Page 50 of The Work Boyfriend

“You’ll either stay together or you won’t. It’s that simple. Rob’s said it. I’ve said it. If Carl was here, he would say it.”

“Every sensible part of my brain is screaming at me right now to go fix what I’ve broken. Not a single part of me can imagine that I might have broken it for a reason. I’m the worst person in the world.”

The tears were unstoppable now.

“Oh, Kelly.” My mother sighed. “You’re hardly the worst person in the world. Maybe”—she paused—“you’re the seventy-seventh.”

And we both laughed. I would have bet that if I’d asked my mother to list the seventy-six she imagined were worse than me, she would have, if only to take my mind off of it all.

At that moment, I didn’t feel my age. I didn’t feel like an adult with a home and an almost husband. I didn’t feel like someone who knew where she was going or what she was doing, who had her head on straight. My mother hadn’t been kidding—she knew me so well.

“I need some proper sleep,” I said, drying my eyes with a tea towel. “I need to curl up and sleep for a week.”

“Spare room’s all ready. Fresh sheets and all.”

Carl and my mother had turned my bedroom into their spare room the minute I left for Queen’s. The room was covered in various bits and pieces of my mother’s projects—embroidery, sewing, odd bits of stuffing for crafts she was making for the baby, the pieces of what looked like the start of a beautiful mobile. My posters were long gone. My life had moved out and been packed up a decade ago. Anything that was not with me at the condo had been lost forever to the funeral march of impermanent housing.

Every now and again, I felt nostalgic for the concert shirts I’d bought at shows I still remembered attending. I wanted to pull out the photo albums filled with grainy pictures of blurry people at house parties that I had stuffed into the side drawer of my old desk alongside the odd earring or two and the liner notes from a Pogues CD that I didn’t remember buying or being given.

When I left for Kingston, I had thought I was starting over, that I could be a different version of myself, and so I left so much behind—all the odds and ends of my teenage life that felt important, and now I looked around and remembered them, probably because I was now struggling to know who I was at all. If Rob and I broke up for good, for real—the thought of it was too hard to even imagine—I’d be back here for a while, living in my old room. Sleeping in my old bed. How could you do that and not feel like a complete failure? Could I stuff my clothes back into the drawers of a dusty old dresser and shake out the cobwebs of the life I thought I’d left behind?

Maybe I didn’t want to be with Rob. Deep, deep down, so far down that I wasn’t sure I could see the bottom, the well of my emotions was unable to comprehend the lowest I’d ever gone when it came to hurting someone, the most selfish, the most horrible, the most devastating things I’d ever been. I knew at some level that I didn’t want to be back here in my room, mooning over him. I didn’t want to hurt because Garrett was probably going to end up back on the West Coast with Jen. I didn’t want to feel so deeply betrayed and rejected. If that was what I had done to Rob with Garrett, I wasn’t sure how I could live with knowing I’d hurt someone who loved me so much.

But maybe my mother was right; I was still angry with my father. After all these years the pain of his abandonment still reverberated, was still a feedback loop ringing in my ears. My options right now were here or home. Did I want Rob—fully, completely? I didn’t know. Maybe I’d just empty my bank account and disappear into the moors, like in those great shots of Austen as interpreted by Hollywood. The wind swept the heroine’s problems away and she’d be left standing in front of the hero at the exact moment it threatened to rain.

Chapter 12

THE NEXT FEW days were a blur of wandering around my mother’s house in jogging pants, trying desperately to avoid her whispering to Carl on the phone, worrying about me and the state of my relationship. Their phone rang but I didn’t answer it. My BlackBerry was shockingly silent. I sent one quick note to Rob letting him know where I was and not to worry. But there was no way I could properly apologize for what had happened in a text message. I sent something simple but inadequate.

Please keep an open heart, and I will try to make this better.

He didn’t reply.

The house was quiet with my stepbrothers back at school and Annie not dropping in every now and again. Carl was at his retreat, and my mother headed to the office the day following my intervention. I sat around their house feeling eighteen again, like I was skipping school to watch too much daytime TV and eat terrible food. Late-night talk shows were a distraction too. I could have talked to my sister or called Beth, but I didn’t want to make the situation worse by talking it to death. Even going over what I remembered made my stomach revolt, tossing and turning like a ship at sea until I couldn’t bear it and had to take something to make it settle. Other than the quick note to let him know where I was, I didn’t call Rob. I desperately wanted to, though. I wanted to prove to him that I was worthy of this life for us that he was working toward by making some grand gesture—a surprise wedding at city hall? A last-minute beach vacation where we could wash away all our sins during the day and then eat them up again at the buffet table in the evening? Nothing rang true, so I lay around convincing myself that if I just let the situation air out the stain might lift, and then everything would be back to normal.

And then it was New Year’s Eve proper—Beth’s big party night. I couldn’t avoid my life any longer. I had to go home and then head over to help her at the venue. My mother spent much of the day calling me and begging me not go, to just call in sick. But I had promised Beth, and I couldn’t let her down. Nor did I want to hear what Siobhan might say if I dared skip out on the biggest party our department had ever thrown. My mother came home over lunch to find me packing clothes back into my duffel bag. She gave me a look.

“I have to go,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “This is a crisis situation. Your life is falling apart. A party doesn’t mean anything.”

“I can’t let Beth down,” I said. “Regardless of the shambles my life is in, I can’t make a shambles of this for her—her career is on the line. If this goes off without a hitch, she gets a great promotion. I don’t want to be the reason something else goes wrong.”

The tears fell. My mother rushed to me and held me tight, wrapping her arms around me as she’d done countless times. “You haven’t made a mess; you’ve made a mistake. All of this was born out of you not wanting to hurt someone you love; it’s just bubbled to the surface in the worst way possible.”

“Way to make me feel better, Mother.” I laughed as I pulled away from her and grabbed a tissue to wipe my eyes and nose. “Okay, I think I’ve got everything. Who knows? I might be back tomorrow if Rob’s kicked me out for good.”

“The end of a relationship is not the end of the world. If I’ve taught you anything—”

“You’ve taught me that. Trial and errored that one to death, I believe, my darling mater.”

“Kelly …”

“Mother …”

“I’ll call you tomorrow from wherever I land,” I said, heading down the stairs.

“Tonight!” my mother shouted after me. “Call me tonight!”

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