“Because you don’t listen,” I sigh. “You don’t, Joy.”
“I do too! I’m just . . . busy. I have so many balls up in the air right now . . .”
She continues on in some tirade about how hard her life is now that her parents have started to wean her off financially. They want her to get a job. She thinks they’re being unreasonable. It’s a little hard to hear when you’ve had a job, sometimes two, since you were fifteen.
“Mal?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” I say, stripping out of my dress. “I’m here.”
“Who’s not listening now?”
“I’m getting in the bath,” I say, turning the water off. After dumping in a handful of bath salts, I test the temperature with my toe. Perfect. After sinking in the tub, I rest my head against a towel. “There. What were you saying?”
“I was just asking how your day went. That’s all.”
“It went well, I think. It’s nothing too complicated and nothing I haven’t done before. They’re paying me really well too.”
She pauses. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. I mean, what are you wanting me to say?”
“Damn it, Mal! You know I’ve fantasized about the Landry boys since we were ten. The closest I’ve ever gotten to one is a quick kiss with Ford behind his mother’s car in sixth grade. I used to beg Camilla to have me stay the night just so I could try to see her brothers.”
“You’ve always been a little hoochie,” I laugh, my thighs pressing together as Graham’s chiseled face floats into my mind.
“So?”
We both laugh as the water soothes my tense muscles. I close my eyes and sigh. “Graham is outrageously good-looking.”
“You aren’t complaining, are you?”
“No, no, of course not,” I say hurriedly. “It’s just really hard to concentrate when he’s on the other side of the wall all day. I have to call in his office and alert him of calls or appointments, and his voice comes through the line, and I literally have to talk myself out of not taking a bathroom break and getting myself off. I just hope this works out . . .”
“I’m going to pretend I don’t hear that thing in your voice.”
“What thing?” I ask defensively.
“That bit of uncertainty. Just stop it. Everything will be fine.”
It’s easy for her to say. Her bills are paid regardless if she works or not. It’s not that simple for me. I only got into the private school that she, Camilla, and Sienna went to because I worked my butt off in middle school, filled out the paperwork for a scholarship, and practiced for a week straight for the entrance interview. We couldn’t afford it. And, frankly, my parents didn’t think a good education was really that important. I’d finish high school and go get a job at the factory or be a cashier at the hardware store and be happy. If I mentioned pursuing something different, they rolled their eyes and told me to be realistic. I wanted more.
Through pure determination on my part and maybe a toss of luck from up above, the administrators of the school let me in with a scholarship. It was the best day of my life.
Now I sit in this mediocre apartment and look around. The porcelain in the tub is cracking and the corner of the mirror above the sink is broken, and I fight off the unsteadiness that wobbles in my gut.
“Will it be okay?” I ask. “I feel so out of touch.”
“Out of touch with what?”
“With . . . me. I don’t know who I am or what I want or what’s even possible for me anymore, Joy. I’m having a midlife crisis,” I pout.
“You can’t have a midlife crisis at your age,” she scoffs.
“You totally can. I think it’s called a quarter-life crisis, actually.”
“Stop sounding all doom and gloom.”
“I don’t,” I toss back. “I’m just emotionally drained from today. Cut me some slack.”
She sighs. “I’m glad you came back here.”
Her reference to me not moving to North Dakota with my parents is thinly veiled. She knows I don’t have a terrific relationship with them and had I followed them north to the oil fields where my father is now working, I’d be miserable. But coming to Savannah, the place I call home even without my parents, was a risk.
“Me too,” I whisper. “I just hope this doesn’t end up on the list of ‘Mal’s bad decisions.’”
“It won’t. Things will work themselves out. They always do. Look at me, having a job and all. Who’d’ve thunk it?”
“True,” I giggle. “But I certainly don’t know what I’m doing right now,” I sigh. “But what choice did I have? Stay in nursing with a guy that made it clear he doesn’t see a future with me or suck it up and move on? This whole thing isn’t what I wanted or thought would happen, and I’m not sure where to go from here.”
“You’ve started that by taking the job with Graham. I think you’re doing great,” Joy says softly.
“If only I can stop thinking about him in a purely unprofessional way,” I giggle.
“If you figure out how to do that, share the knowledge. I’ve battled that almost my whole life!”
I sink further into the water. “You know what I really want?”
“Besides Landry naked?”
I roll my eyes. “I want to feel . . . like the me I used to know. I want to feel alive. I want to wake up and smile. I want to accomplish things, to feel powerful. I want to have things to look forward to, have goals, find someone that wants to laugh with me, go hiking, or get ice cream. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
“No, no, it doesn’t,” she says.
Swirling the water around the tub, I think about what I just said. It’s the first time I’ve been able to really verbalize how I feel. I miss feeling like the girl with the drive to get into private school. I don’t know her anymore; I sacrificed her for a relationship in which I was little more than a plot device.
“You know,” I say, sitting up, the water splashing onto the floor, “Now that I think of it, I can’t remember a time when I was with Eric that I was truly happy. I just kept thinking that I would be happy, things just needed to line up the right way.”
“That sounds stupid.”
“I know.” My shoulders slump. “I kept thinking if I do this or do that or this happens that we would be happy.”
“Then why did you stay with him, Mal?”
I shrug. “We had fun together. Especially at the beginning, we saw movies and played euchre and had great sex,” I laugh. “It always felt like something was on the horizon. It just never materialized. Before I knew it, years had gone by and I felt like I didn’t even realize who I was.”
“I had no idea.”
“Me either,” I sigh. “I knew I felt sort of depressed and blah, but I didn’t realize why until he told me he didn’t see a future together. That sent a spark of reality through me. I thought, ‘How did I, Mallory Sims, get here?’ I don’t remember him holding me or asking me how my day was,” I say, the words coming faster as all of it hits me, “or caressing me. He didn’t ask my opinion or tell me he was proud of me or encourage me to do anything.”
“Love makes you do funny things.”
“I guess.”
She doesn’t even try to conceal her frustration. “The moral of this sad, depressing story is fuck Eric.”