Page 40 of Happy After All

He smiles ruefully at that, and it surprises me. “Difficult family,” he says. “I’m familiar.”

Excitement spikes in my veins. How ridiculous. I feel like I won a prize because he’s continuing a conversation with me. Because he’s given me a little piece of information about himself.

Difficult family.

Of course, given his whole aura, that feels like a foregone conclusion.

“Yeah. Kind of award-winningly difficult,” I say. “But it’s fine. It doesn’t worry me at this point. It was much harder when I actually had to live with her. Now I have to call her on her birthday, and occasionally Mother’s Day, and otherwise I think she forgets I exist. It works for both of us.”

“Yeah. That’s how things are best left with my dad,” he says. I’m not sure what to think about him making that statement, but I realizeit doesn’t seem to cost too much. Like me, he’s clearly made peace with the dysfunction there.

That surprises me, partly because I didn’t take him for the sort of man who had made peace with anything.

“You don’t live near your parents,” I say.

He shakes his head. “No.”

I’m not telling him where I was directly before I came here. There’s missing connective tissue to both of our narratives.

We tell stories professionally, so I think we’re both aware of it.

It’s not drip feeding—that glorious authorial tool where you slowly weave your character’s backstory into the front story instead of dumping it all on the reader in a two-page barrage of word vomit.

It’s just withholding.

I don’t know where he’s from originally, or what brought him to the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know what brought him here.

He’s curating the things he tells me, and I can only respect it, because I do the same. Not just with him. With everyone.

There are great gaps in my own personal story I have no real desire to fill in for anyone. And haven’t. Not here. I’ve learned that you can forge very meaningful friendships with people by focusing on the present.

I show up for the people here. For the people I care about. That makes my past immaterial, both to them and to me.

I look down, and then turn my head to look at him. I feel lost in what happened two summers ago. With the power outlet. When I had been mostly certain that he was going to kiss me.

That moment when I had admitted to myself that I wished he would.

“What’s it like to be here in the summer when you are used to such rainy ... cold weather?” I ask this because I don’t know what else to ask without digging. Without making him shut down. I don’t know how I know he will; I just do.

We’re talking about the weather. If I were editing this story, I’d cut all this out since it’s so clearly a stand-in for us discussing anything meaningful, but I feel locked up because I don’t want him to get hostile and push me away again. I’m not sure he wants to have a deeper conversation with meever.

“To me it’s all the same,” he says. “I don’t go outside.”

He’s not being totally honest. He’s outside right now. I can’t decide if he’s being deliberately difficult to end the conversation or what.

We arrive at the grocery store, a small sun-bleached building with automatic doors that groan when they open.

“I have ...” I gesture toward the aisle that has wine in it. I make my way away from him, conscious of the fact that we aren’t shopping together. For all I know, we may not even walk back together.

I want to push him, but I also don’t want to make him be outright unkind to me. It’s such a strange feeling, and I can’t explain it. It’s like I’m tiptoeing around land mines when I talk to him.

It’s difficult.

I grab a couple of bottles of wine that come from vineyards within a hundred-mile radius. I also grab some fun drinks for kids. I want tonight to have a party atmosphere.

I happen to intersect with Nathan at checkout. He has a pile of frozen meals.

“You know we’re having a barbecue tonight,” I say.

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