Later, in the privacy of our car, I permit myself a single scream.
“Jeez, Lily!” says Mom, startled. “You’re going to scare the whole island!”
“The therapist you made me see in the city told me about a technique she calls ‘scheduling your grief.’ I’m just following orders.”
According to said therapist, you’re supposed to allow yourself to feel by setting aside specific times of day to cry. Rose is a clinician on the island and because of her, I’m perhaps the most therapized twenty-five-year-old in the state. Somehow, it hasn’t made me any less of a disaster.
“Isn’t that for crying, not screaming?” Rose points out.
“It’s all the same.”
I lean my head against the steering wheel, and the horn lets out a loud squawk. A figure looks up from a shopping cart, alarmed. It’s the same red-shawled woman who passed us in the ice cream aisle a few minutes earlier. Her hair is such a brilliant shade of white it looks almost blue in the light of our high beams. It’s the detail, the vague resemblance to Aunt Lottie, that does me in.
It is a ridiculous idea to “schedule your grief,” I decide. A capitalistic scam, another inhumane effort to reach optimal productivity. Feelings are not supposed to follow a schedule. Some messes cannot be contained.
“Are you okay?” There’s real concern in Rose’s voice now. “I thought that went fine! All things considered.”
I look up from the steering wheel to raise my eyebrows. “All things considered?”
“Yeah! You were cordial, sweet… polite.”
“I fell off a shelf in the grocery store and was covered in bottles of detergent. Which hurt, by the way.” My body is tender, riddled with soon-to-be bruises.
Mom touches a welt on my forehead. I wince. “Well, that part could have gone better.”
I groan and hit my head against the wheel again. “I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“I gave him a handshake.” Once I had removed the detergent containers from my body, the two of them approached, and in a brilliant flash of idiocy, I reached out and shook both of their hands.
“Yes, well, I suppose that part could have gone better, too, but like I said, at least you were polite,” says Rose.
I can still feel my heart hammering in my chest and my stomach churning. Before today, the last time I saw Henry was at Lottie’s funeral last Memorial Day weekend. He looked as innocent and clean as summer rain in that pressed black suit.
Henry and I broke up a little over two years ago, right before the pandemic, but we never stopped speaking. The world shut down; we left the city and returned to our respective families for quarantine. Me, here. Him, home in Connecticut and then, later, Boston. We would talk late into the night, text all day, send each other funny videos on social media to break up the fear and despair. We saidwe would stop if one of us met someone, but neither of us did. I was more preoccupied with the world potentially ending, and Lottie’s increasingly defeating treatments, to even think about romance. I assumed he would eventually come back to New York and leave Boston. I assumed that someday, maybe, we would give it a try again.
There was a part of me, however small or suppressed, that even dared to hope he would be here this summer—both of us single—and we would meet again, but this time, it would be right. It would stick.
Then, three months ago, he told me he met someone. He said they had been seeing each other for a while, all throughout the pandemic, but it recently became “serious.”
Now I realize that by “serious,” he meant he is engaged. Quite the understatement.
“How is this possible?” I say aloud, mostly to myself.
We dated for five years, have been in each other’s lives for seven. How long could he even have known this girl? Less than two years, max?
Mom reaches out and smooths my hair, tucks back the stupid bangs. “You must’ve known he was going to move on eventually?”
“Of course,” I say, but it’s not the truth.
Our breakup never felt solid. I never mourned; I didn’t even cry once. Not talking to him the last three months was a stark change, and sure, it was difficult to resist dialing his number. My fingers naturally gravitated to his name in my phone. Still, it didn’t feel over.
An engagement?
Rose must detect the truth in my face, because she sighs. “Oh, Lily-pad,” she says, her nickname for me.
I notice the clock on the dashboard. It’s almost eight p.m., time for Rose to meet up with her friend. I realize how selfish I’m being, keeping everyone waiting over my melodramatics.
