Page 58 of Backslide
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, I really do,” she nods. “Most of the time. Lately, I’ve been feeling kind of stagnant though. Like I’m over magazines and commercials. Like maybe I’d like to try transitioning to TV and movies, even though that’s a slightly different skill set.”
“That sounds really cool,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll make it happen if you want to. You can do anything.”
And I mean it. She can.
She blinks and looks down, like she doesn’t know what to say.
A squirrel hustles by on its way to a nut. Nell takes a sip of iced tea.
“How’s your mom?” she asks, back on safe ground.
“She’s good. Sweet. Same old.”
“She was always the best cook.”
“Also still true. I miss her food.”
“And how’s Henny?” she asks with a wistful smile. “Besides being married.”
“Henny is…Henny,” I say. And we both laugh. Because I know we’re picturing the same thing. Impatient eye rolls and groans andughs but so much warmth. My sister, Henrietta, doth protest too much. She may seem scary, but she is ultimately a teddy bear. Just one that shouldn’t be crossed.
Back in the day, Henny loved Nell as much as she hated my other friends—maybe more. I know she felt a loss when we broke up, too. “We talk every week,” I add. “Or, more specifically, she lectures me about my dumb choices every week.”
“That sounds right.”
There’s a comfortable silence between us as we both sit with that. After a beat, I glance over at Nell beside me and I can tell she’s about to say something real from the crease that pops between her eyebrows.
I wait, patiently.
She swallows hard, stares at the ground. “The last time my shoulder flared up like this… it was when my dad…”
I nod. Close my eyes against the pain that rises. My heart broke for her then too. When Ben called and told me. I can remember that moment exactly—I was standing in my office, taking the first sips of my morning coffee.
“I tried to reach you…” I say.
“I know.”
“I wanted to come pay my respects, but I didn’t want to make things harder for you. It seemed selfish.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “That makes sense.”
“Your dad was the best,” I say. And I mean that, too.
“I thought so.” She shoots me a weak smile, eyes welling. “He really was the best.”
Because he was—gregarious and funny and talented and someone who saw the people around him for who they were and accepted them despite their flaws. He was an architect, and as soon as I saw what Nell was doing with her life, it made so much sense.
She has carried on his legacy in a way.
I didn’t have a lot of male role models growing up. There was my baseball coach, though looking back, I’m not sure I could say he always had my best interest at heart. Plus, he had an unhealthy obsession with Limp Bizkit, which I could never unsee.
So, Nell’s father, Jeff, was the closest I came to having a dad in those days. In the time Nell and I were together, I came to rely on his perspective.
When she and I broke up, I felt like he dropped me too.
“It was so long ago,” Nell says now. “You think you’re okay. That the grief—at least the acute kind—has passed. Then you meet John the driver who gives you fatherly advice and you take a gummy and suddenly you’re crying in a town square, eating Cheerios with your ex-boyfriend.”
