Page 11 of Speak from the Heart

“Guess I might see you around then.” He turns toward me, modifying his statement from earlier in the evening where he clearly said he wouldn’t see me, as if he hoped he wouldn’t ever see me again.

Well, too bad for him. “Yep. See you.”

My voice drifts as I realize how close we stand to one another, staring into each other’s eyes. My chest almost presses against his jacket. My fingers twitch to reach out for him. The soft noises of the night suddenly sound like a symphony. The darkness feels like a tender blanket and my skin prickles under the weight of it.

Will he kiss me?

I take a giant step back with the thought. What a ridiculous idea.

We aren’t on some date, I remind myself. Jess’s brows pinch as I move away from him and he imitates the chin tip I gave him earlier. Without a word, he spins on his booted heels and heads down Nana’s block, only I notice he doesn’t turn left in the direction of town and the bar.

I also realize too late he’s walked off with my favorite silver sandals.

+ + +

“He is the most miserable man,” I tell my sister Grace when I finally call her that night. “He’s surly and brooding and just . . . gah.”

“Sounds perfect,” Grace says, her voice dreamy. My sister has the fairy-tale life—went to college and fell in love with the first man she met. His plan was the military while she wanted to be a lawyer, but she ended her education with a dual degree in PoliSci and history along with a diamond ring on her finger. Immediately, she had a baby, then another one, one more, and score number four. Now, baby five is on the way and her husband Mark jokes that his basketball team will be complete. Five boys.

I’m not jealous. I’m not.

I always thought I’d have kids. Someday. It wasn’t something I spoke of often, especially considering it isn’t necessarily date conversation. Still, I’d been holding out for a happily ever after with the hope one day a baby would come.

For another moment, I consider Jess. He’s a single father, something else my sister found intriguing.

“That means he’s lonely for adult company and looking for companionship.”

What is she, a fortune teller?

“I don’t want to talk about him,” I say, although I’ve already been speaking about him for the past ten minutes. His broody edge. His jaw tick. That stupid bandana.

Definitely not a prince charming.

At thirty-four, I’m thinking less and less of fairy tales coming true for me anyway. My happily ever after rests in my career.

Does it really, Emily?

I’ve been passed over for story after story in the last decade. I mean, I’ve been writing articles—but not the ones I want. The special interest ones. The personal tales. The romantic sort. Instead, I write newsworthy information on the trivial. Union strikes. Local fundraisers. City crime.

Not that these things aren’t important on some level, but it isn’t what I thought I’d be covering some ten years after I started. I work for City’s Edge, a newspaper dedicated to the suburban side of the third-largest city in the United States. My boss was a mentor of sorts when I began, but as the years have rolled on I’ve begun to question his ethics. He always passes me up for another writer.

Let’s let the better man take this one. Not better journalist, better man.

“Anyway, let’s talk Nana,” I say, no longer interested in discussing Jess with my sister. She doesn’t need to know how attractive he is or attracted I am to him. “I think I need to stay the week.”

I don’t need to see my sister to know her eyebrows just hit her hairline.

“How will that work with your job?” There might be a touch of sarcasm in her voice. My sister knows my goals and believes I might take them a bit to the extreme.

“I haven’t taken time off in a year.” I still have all twenty days of vacation allotted to me. “Grace, I can’t even describe this place. I’ve entered a time capsule which has collected dust like it’s been buried.”

“It’s that dirty? That doesn’t sound like Nana.”

Okay, so I might be exaggerating a little bit. I’m a writer. I like hyperbole. It’s just everything is faded and worn. Cobwebs hung in corners until I swiped them away with my hand. I shiver with the memory of the spider I didn’t see that climbed up my wrist before I flicked him off me.

“Do you think she has Alzheimer’s?” Grace asks, her voice shaky with concern. My sister hasn’t been here in years either. With each new birth, travel became more difficult. The expense. The distance. The number of children.

“I just don’t know, but all this talk of Grandpa really weirds me out.” I’ve gently mentioned that my grandfather is no longer here a few times, hoping to prompt Nana to remember. When I say such a thing her face melts to sadness, and I’ve come to the point of not mentioning it, letting her chatter in her fantasyland. Still, it disturbs me. I’ve even asked her when she last visited a doctor and her response was she’s fit as a fiddle. But it’s obvious she’s not.