“Of course he’s cold. You hurt his feelings. He’s manly. That’s how manly guys do hurt feelings.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. Though she did, a little bit. How else would Caleb be when in pain but strong, controlled, and silent? “He doesn’t care anymore.”
Jamie had the gall to laugh at her. “Maybe you don’t need a Frisbee. Maybe you need, like, a baseball bat.”
“Quit it.”
“Quit what?”
“Quit picking on me when I’m down.”
Jamie leaned over and plucked her forearm off her eyes, dropping it on the bed beside her head. His face was as familiar as her own, and as she studied it she realized he wasn’t trying to pick on her, not really. He was trying to help her.
“Ellen, what are you afraid of? That you’ll go after him and he’ll say no, or that you’ll go after him and he’ll say yes?”
She was afraid he’d turn her down. That Caleb no longer loved her, or maybe he never really had. She was afraid he’d be cruel, and his cruelty would wipe out all her good memories of him.
She opened her mouth to tell Jamie all that, and she said, “Losing myself.”
Oh. Damn. There was the Frisbee. There was the sensation of getting smacked in the face with the truth. She couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs.
It wasn’t about Caleb. Once again, what she was afraid of had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her whole life. The way her mother had pushed her into Jamie’s shadow. The way Richard had cultivated her dependence and girdled her self-confidence until she became someone she didn’t recognize.
She’d fought so hard to find herself after a lifetime of being who other people wanted her to be. Jamie had helped, and so had Henry, but ultimately it had been her fight, and she’d won it. She’d built herself a fortress on Burgess Street in Camelot, Ohio, and stalked around the battlements, proud and independent. Nobody was going to get inside again. Nobody was going to help her, because she’d finally figured out how to be sufficient all by herself.
After a lifetime of depending on people, it had felt so good to be enough that she’d turned it into a vice. Independent Ellen didn’t believe in love. She didn’t need romance. And she didn’t recognize the best thing that had ever happened to her until she’d driven him away.
Jamie quirked an eyebrow. “You just had, like, a million different expressions on your face over the space of five seconds.”
“The Frisbee,” she said.
“Ah.” He leaned back and dusted off his hands. “My work here is done.”
Ellen’s heart raced. She sat up and tugged on his sleeve. “No, you have to help me figure this out.”
“What’s there to figure out?”
How could she fix it? She’d fallen in love with Caleb, but she’d treated him like dirt. Meanwhile, she’d handled her asshole ex-husband like a man worthy of concern. “I picked Richard over him. Richard. God, how terrible am I?”
“Not terrible. Just stupid.”
“Oh, thanks. That’s really helpful.”
“No, it’s all right. Love makes everybody stupid. It’s a cliché for a reason.” He stood and shouldered the bag. “I have a fiancée and a baby to get back to.”
“You’re mean,” she said, because he was abandoning her when she needed him.
“You already figured it out, Ellen. Now you have to decide what you’re going to do about it. I can’t help you with that.”
On the way out, he stepped over Henry, who had ground several Doritos deep into the nap of the bedroom rug. “Sayonara, Squirt. See you soon.”
“Sy-nara,” Henry said. “Sy-nara means?”
“It means goodbye,” Ellen said. Jamie flashed her a quick smile and left.
“Your water is?” her son said, and she picked him up and went looking for his sippy cup.
A few days ago—God, had it only been a few days ago?—she’d asked herself what she wanted, and she’d decided she wanted to be a Chiclet. Now she knew she’d been fooling herself. She’d wanted Caleb. She still wanted Caleb. The whole Caleb, not some imaginary version she’d constructed to suit her fantasies. But she was letting fear keep her from going after him. Fear imposed on her by the past—by her mother’s warped priorities and her own juvenile decisions.