there was a reason therapists used this stuff—it worked.
“Brook... I loved you. I still love you. I thought... Well, I wanted us to spend our lives together.”
Flowers opened in my heart. Dried rivers flowed. Arias were sung.
“But I didn’t know if I was...was ready for that again.”
Locusts invaded. The earth grew fallow. Dirges sounded.
I carefully reminded myself not to get off task. And couldn’t help myself.
“‘Again’?”
The silence after my one word weighed about fifty tons. Kendall looked up for the first time and searched my face, and I could actually see him calculating, watched potential tactics flit across his face and be discarded in the space of a few seconds.
“Yeah. After, you know. Teresa.”
Let it go. Move on. But I couldn’t. Nothing in his words specifically told me there was more here, but I could see it in his face. Sensed it.
“You mean...after you moved to Chicago for her? To live together?”
He nodded, jerkily.
“Yeah. We were...more than just living together.” The words were muttered, quiet.
I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded stiffly. “Engaged?” Even in my own state, I could see that Kendall was miserable, and I felt a vague twinge of sympathy for him.
He cleared his thr
oat. “Married.”
I’d misheard. I had to have misheard.
“You were... You had... What?”
“We were married. Not long.” He said it like a palliative, quick, desperate. “Or not long working at it, anyway. But it’s over now, Brook. It’s been final for months.”
Months was slowed down, dragged out in my ears like the presidential assassination scene in a cheesy old movie. Months was how you marked the passage of short-term, recent things…tax periods…pregnancies… Months was how you spoke of a baby’s age. Months might have been less long than we’d been together.
“When was it actually final?” The voice coming out of my mouth was Wise Therapist’s voice: reasoned, objective, unemotional. The hysteric in my head marveled at the calm, level sound of it.
Kendall was too far gone into his own play to register that he ought to tread carefully. Too relieved, maybe, at my steady reaction. It made him incautious.
“End of January. I took you out to celebrate that night—remember? We went to Caravelli’s, stayed the night in Naples...?”
Oh, I did remember. It was the most excruciatingly romantic thing Kendall had ever done for me—that almost any boyfriend had ever done. He instructed me to dress up and pack an overnight bag, and told me nothing else. Picked me up at my house, had me wait in the lobby while he checked us into the Bay Inn on Fifth Avenue. Dinner at swanky Caravelli’s, and back upstairs to our room—a suite—where there were white roses and chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne.
I was so surprised that my no-nonsense, business-focused beau had a hidden and ornate romantic side. So moved that all of this was spontaneous, no occasion, no reason. So overwhelmed that all of it was just...for me.
But Kendall had been having his own private celebration, a secret commemoration of his freedom. For me the night had been a turning point for us—when I began to realize we were more than just casual, that I meant more to him than a fling. For him, it had been his own personal marking of a milestone. I was just along for the ride.
And it was also the night he’d asked me to move in.