Getting Real (Getting Some 3)

It’s not a fun place to be.

I consider texting him. Something casual and lighthearted.

Hey could work.

Or something direct and bold. Inviting him to come back over for round two . . . or four . . . if we’re getting technical. Or the simple, one-lined burning question of why did you leave?

But every time I move to type the words—they sound too pathetic. Too needy. No man likes needy.

The cold, plain truth is if Connor wanted to talk to me—he would. He’d reach out or he never would have left in the first place. And if I’m being honest . . . he never made any promises to me.

Not once.

So I force myself to do nothing. To wait until I see him at work tomorrow. When I can see his face and hear the inflection in his voice and watch his body language . . . and understand what the hell went wrong.

In the meantime, I put on a record, one of my favorites, and blast “Always Something There to Remind Me” by Dionne Warwick through my house. The lyrics are sad but the melody is upbeat—a perfect reflection of the clash of emotional titans going on inside me.

I write a poem to purge my feelings. It’s terrible, even for me—it doesn’t even rhyme. I cross out and rewrite so many words, it just ends up looking like a giant ink smudge on the page. So that’s what I title it: “Smudge.”

And I put it in my mother’s old jewelry box on my dresser, with all the others.

I take a calming bath and drink chamomile tea, even though I hate the taste of it. And I give myself a manicure. I need to keep my nails on the short side for work, but I clean up the cuticles, buff my nail beds to a high sheen, and paint them with a simple lavender polish. To feel pretty.

To try and feel happy again. Like I was yesterday.

But in the evening, when the sick, churning confusion refuses to ebb, I call my sister, Tuni. Chrissy’s the dreamer, the romantic. But Tuni’s the logical, straightforward twin. If anyone can help me sort myself out, it’s her.

She picks up on the second ring.

“Hey, Vivi! What’s up?”

With dismay, I realize I’m holding back tears. I’m a hard crier. Sloppy and sobby like a dam that bursts and drowns any living creature below it in a deluge of hiccups, unintelligible words, and snot.

“Am I like Mom?” I ask her in a thick, clogged voice.

It just comes out. Not something I’ve been dwelling on, but I realize now it’s at the heart of my worry. Because my mother was warm and wonderful and for her whole life she loved a man who didn’t stick around. Who slipped out the door in the middle of the night when she was sleeping. Who never loved her back the way she deserved.

“What?” my sister asks, the previous joy in her tone evaporating like dry ice in the air.

“Am I like Mom?”

I hear the scraping of a chair in the background, and a shuffling, like she recognizes this is a sitting down sort of conversation.

“You are definitely like Mom. And you should take that as the compliment it is.”

I pick at my newly dried nail polish.

“No, I mean—do you think I’m like Mom when it comes to men?”

“Well, Mom only had a taste for one man—and it wasn’t the healthiest choice in the pantry.”

“Exactly.”

“But Dad loved her.”

“Did he, though? Did he really?”

“I like to think he did, for her sake. I remember watching them together, and I know he made her happy when he was around. I think he loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone.”

“But that’s not enough, Tuni! She loved him with her whole heart, and it broke her when he didn’t come back. I saw it break her.”

Would I love Connor that much?

I think I would—eventually. I think one day I could love him so deep and so hard that I’d let him shatter me . . . as long as I still got to keep a piece of him.

“It wasn’t right,” I insist.

“No, it wasn’t right.” Tuni concedes softly. “But she could’ve chosen differently, Violet. She was strong enough to do that. But he was who she wanted—warts and all. Just because you’re like her doesn’t mean you’ll choose the same.”

Her words bring me back down, soothe my aching heart and ease my panic.

“Yeah,” I sniffle. “I guess that makes sense.”

“What’s going on with you Vivi? What’s the story, morning glory?”

Even though I was head of the household after my mother died, we don’t have a parental sort of relationship. I was the adult, but it was still a situation where the four of us were in it together. So now that Tuni’s all grown up, she’s my beloved sister, but also on my level—my dearest friend.