Because, she told herself, this time she could clearly point to the cause of her troubles as the major life transition she was undergoing. And one thing she had learned, having some living under her belt, was that transitions ultimately ended. The cyclones came, the cyclones left. Eventually.
She shook herself out of her thoughts. She was supposed to be talking to Jack, responding to his observation that Esme had sounded worried about her. “I’m a bit set back on my heels by… life. But I’ll be OK. I’ve never lived alone, and it’s taking some getting used to.”
Which was why it was good to have company, even if one’s company was a snobby, cranky literary genius.
“Never?” He sounded genuinely startled.
“Nope. I came right to this house from Georgia. I found it from an ad in the paper—remember those? You know the rest: roommates, then Reggie, then kids.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I’d go crazy if I was never alone.”
“You never lived with anyone?” She had willingly trotted out her life story. She wouldn’t mind hearing his.
“I lived with my parents, obviously, though never both of them at the same time, and when I went to college, I requested a single dorm room.”
“You never had roommates after that? Or a live-in girlfriend? Or boyfriend?” She didn’t want to assume. Though she was kind of assuming, because… Well, she didn’t know why she was. A vibe she got from him.
But maybe that was just wishful thinking.
But not because she didn’t wish for anything of that sort from Jack Branksome.
“Girlfriend,” he said, “and no. I got close once. I dated a woman for a year who was also an introvert. She used to joke that when we moved in together, we’d buy a duplex and each get a side.”
Maybe Jack needed to date someone with a pool house.
Not her. Someone.
It was a good setup, was the point, for scenarios in which an introvert needed to coexist with someone else.
“I can understand with my intellect, though,” Jack said, “that going from being married and having kids at home to being alone could be… hard.”
“Don’t injure yourself trying to imagine it,” she teased.
“What happened with your ex?”
She was a little surprised by the question. Not that she thought it was too personal and shouldn’t have been asked, just that he was at all interested in the answer. She got the sense that Jack was trying to be nice. She had no idea why, since hewasn’tnice, but talking to him was turning out to be kind of therapeutic.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “None of my business.”
“It’s OK. Nothing happened. We just kind of… diverged. When I met Reggie, he was a striver. A hustler. I loved that. I was one, too. We spent a lot of years striving together. He was an ambulance chaser, as I said. Which I understand should have been unattractive, but I loved the way he made stuff happen. He had a lot more money than I did when we met. He swept me off my feet. Meals, trips, the whole thing.”
“His face on the side of the bus.”
She laughed. “His face on the side of the bus. And then I started having some success, and he was my biggest cheerleader. Then I got pregnant.” She shrugged. “So we got married.”
“You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t gotten pregnant?”
“I don’t know. We were crazy about each other. It’s just that we were so young, or at least I was. People weren’t so sensitive to age-gap relationships back then. We hadn’t yet heard all Taylor Swift’s songs on the topic.” He was looking at her blankly. “Is it safe to say you’ve never heard ‘Dear John’ or ‘The Manuscript’? Probably. But surely you have heard ‘All Too Well’?”
“I have not.”
She’d been teasing, but he looked like a deer in headlights, a fact she enjoyed more than she should have. “Anyway, I saw Reggie’s striving as a means to an end, whereas I came to understand that for him, the striving was—is—the point. He was always wanting more. A bigger house, better schools for the kids, more cars. It just got… tiring.”
Exhausting, really, but she didn’t want to belabor the point. When Reggie’s perpetual striving started to shade into a kind of keeping up with the Joneses Blair knew all too well from her family of origin, it had made her start to fall out of love with him.
A house only needed so many bedrooms. A man only needed so many cars.
A woman only needed so many units of Botox before she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore.
