Page 52 of The Best Part of Breaking Up

“Don’t think I’ve forgiven you for this,” I say.

“Sparkling,” he calls after me. The musical tone of his voice trails me down the hall – part mocking, part warning, part… accusation.

I can feel the interns’ collective eyes on me, peering above the cubicles as I leave Henry’s office. When they see I’ve caught them staring, their heads duck back into the sea of desks like prairie dogs disappearing into their burrows at the first sign of a threat, which only serves to make me feel worse.

I lift my chin and strut, as confidently as I can, back to my own office. I’ve got too much damn work to do to justify worrying about any of this.

***

“Everyone thinks I’m sleeping with him,” I tell Auntie Lena. “It’s insulting.”

We’re sweating in the second-story stairwell of her three-story apartment/shop during the infamous Quarterly Window Display Update. I’ve got the lower half of a mannequin under one arm, and the upper body beneath the other. Occasionally, when I pivot to avoid an ill-placed cardboard box on the stairs, an errant white plastic hand smacks me on the backside.

We do this every year.

For whatever reason, Jack and Annie only come out of storage in July and hang around until December. The other half of the year it’s Erin and Andy. This summer, though, she’s had a grand new idea: block party. She says it with sparkling eyes and widespread fingers, like she’s introducing a musical act. This is how it was determined that all of them need to come down.

I’ve avoided this requisite nightmare since I graduated law school and left Auntie Lena’s payroll, but she’s currently between employees, and she claimed she needed someone with experience for this. Experience being felt up by inanimate objects, apparently.

“Jack and Annie know you,” she argued. “You’re like family.”

“I am family,” I grumbled. “Unfortunately.”

This is how I ended up trudging down the narrow stairs that have that musty attic smell, mingled with the smoky aroma of incense as we pass the landing for her apartment on the second floor. I readjust the mannequin halves less than gracefully, navigating around Auntie Lena’s latest foster kitten, Pimento, before making the final descent.

“Are you sleeping with him?” she asks now, hauling a trio of hot pink lawn flamingos down behind me.

“No,” I snap. “See, even you think it. Why?”

“Is it so ridiculous to think you’d be having sex? You’re an attractive young woman who has never struck me as having antiquated ideas about physical intimacy. It makes sense.”

“I work with him.”

“So what? Half of everyone I know met their significant other at work. You spend a lot of time there. It only makes sense that it’s where you might meet someone with similar interests.”

I attempt, unsuccessfully, to blow a stray piece of hair off my face. I paw at my sweaty cheek. I wonder, beyond the prospect of partnership, if Quentin and I could really be classified as having similar interests. ‘Helping people dissolve their marriages’ can hardly be considered an ‘interest’.

“Okay, but I’m a professional.”

“Okay,” she counters, “but that’s not all you are. You’re a person. People need more than work and money. They need companionship.”

“Oh yeah? Where’s your companionship?” I say.

She holds up the flamingos, as if for emphasis. “I’ve got plenty of companionship, thank you.”

“I know you do,” I offer, apologetic.

Auntie Lena dates. I know she dates.

Okay, I think she dates.

Regardless, I also know she’s fine on her own.

She was married once, briefly, back when she was in her early twenties. She never talks about it, but my mom used to bring it up every now and then. He died in an accident, shortly after they were married. She got the shop that had been left to him by his late parents and sold the house they shared, eventually moving into the apartment upstairs.

After my mom married Eric, when she stopped going by Jenny and became Jen, she always lamented that Auntie Lena was living in the past, “with all that junk”. Jenny was the woman who dragged me along with the two of them to estate sales, who rifled through bins at second-hand shops, who sang along in the car to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection; she would have thought Nine Lives was a treasure trove. Jen wouldn’t dream of doing any of those things.

Despite what my mom said, I always thought Auntie Lena was just carving out her future. Making lemonade, as they say. We all squeeze the lemons we’re dealt.

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