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Those blue eyes that had always made me feel like I was falling were still the same, except for the fact that the way they looked at me was mighty different from the way they had before he’d left his Alaska life behind. My hand flew up to my locket, which was tucked safely away beneath my shirt. I wondered what kind of thoughts were going on behind those beautiful eyes. I was wondering so many things that I couldn’t seem to land squarely on any single one of them. Instead, I stood there like a hollowed out person who’d lost her brain when she wasn’t looking.
“Fay. I didn’t know you would still be working here.”
“Yeah, well, nothing much changes around here,” I answered quietly, feeling whatever dignity I had left slipping away at his second mention of the fact that in almost a decade, I hadn’t gotten anything aside from my diner job. “But I guess you knew that.”
“Sure,” he answered amicably enough, maybe even a little bit embarrassed, which was something I wouldn’t have minded a bit. “I guess I did.”
“I saw a light in in your house earlier. I’m still living in the same house. I didn’t think it would be you, though. I mean, the thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t think it would be you.”
“I didn’t think it would be, either. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I inherited the house, and there’s a whole lot more to getting things all figured out than I expected there to be. It seemed like coming back for a while made the most sense in the end.”
“I heard about your dad,” I said in a low voice, furious for myself with the sudden feeling that I might actually start to cry. I dug into my palms with my fingernails, to make sure that didn’t happen. “I’m very sorry. I thought about sending my condolences, but then I realized I wouldn’t have had the first idea of where to send them. So, you know. I didn’t.”
&nb
sp; “That’s all right. It’s sweet of you, though, to think about it. Thanks, Fay. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I should also be going.”
“Going? Didn’t you come in here for a meal? Or, why did you come in here?”
“Just a coffee to go will be fine, actually. I’ve got a lot of shit on my plate, and I’m not trying to stay in Ashville for the rest of my life.”
“Of course. Hold on.”
I poured him his cup of coffee with hands that were undeniably trembling. How many times had I done this exact same thing over the course of my life? Enough that when I’d first begun giving him drinks to go, they had been cups of coke or hot cocoa instead of coffee, back before he was grown up enough for a drink as mature as that.
Back in the day I had all but lived for the times when Neil would come in to see me. I had loved the way he had always made me feel like the most important, special person on the face of the earth. And now? Now he was like a stranger, only worse. A stranger wouldn’t have had this uncanny ability to hurt me the way that Neil was, to hurt me without even trying. And he wasn’t even doing anything! He was only acting like we were strangers or distant acquaintances, which was exactly what we were now. All I knew was that I wanted him to go. Out of all of the times I had imagined the two of us seeing each other again, it had never once played out like this.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
“Nothing, please. Let’s just consider it a gift from an old friend.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” I answered in an overly bright voice, knowing that I would never be able to work the register in my present state of agitation. “Least I can do, right?”
“Shit. Well, thanks. I don’t have anything to do for you in return. But we should get together before I leave, you know? We should do some catching up. Maybe I can buy you dinner or something, or what passes for dinner in this place.”
“Yea, if you have time. That might be nice.”
“All right, good. I’ll see you around, Fay.”
I nodded at him, feeling both relieved and sad when he was finally out of the diner and getting back into his truck. It was a nice enough offer, his idea of us going to dinner, but I wasn’t an idiot, or at least not a total idiot. Not as far as I could tell.
The dinner suggestion had been his way of getting the hell out of dodge as fast as he could. Nothing less and nothing more. For all the things that appeared to have changed about the guy, there was something other than his eyes that seemed to be the exact same as it had been when he’d gone and never looked back.
His desire to be as far away from little old Ashville as he could get was exactly the same as it had been when we were still teenagers. Although I wouldn’t have thought it was possible back when I was still an eighteen-year-old girl, Neil’s dislike of Ashville seemed to have grown instead of decreasing.
I’d heard the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” plenty of times. Everyone had. For Neil, the opposite seemed to be true. Absence seemed to have made his heart grow colder, towards Ashville as a whole, and undoubtedly towards me. I was nothing more than some silly little townie, and there was no way seeing me again was on his agenda.
My hand flew back up to my locket, and for just a minute, I could see the Neil that had been mine. The Neil that I had loved so completely. Then my hand dropped back to my side, and that image was gone, leaving in its wake the version of Neil I had just seen. This man was all work and no play for sure. If I saw him again before he left, I would be so stunned, someone could knock me over with a feather.
My guess was that seeing me again would only drive him to get his work done faster so that he could leave his past behind for good and get on with whatever fancy life he’d created for himself out there in the wide world.
“Well that was a trip and a half, am I right?” Courtney asked.
I turned to look at Courtney, who was beginning to look a little blue from all of her time in the massive refrigerator. I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture I hoped looked at least a little bit nonchalant. Not only was I not sure what to say, but I also wasn’t sure that I could trust my voice. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was kind of bowled over by what had just happened, and I needed some time to regroup.
“Come on, Fay. Don’t be mad, all right? I know you just wanted to hide from him, but really, why the hell should you? This is our diner. Not his.”
