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She sighed. “You can’t tell anyone.”
Molly held up her right-hand pinky, and June linked hers with her friend’s.
“Dragan’s family from out of town — who are so worried about his marital status and lack of a family — came to visit. He was tired of their questions and asked me to… to stand in. As his girlfriend.” June muttered the last bit, suddenly feeling like her feelings for him had been taken advantage of and she’d been too blind to see it.
Molly set her fork down. “Are you shitting me?”
“No, and I don’t need any angry shit right now, Mol.”
“Wow.” Molly gave a low whistle. “Okay. Obviously, you were trying to be nice and help a friend. I get that. I won’t say what you know I want to, because you know what it is. In any case, why isn’t he speaking to you?”
“Something happened with his family and I think he was embarrassed? But I don’t know for sure, he won’t talk to me. Except to see his family off to the airport this week.”
“Oh, no. Uh-uh. You ain’t going anywhere unless he gives you an apology. So what if he was embarrassed? We all have shit. Honey, we raise standards not men.” Molly went back to her salad, occasionally muttering moreuh-uhsunder her breath.
While June didn’t disagree with Molly, she wasn’t as much a hardliner. Dragan was her best friend, they’d been through a lot of shit before and had come out just fine — if not better — at the end of it. But this felt different. Lasting. Like it had infiltrated itself into their foundation and was spreading roots, creating cracks.
“Hey, Junebug.” The door opened, and Otto the mailman walked in. “Why the long face?”
“Oh, noth—“
“Guys are dicks, Otto.”
June glared at her friend before turning to the man who had delivered their mail for as long as she could remember. “I’m sorry for my friend.”
“And I’m sorry for whoever broke your heart,” he said, frowning as he set the stack of mail on the counter. “Want me to beat him up?”
June laughed, ignoring the tears in her eyes as Molly gave a hearty, “Yes, please!”
“Okay. Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.” He patted her hand before taking off.
June wiped her eyes, and started going through the stack.
Junk, junk, bill, thank you, town flyer, junk, bill —
“Ugh, I love him. He’s the best mailman around, we don’t deserve him,” Molly said, scraping the remnants of her salad from the plastic bowl.
— Town Court?
“June?”
She couldn’t feel her body, couldn’t remember if she was breathing. With shaky hands she opened the letter and skimmed it.
“June, what’s wrong? You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I—I think I am.” Her breathing was shallow, labored, as she fought off the need to vomit in the nearest trash can. She passed the letter to Molly. She didn’t trust herself not to heave, or to weep.
Molly skimmed the notice of the foreclosure settlement conference, looking up at June in horror.
“June, why didn’t you tell me?”
She couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst into tears. Ugly, wracking sobs that called out through the empty store. Her empty home.
Molly put her arms around June and held her, something June hadn’t realized she needed most. For the first time when she needed someone, it wasn’t Dragan she could turn to. And June realized she had a whole other area of her life she needed to build on. One that didn’t include him.
28
Dragan sat on the porch, phone in hand. His family’s laughter and their voices flowed out through the living room window, and he realized this was the first time he could ever remember his family being consistently happy. The sounds lit him up, sadness at it ending weighing him down. He stared at his phone, at the text string with June, reading and re-reading their conversations. When he did it last night, staying up until three in the morning, he had gone back two years. Two years of pretending he wasn’t in love with her. Two years of shielding her from the most ugly aspects of himself.
