Page 8 of 50 Ways to Win Back Your Lover

Hungry for more of her, I scroll to her next post, one from a year prior. The bakery café she owns looms behind her while she points to the storefront’s sign—SUGAR AND SIPS—a bigger grin lighting her face. It’s an adorably clever business name. Sweet treats. Coffee sips. Out of morbid curiosity, I check Hugo’s page next, but his page is listed as private.

Delilah sniffles from in front of me, and I freeze. She sighs, and I slump. Her neighbor is giving her space, an inch I’d like to cram myself into so Delilah can lean on my shoulder, cry on my shirt. She can even blow her nose on the soft cotton, then check her boogers.

Lennon has resumed his morose window staring. I close my eyes, praying for sleep or an aneurysm. What I get is a replay of my Top Ten Best Days.

Many people would struggle to pinpoint the absolute best days of their lives. Those lucky bastards probably don’t obsess over their memories in the hope of retaining a part of their abolished identities. Me, I have a Top Ten Best Days list. Each one is written in my collection of journals. Tweaked and embellished when a specific memory surfaces, the details forever recorded, never to be lost. Not because I’m a glass-half-full, rainbows-and-lollipops kind of guy. After I relived my worst days ad nauseam until I existed in a perpetual fetal position, my brothers held an intervention and suggested I focus on the good memories. The special occasions. The unforgettable moments—so I never forgot who I once was.

Number ten isn’t my memory, per se, but I’ve heard the story so often it feels like mine.

I was born Edgar Eugene Bower on a windy day in the Windy City, my horrendous names courtesy of Dad’s great-grandfathers. That day, powerful gusts knocked out half of Chicago’s power. A tree fell in front of my dad’s car, causing another vehicle to rear-end him, forcing me to be born in the back seat. Mom said I was her only natural birth. No C-section like with Lennon or drugs used to dull the agonizing pain like with my other brothers, but the second I was placed into her arms, she said the pain disappeared. “You have power,” she often tells me. “When people hurt, you absorb their pain. It’s why you’re so compassionate.”

Or I’m just an oversensitive man who feels too much.

Emotional baggage aside, coming into existence is number ten on my list. Without that milestone none of the others, good and bad, would have happened.

Five belongs to the day I turned seven and my parents moved the family to Windfall, North Carolina. My accountant father praised Windfall’s vibrant arts community and hiking and equestrian scenes. He said he wanted to live somewhere with fresh air and lead a quieter small-town life.

Shocker of all shocks, Dad lied.

Windfall’s massive tourism influx, its general stability and affluent visitors, along with the variety of cash businesses Dad could front—nonchain convenience stores, liquor stores, restaurants—made it a prime location to launder money and keep his cartel bosses happy.

So our oblivious family moved to a hobby farm with rolling hills and tall grasses, forests of oak and hickory cradling the tranquil property. There was a fence on our lot next to the neighbor’s chicken coop, its sun-bleached wood stretching along our property line. Typical in all regards, except for the seven-year-old girl standing on the bottom rail, her curly hair wild and her face pinched, as she shouted, “Get off my land!”

I squinted at her pursed lips and shouted, “Get off my fence!”

She shouted, “Get a new face!”

I shouted, “Get a brain!”

A woman with similar wild hair ran over, interrupting our clever repartee. Smiling indulgently, she grabbed the mini tyrant off the fence and plopped her on the ground. “You’ll have to forgive Delilah. She has a royalty complex. Thinks she’s queen of Windfall. I’m Hayley Moon,” she called to my parents. “We’re thrilled to have new neighbors.”

She went to chat with Mom and Dad while my brothers ran off to explore, leaving Delilah and I glaring at each other through the fence slats.

“Eat dirt,” she said, channeling her best Maleficent.

“Eat worms,” I replied, going for Jafar.

Then she gave me the finger and ran away.

It was an awesome day.

The fourth-best day of my life was the day of my truce with Delilah Moon. Being neighbors, we rode the same bus to school. She’d sit at the front. I’d sit at the back. For two years we ignored each other while perfecting our death glares, unless one of us felt creative. Those days we’d mumble jabs like butthead or butthole or buttwad as one of us would walk past. As far as I was concerned, Delilah Moon was an invasive species—a weed in my new life, popping up her vicious little head in the worst places.

The day of our truce, the fourth-best day of my life, we got off the bus at our stop. Just the two of us as usual, a couple of butt-insulting enemies on our rural road, while my brothers participated in after-school sports.

She walked ahead, holding a ceramic horse in her hands—her show-and-tell keepsake from class. Little Gracie had been her grandmother’s figurine, acquired the day her grandparents moved to Windfall and bought their horse-breeding farm. Delilah’s evil eyes had shone when telling the class Little Gracie was the name of the first Arabian her family owned. She’d explained how strong and kind and athletic their horses were, while I tried to burst her head with my laser-hate vision.

That afternoon, as she walked down the road, she held the figurine up toward the sun, watching the light refract off the brown glaze. My fingers twitched for some reason, the urge to draw that horse and her tanned hand pulling at me. I pictured my pencil dancing over a paper, smudges and lines growing into a picture. In that version, the horse was eating Delilah’s head.

Then she tripped over a rock and dropped the horse.

I froze.

Delilah sucked in a sharp breath, followed by a quiet “No, no, no, no” as she gathered the useless shards in her hands. A sob racked her body, and something sharp jabbed at my heart.

It’s a sensation that often plagues me when other people are upset, like my heart’s a hollowed organ, the interior filled with jagged stones. That day, the stones grated, building into a hard-to-breathe kind of pain that made me want to cry. Cry for Delilah’s grandmother, who loved that figurine. Cry for Delilah’s mom, who probably loved the memento. Cry for Delilah, who I hated but who’d lost her special keepsake.

She glanced over her shoulder, her too-blue eyes full of sadness, not villainy, and I ducked my head, ashamed of witnessing her misery. Tears running down her face, Delilah hopped to her feet and bolted ahead, her short legs pumping, leaving Little Gracie broken on the dirt road and me with an aching heart.