“Please do! For both of us. I’m living vicariously through you. These days I’m just dealing with a crying baby boy all hours of the night, and he makes my nipples sore,” Veronica lamented.
“Sounds like college all over again,” I said with a chuckle.
“Right?” Veronica laughed and added under her breath, “I shouldn’t have dated so many writers.”
“Can we call what you were doing in college dating?” I joked.
Veronica laughed again and continued with a more tender tone. “But seriously, when we first met in college you were this smart, savvy, adventurous, black-haired, tawny-skinned goddess. And I get it; you wanted to move home to be with your mom when she got sick. But Kit, it’s been over a yearsince she passed. You’ve got to get back out there. Your mom, of all people, would have wanted you to enjoy life, for fuck’s sake.”
I let a chuckle escape. Veronica was right. My mom loved life. No matter what her circumstances, she had a way of making everything seem brighter, especially the holidays. I felt that familiar lump in my throat. I took a swig of coffee, trying not to wince at how ridiculously syrupy sweet it was. “You’re right,” I said. She wanted me to be out here doing what I love.” I added, “I do love my job at the library, though. So there’s that.”
“Turns out there are libraries all over the world,” Veronica said sarcastically. She sighed. “Seriously, Kit. Your hometown of Creekstone, albeit very charming, really lucked out when you decided to move home. We’d love to have you closer to us here in Atlanta, and I know Matt misses you in Los Angeles. I mean…Creekstone is a tiny town in north Georgia. How many single people your age live in Creekstone?”
Before I could respond, Veronica’s son, Preston, sounded the alarm that he was ready for his next meal. Veronica said hastily over Preston’s cries, “Oh, let me call you back. Boobie-duty calls. Preston is hungry. Love ya!”Click.
I took a deep breath and watched a delivery truck drive through the puddles on the street. I leaned back in my chair and replayed what Veronica had said. Perhaps it was because she was so sleep-deprived, but Veronica wasn’t letting up and was giving me a healthy helping of honesty about the state of my dating life. I guess that’s what friends are for. Normally, I would have pushed back a little more, but I knew how hard these postpartum months were for Veronica. Before having Preston, Veronica worked as a real estate lawyer for a firm in Atlanta. She decided to take a year off to be with Preston, and I could tell she struggled to be at home instead of at work.
I didn’t want to sink too far into this chair again. I shifted my weight in my seat. I thought aboutthe feeling I got inthe pit of my stomach when Veronica mentioned Matt, my ex-boyfriend. I knew that Veronica’s husband, Gus, still spoke to Matt. After all, they had been college roommates like Veronica and me. That’s how it all started. Veronica and I lived in the same dorm our freshman year of college. Once we met, we were inseparable. Veronica and Gus started dating, so Matt and I started spending more time together. We were always at the same parties, and Matt tagged along with Gus pretty much everywhere he went, so it seemed inevitable that Matt and I would end up together.
Dating Matt had been so easy and sensible. I wouldn’t have said we had an immediate spark, but we worked so perfectly together. More than anything, I became aware of how happy our relationship made everyone else. I felt a pressure to be happy with what I had with Matt because everyone else felt like we were a perfect match. And Matt was the total package, right? Matt was attractive in that all-American way. He was not just conventionally good looking; he was also extremely smart and athletic.
After undergrad, I started a one-year fellowship in Washington, D.C., to work in archives. He moved with me to D.C. to study for his MCATs. While he was in D.C., Matt did volunteer work at a children’s hospital and a clinic for the unhoused to help fill his time. He applied for med school and got into UCLA. I was elated for him. It’s what he’d always wanted. Everyone immediately started asking me if I was going to move to Los Angeles with him. But a few weeks after we found out that Matt would be moving to Los Angeles, I got the call from my mom. She was sick again.
Breaking up with Matt had been hard, but probably not as hard for either of us as everyone thought it had been. We didn’t break up right away. We decided to try and make the long-distance thing work. Matt was well into his first year ofmed school, and I had been lucky enough to get a position at the Creekstone Regional Library. In the same way that we had been good at going through all the motions of being college sweethearts, we were excellent at working out the logistics of being in a long-distance relationship. I would visit during short breaks, and he would come to see me during longer breaks. But then, less than a year after I moved back to Creekstone, something unexpected happened: the pandemic.
Like everyone else, our travel was limited, and the thought of someone working in a hospital being in close proximity to me or my mom was too dangerous. I told Matt that my mom’s health would be my priority, that I didn’t want to take any risks, and that this just didn’t feel fair to him. He took it hard at first. He protested the appropriate amount. He insisted that he wanted to try, but like all other parts of our relationship, breaking up and moving on happened with relative ease for both of us.
That was five years ago.
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then I leaned back in the chair and took another bite of the snowman.
“Oh, sugar,” a sweet woman’s voice said from behind me. “What’s eatin’ you up?”
I turned around in the chair to see Ms. Pearl, a regular at the Creekstone Library. She was peering at me over the tops of her red glasses with a ball of yarn and two knitting needles resting in her lap.
“Oh, hi, Ms. Pearl.” I turned in my seat and rested against the back of the chair. “I was just thinking about a meeting I have with Aunt Rita later,” I lied. I did not need a second round of dating advice today. Ms. Pearl was a local who had lived most of her life in Creekstone. She had worked as a receptionist at a local law firm. Even though she had retired years earlier, she always wore her hair pulled back in a professional French twist,a matching cardigan sweater set, and a pair of tasteful pearl earrings.
“Is something wrong with our dear Rita?” Ms. Pearl gasped, clutching her knitting needles to her chest.
“No, no,” I said quickly. I had slid down into the abyss that was the bottom of this chair again. I engaged my core and pulled myself forward. “Everything is totally fine.” If other towns had rumor mills, Creekstone had a full-scale gossip factory. “We just have a meeting with the mayor later. Some development company is in town and interested in buying property out by the river.”
Shocked, Ms. Pearl gasped, “You’re going to sell the house and land by the river?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “We are not selling the house. We’re only considering a very remote possibility of selling the land by the river—not the land in town with the house. The whole meeting is probably a waste of time, but we just want to hear them out. I promised Aunt Rita I’d attend.”
“Is that right?” Ms. Pearl nodded as if she was processing what I was saying, then she said with wide eyes, “Now that’s interesting.”
“Is it?” I squeaked out. That was the opposite of what I wanted.
I tried to pivot away from any piece of news that might be interesting to Ms. Pearl. I held up my decapitated snowman cookie. “Did you get a free cookie?”
“No one asked to buy my land,” a gruff voice said from behind. I turned to see Ms. Patty.
“Well, who would want that lot?” Ms. Pearl chortled.
“Humph.” Ms. Patty stood between Miss Pearl and me. She was a short, older lady, like Ms. Pearl. She had curly, grey hair that peeked out from under a homemade beanie. She wore a heavy canvas work jacket and her loose pants tucked into a pairof boots. Ms. Patty crossed her arms, dismayed. “It’s a fine lot…It has character.”
Ms. Pearl hooted in disbelief. “If by character you mean wetlands year-round, then that land has more character than a three-ring circus.”
