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13
Never sneak up on an irritated witch, sorceress, or conjurer.
—A Witch’s Compendium of Curses
At least I avoided punching anyone’s breasts. I did, however, blow up the glass globe on the porch light. This time, it was not my fault. People really had to stop sneaking up on me.
Stephen was sitting on my porch swing with his raincoat folded over his suitcase and flowers clutched in one hand.
“I just had to come see you, darling,” he said, his voice sleepy and hoarse from the strain of his long flight. “I know we left things in an awkward place. I wanted to apologize in person.” He pressed the flowers into my hands, a pretty but generic arrangement of roses, the sort of thing you could buy in one of those airport vending machines by the arrival gates. “Aren’t you happy to see me, at all?”
I offered him a stilted smile, accepting the flowers. “I just wasn’t expecting you.”
That was the feckin’ understatement of the century. I felt guilty. I’d expected to feel annoyed and embarrassed if I saw him again. But the interesting thing was that I wasn’t embarrassed at the thought of Stephen meeting my friends and judging them. I didn’t want them to meet him. He no longer fit into my life, which had expanded and changed and become so much more complex since the last time I’d seen him.
It would have been so easy to relent, to apologize for having been harsh with him, to go back to him and reclaim some sense of normalcy. Clearly, things weren’t going to work out with Jed, and I didn’t have a talent for being alone. But I couldn’t do that to Stephen. I was still angry at him, on some level, but he was a good man. I didn’t want to make him a consolation prize. At one point, I’d seen our future together, bright and clear, but I couldn’t look at him that way anymore. We were just too different. I’d spent so much of my time working to make him happy so he would stay with me and give me the kind of love I wanted so badly. I didn’t think about whether that made me happy or not.
Now I sincerely doubted it would.
“Penny told me all about you discovering your grandfather and your family here. I’m sorry you felt like you had to lie to me about it. I suppose that I deserved it, though, after the things I said.”
I arched an eyebrow. Why didn’t Penny tell me she’d told Stephen where I was? It wasn’t like her to share information with him at all. I stared him right in the eye as I said, “Yes, you did. But I am sorry for the things I said. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have hung up and called back the next morning.” I opened the door and ushered him into the living room. “Tea?”
He nodded. “Please, and then I’d like you to explain a few things to me.”
“I will; I just need something to do with my hands.”
I put the kettle on to boil and pulled out the bags of oolong, which he preferred. As my hands moved, I tried to figure out exactly what I wanted to tell Stephen. My chronically unhelpful brain was coming up blank. So I went with the “let it all just tumble out of your mouth” method.
“I didn’t tell you about coming here to meet relatives because I didn’t want you to have one more thing to hold against my family. I could almost hear you in my head. ‘Here we go, another dramatic debacle, courtesy of the McGavocks.’ You say those things so often I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it.”
“But even you make jokes at your family’s expense,” he protested.
“Yes, but I’m not serious when I do it,” I said, trying to think of a way to explain the principle of “it’s OK when I pick on my family, but no one else should try” to someone whose parents used an intercom to communicate dinner plans. “You know there are large portions of my life that I hold back from you—hell, I hold them back from myself—because I am afraid that you can’t handle them. And it’s not fair to either of us. I’ve only given you a partial, watered-down version of myself, and you shouldn’t want that. I want better than that for you, better than a half-relationship with a half-person. I just don’t think what we have works anymore.”
“Wait, I thought you were just angry on the phone. Are you really breaking it off with me?”
“I’m sorry, Stephen,” I said, rethinking the wisdom of handing him a cup of boiling-hot tea.
“Haven’t you wondered why I haven’t introduced you to my parents?” he sputtered. “I kept waiting for the weird shit I had to put up with to bottom out. I wanted to know how bad it could get. But it just kept getting worse! You want to know why I wanted to move with you to Dublin? Because I wanted to know whether you were someone I could consider proposing to. But you just kept putting me off! It doesn’t have to be this way,” he insisted. “If you could just draw some boundaries with that band of loonies, then—”
“Do you realize you’re actively making my point for me?” I asked.
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’m sorry, darling, I’m just upset. I don’t want to lose you. I will learn to watch my tongue, but you have to make some changes, too. We can make this work. Don’t you see how easily we could fit into each other’s lives?”
“Maybe it’s not about fitting into each other’s lives but making one life together. I shouldn’t have to feel like I should hide things from you. I can’t keep compartmentalizing and tucking away the bits of my life I’m afraid will upset you.”
“But I came all this way to see you.”
“I didn’t ask you to. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
And round and round we went, until I lost track of the time and our tea grew cold. We hashed through every angle of our relationship, my inability to separate from the family, his unwillingness to take my job seriously or meet my family halfway. Stephen got more and more upset as the conversation went along and I didn’t budge on splitting.
“I refuse to accept this,” he spat. “We love each other. If we’re not going to be together, it won’t be caused by something so silly. Lots of people don’t get along with their in-laws.”
I nodded to his cold tea. “Would you like me to warm that up for you?”
“Why do you keep worrying about tea at a time like this?” he asked, exasperated.
