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“That’s not for you to decide!” I shout, my voice strangled by the force of this truth. “How could you keep that from me?”
“I was just trying to protect you.”
A primal roar issues from deep in my throat. “I wish you would stop protecting me! If it weren’t for your stupid protection, I wouldn’t be picking up the pieces of my life again.”
His jaw tenses at my accusation, the muscle twitching furiously. “I need you to read it while I’m here. I… I won’t leave until you’ve read the whole thing. Then you’ll understand why.”
Yanking my wrists out of his grasp, I shoo Skippy away so I can grab the letter off the floor. But he follows me as I sink down onto the sofa, hopping onto the cushion next to me, his sixty-pound black Labrador body pressed against my side. As if he can sense that I’m going to need him there.
Houston sits on the edge of the coffee table facing me, our knees inches apart, his gaze locked on the letter in my hands. I try to read his expression, try to see beyond the hardened grief and obvious regret for any indication as to what I’m about to read. What did Hallie confess in this letter that would make him think he had to lie to me for more than five years? But I see nothing.
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.
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 b
ackpack 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?”
