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Your dad would do it again.
Jamie glanced at me a second, opened his mouth as if to comment, but then said nothing. Probably because he knew I didn’t exactly want to talk about Dad at the moment. He shook his head, and his gaze returned to the furniture.
The desk Jamie pointed at now had more of a dark cherry finish. Unlike the others. There was also a certain quirk to it—curved edges, less pointy than the others. I let go of the handles on the cart—one of those big IKEA carts meant for stacking boxes of unassembled furniture—and ran my finger along the finish of the desk. Behind it, I noticed an equally fitting chair—black with rolling wheels.
Jamie remained with me, resting his hand over mine as we moved along the desk.
“It feels like a fit,” I said. “It’ll… uh… be nice to have a desk again. Of course, my old desk was like… close to a grand. But I think I’d rather stick with a desk under one hundred. There’s dignity in that.”
“One thousand dollars? You had a desk worth that much?” Jamie’s nose crinkled. “I know I asked this before but… why did you let Dave get your furniture? Especially a desk like that which I’m guessing you paid for.”
“I paid for all of our furniture. I’m the only one who really had the money.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Dave barely worked more than a couple of part-time jobs throughout the time I knew him. That was the ongoing joke between us. He was the stay-at-home husband. With no kids and no real responsibilities. He did sometimes clean, though.”
“He…sometimes… cleaned?” Jamie asked.
“And sometimes made dinner. So I guess I can’t complain.”
“You’re being sarcastic, right?”
“Very fucking sarcastic.”
“Great relationship,” he said, shaking his head. “Great fucking relationship. Dude didn’t work, dude didn’t really even take care of the house. Dude also couldn’t be bothered to help you when you were going through hell. What did he do that was right?”
“He…” I took a breath. Remembering all the times Dave accompanied me when I went to my book signings. Remembering that there were times when he held me at night, the nights when I didn’t feel the greatest, dealings with the depression which had carried over from the Stony Point days and nights. Recognizing, in particular, the time I arrived home to a steak dinner set for two which he had cooked. Of course, the romantic dinner he concocted paled in comparison to the candlelight dinner Jamie had created for us, but Dave hadn’t been one hundred percent bad, either.
“Maybe not one hundred percent,” Jamie said. “But he sure as hell didn’t treat you the way you deserved.”
“Maybe not.” I glanced at the number for the display of the desk we were looking at. “Okay, I’m going to write this one down. With the chair. I think we have a winner.”
I reached for my little paper ticket—the thing you gave to the IKEA people once you were done shopping, so they could grab the item from the warehouse—and scribbled down the model number of both the desk and chair on the sheet.
“You still haven’t told me why you let him have all the furniture,” Jamie said. “Especiallyyourstuff.”
“Oh, well, that’s easy enough,” I said. “Our furniture… even the stuff I’d picked out for myself… reminded me of a failed marriage. I couldn’t look at any of it anymore. Because it was part of the life I’d built with him.”
“Yeah.” He smiled at me sadly, as if he could somehow relate.
I pushed the cart along the rest of the store, a path which guided us around to the different sections. As we moved, I noticed a smile plastered across my face. While the dream from last night haunted me, being here with Jamie brought comfort and warmth. Jamie was all the good things of Dave, with none of the bad, and his presence made it easy for me to imagine what our lives may have been like if I hadn’t gone to a separate school. If we had stayed together and eventually let each other in.
“Do you think we would have stayed together?” I asked as we crossed into the bedroom territory of IKEA. “If I would have stayed at Stony Point and not ended up in the river that night. If we had stayed together through high school, that is. Do you think we’d be here now, shopping for furniture together?”
“I have no doubt in my mind,” he said.
“Yeah. Me too,” I whispered. “Though I don’t know if that’s hindsight bias or what. Considering the Jamie I know now loves me. I’m still not so sure about the one I knew before.”
“I loved you,” he said. “I was just the idiot who didn’t realize it.”
I sighed, feeling a level of relief at his words.I loved you. All those years, I’d thought it had been me. It’d become cemented in my head that this boy could not have loved me. That I just wasn’t good enough.
Now, after everything we’d been through, I started to believe that he was telling me the truth. Jamie had loved me. Even then.
I simply wished he’d known it all those years ago. That would’ve made the Ouija board incident a lot more tolerable. That would’ve made everything I was going through back then… at least a little more manageable.
“I wished I’d known what I know now,” Jamie whispered.
On the other side of the bedroom furniture, we ventured into the area with couches. Something I’d told Jamie I would definitely purchase today, as part of our agreement for making me a healthier Jemma. A couch, a TV, and a desk set with a chair. Those were the required items for our shopping trip. I would make a little bit of progress toward rebuilding my home.
Home.
