Page 40 of Happiness for Beginners

“Are you still there?” Mike was asking. “Did I lose you?”

“I’m still here,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I meant it.

“I mean it, Ellie. I really do.”

“I never liked it when you called me Ellie.”

“Hang up and come home. It’s crazy that we’re apart.”

It took a second to assemble a response. “We’re not just apart, Mike. We’redivorced. It’s been ayear. People don’t get un-divorced. We signed papers, we officially ended it in every possible way.”

“I know, and I get that, and from a certain perspective it seems a little crazy—”

“From any perspective, it seems a lot crazy.”

“We made the choice we had to make at the time. But I’m better now. It took a hell of a wake-up call, but I pulled it together.”

“It wasn’t a wake-up call. It was a legal document.”

My phone beeped. The battery was dying.

“I’m telling you,” Mike said. “I’m like the old me—but better. I can be good for you now, Ellie.”

I leaned my head back. It was just so perfectly like him to say the exact words I’d always longed to hear—but to wait until it was solidly too late.

He went on. “I’ve been dating constantly for the past six months—and guess what? Nobody can compare to you.”

“You’ve been dating constantly?” I asked.

“Haven’t you?” he said. “Toby said you’d been on some dates.”

“One. With a Belgian insurance adjuster. I don’t think it counts.”

“There’s been nobody else? Really?”

Of course, there had been somebody. A vastly inappropriate somebody Mike himself had interrupted me with. Mike and Jake knew each other, of course, from many Thanksgivings and New Year’s Eve parties at Grandma GiGi’s, and I could have shocked the hell out of him if I’d said something about it right then, which was tempting. But I didn’t. Partly because Mike and I really weren’t close enough anymore to share anything that private. Partly because I wasn’t sure myself if messing around with Jake had been kind of awesome or totally pathetic. And partly—though I never would have admitted this, even to myself—because something about that almost-night with Jake had cracked open a place so tender in my heart I knew I had no choice but to stand twenty-four-hour guard in front of it.

“I’ve had lots,and lots,of opportunities,” I said, “but I’ve been in a healing period.”

“I get that,” Mike said.

My phone battery beeped again.

“Come home,” Mike said then. “Why do you always have to be so hard on yourself?”

I hesitated. This was exactly our pattern, of course. Certain people in life—and not even always ones who deserve it—can just unlock all your doors, somehow. Even if you change the locks or hide the keys. And Mike had always been one of those people for me.

Until right now. It was time to be a tough guy. It was time to bare the fangs of my inner bloodthirsty beast. It was time to not just sayNo,butHell, no.

I took a breath to do it, at last—but then, as if on cue, the battery died.

“Mike?” I said, even though I knew he was gone.

There was no answer.

It wasn’t his fault, and I knew that. But I went ahead and added it to my long list of disappointments. That damned ex-husband. He never let me win.

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