Page 78 of Delayed Intention
Helping with the dishes, I feel edgy—not knowing how she is doing…it’s agony. I mean, for all I know, she may never speak to me again, which would be what I deserve. The biggest part of my misery is not knowing if I can ever be any good for her. Part of me loves her enough to realize the better part of valor might be to let her go. At the same time, I worry, not knowing how she is, if everything is going okay at her job, with her family…
We decided to make coffee after dinner, since I’m driving home tonight. I’m sitting and talking to Alan when I get my first call. I wonder if it’s a tourist since I don’t recognize the area code. The calls from the clinic are supposed to go to an answering service to page me, but maybe they decided this call needed to come straight through.
“This is Dr. Joshua Cohen. How can I help?”
“You can help, Josh, by explaining what the hell you are doing to my sister?”
“Um… who is this?”
"It's Joe Mendes." Before I can say anything else, he charges ahead, his tone between frosty and enraged. “Ellen humiliated her at dinner tonight. She gave this big speech about how you told Felicia you were ‘in no way interested’ in my sister. Mom insisted she was quoting you—a conversation apparently Ellen overheard and grilled the naïve idiot over what you’d said, no doubt trying to figure out why Lily left to live in Lincoln. Since my mother has no insight, she thought the move was about feelings for you, not anything she’d done. So, since she thought it was for you, she wanted to pull the plug on any hope Lily may have had.”
No, no, no.
How could this situation have gotten any fucking worse?
This is how.
I think back to the afternoon of the blizzard and how I felt uneasy about Felicia’s questions, about how little she seemed to know about Lily.
Fuck.
“Are you even listening to me, Josh?”
“Yes, Joe. I’m listening. I know I need to fix this. This is my fault—I need to talk to Lily.”
“Talk to her?!? I don’t think that’s a good idea. For you, maybe, but not for my sister. Yes—you need to fix this—but in a way that leaves my sister out of your life. I've heard how you operate, Josh and Lily’s not some bimbo you can take to your bed and leave behind, do you hear me?”
I started to answer, but he’s not done.
“I mean, you know my mother. Did it ever occur to you not to overshare with a virtual newcomer to the family? Felicia has an excuse. You don’t.”
“I… I love her.” I say weakly.
His dark chuckle sounds humorless.
“Really, Josh? You think you love her? What evidence can you give me of that? Oh, I’ve got it—now that you’re about to lose her, you’ve caught feelings about it. And tonight is when you realized it?!?”
Ouch.
“Listen, Joe, I have my own shit. I didn’t know how I felt, okay? I didn’t know. It’s just in the last few days it finally hit me. Idolove her.”
Now, I can’t seem to stop saying it, even though I can hear him scoffing at me. I realize my sister, Alan, and my mother are listening intently to my side of this exchange.
“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But I know it now. This is all new to me, but I’m going to figure this out.”
The fact that I’m talking to one of the people still in Lily’s life is not lost on me, and I need him to believe me. “I love your sister, Joe, and I will do whatever it takes to make this right.” I swallow a lump in my throat. “Even if that means staying away. I want whatever is best for her.”
“Okay,” he says. “You better.” And then he hung up on me.
I look at my family.
“What a fucking mess.”
I tell them what happened with Lily and Ellen. In the retelling, it’s tangible how much it kills me that I wasn’t there to defend Lily. That I don’t know how she’s doing.
No one seems to know what to say until my mother starts.
“Josh, some of this is on Ellen. It’s not all on you. If it hadn’t been this, she would have found something else to try to manipulate Lily.”
