AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The leftovers of the dinner she had served the twins were also on the table: barbeque chicken fingers and sweet-potato curly fries, blueberry-banana milk shakes.
I picked up a handful of fries and headed slowly up the stairs, dragging myself toward our bedroom, feeling completely hammered from my arguments. The one with Jordan that I didn’t ask for. The one with Griffin that I insisted upon.
I was relieved when I passed the twins’ room to see that the door was shut, the lights off. And I was even more relieved when I passed the bathroom, the shower water clearly running, an occupied Jesse’s loud hums audible from the hallway.
I had ample evidence, all of a sudden, that I would be getting through the rest of my waking hours alone and unscathed.
Then I headed into my own bedroom and saw it: I’d been wrong. Wrong about the evidence. And wrong about the leftovers of dinner. They weren’t just on the kitchen table. They were all over the bedroom floor. In shades of barbeque red. Sweet-potato orange. In bright blueberry mi
lk shake.
They were all over the floor, and all over my photographs. All of my photographs.
Ruined.
“Now, that’s not good.”
I don’t know how long I was standing there, frozen, when I turned to find Jesse in the doorway, in jeans and a T-Shirt—ATOM Spraypainted across the shirt’s front—his hair still wet from his shower.
“No,” I said.
“And probably not the best moment,” he said, “but I feel like I should also tell you that Sammy may have swallowed your wedding ring.”
“May have?”
“My only source is Sammy,” Jesse said. “Who also told me he swallowed the kitchen table.”
I turned back to look at my bedside table, and saw what was notably missing: my thin, gold ring. I moved closer to the table, looking for the gold’s gleam in the carpet, underneath the table legs. It was nowhere.
And then, from my new vantage point, I took in once again the disaster that was now my maybe-not-future. The photographs. The negatives. The scrunched film rolls. The canvas box swimming in a blueberry puddle.
“You want some help cleaning this up?” Jesse asked.
I looked right at him.
“I want some help,” I said, “getting anywhere else.”
We sat on the porch steps, like it wasn’t the dead of winter—me on the bottom one, Jesse on the top, a bottle of bourbon on the step between us—and proceeded to get drunk, looking up at the star-filled sky, letting the liquor help fight the cold, waiting for Griffin to get home.
We got so drunk that I ended up telling Jesse all of it, about the end of my relationship with Nick, about losing my column, about the craziness that had been that very day: from Gia and her terrible bathroom confessional to Jordan and Chef Boyardee. I told him all of it, and apparently in an amusing way, because he was hysterically laughing.
He was laughing so hard, by the end, that he made me tell him the Chef Boyardee part twice.
“I’m glad my life is so humorous to you,” I said.
“Wow,” he said, wiping at his eyes, fighting back a final laugh. “It really, really is.”
I kept shaking my head, but I couldn’t really pretend to be offended. I was laughing too.
“So is Jordan always such a bitch?” Jesse said.
“Hey! That’s not entirely fair,” I said.
“I think it is, actually.”
“She’s just worried about me,” I said. “You know, she thinks I’ve gone off the deep end.”
“What if you have?”
