Jolene:
?
Adam:
We’re putting together a puzzle.
Jolene:
??
Adam:
She likes puzzles.
Jolene:
You’re such a nerd. It’s sweet
though. Mom and I are going to go get her stomach pumped tonight anyway, so we both have plans.
Adam:
I really don’t like it when you joke about stuff like that.
I typed out You think I’m kidding? but I deleted it before sending. Mom and I had done that before, but not in a long time. She’d actually been drinking less since she and Tom broke up. I didn’t know if he’d realized that his grand plans to become a kept man were never gonna happen, or if she decided to learn her own lesson and find someone more capable of getting her what she wanted. Whatever that was.
Jolene:
Sorry. Bad joke.
Adam:
What are you going to do?
Jolene:
Something wild. I may do TWO puzzles. Mwahaha!
Adam:
What would my mob name be?
Jolene:
...
Adam:
You can’t think of a single one?
Jolene:
I’m trying to think of one that includes puzzles.
Adam resent the picture of his middle finger.
TENTH WEEKEND
January 29–31
Jolene
Adam didn’t show up.
I always got to the apartment before him, thanks to the militant insistence of Dad’s lawyer, and I’d been there for thirty minutes already. Apart from when he and Jeremy got a flat tire—and he’d texted me to say he was running late that time—he’d never been this late.
I chewed on my nails and peered through the glass door in the lobby. It was new, as was the frame, and it didn’t shake like it was going shatter during a snowstorm anymore. Glancing down, I took in the fact that the old, disgusting carpet was gone, too, replaced by long rectangular tiles laid in a herringbone pattern leading directly to the stairs. Adam’s dad had been busy. All the baseboards and molding were new, too. Everywhere I looked, things were shiny and fresh. Except for the out-of-order sign on the elevator. It was nice to know Adam’s dad couldn’t fix everything.
As my gaze traveled around the lobby and I thought about the steadily increasing improvements that were being made throughout the building, a strangling panic began to wrap itself around me.
I pushed open the glass door and, when I was outside, I turned to look at the building, feeling that panic constrict from my belly to my chest. Stains were gone, broken windows replaced, and the loose stones had been secured with new mortar. The concrete steps leading up to the entrance had even been repoured. It wasn’t all perfect—like the broken elevator inside, there were still signs of the decades of neglect the building had endured, but I almost couldn’t see them.
Adam’s dad had done so much since moving in. I was sure the building owner was thrilled with the progress, but how thrilled would he be to keep letting Adam’s dad stay rent-free in a building that no longer needed to be restored? What then? Adam told me his family didn’t have a ton of money, not enough to pay for an apartment in the city and the mortgage on a house in the country. They wouldn’t stay.
Adam would leave.
I spun away from the building, trying to draw air into lungs that had been squeezed shut.
Why couldn’t Adam’s dad slow down? Take his time? Why couldn’t he take up drinking like my mom had following her divorce?
The pressure bore down tight around my head and coiled through my temples. He hadn’t done that because Adam’s parents weren’t mine. There were no Shellys or Toms or teams of frothing lawyers. There were no hastily scrawled notes waiting to greet Adam and Jeremy when they showed up here, and there was an actual person hurrying down porch steps to hug and welcome them back when they came home.
Sorrow separated his family, not loathing, and if Adam’s dad ever figured out how to fix the kind of broken that his family was... With a shudder that was more a convulsion, I realized that, for all I knew, he already had.
Adam had texted me about the grief group his dad had taken them to when he and Jeremy visited on Wednesday. Not on a weekend. Not when they had to. They were starting to talk, first Adam and Jeremy, then Adam and their dad... How much longer before his mom was in that picture, too? How much longer before the thing that had divided them brought them back together?
I wanted to be a better person, one who could be happy for Adam as I looked ahead to a time when the broken pieces of his life would mend, but I wasn’t a better person. I was me, and I was afraid of losing the one thing I had left.
Already he wasn’t here when he was supposed to be, and there wasn’t a blizzard raging outside that I could blame.
I checked the time on my phone, hope freeing all my limbs when I saw an unread text from him from nearly an hour before.
Adam:
My mom dropped us off early since we only have Jeremy’s car right now. Come to my apartment when you get here.
Adam’s dad opened the door to his apartment when I knocked. He wore the same friendly expression Adam defaulted to. “Jolene, hi.”
I hadn’t seen his dad since that day he’d found Adam and me playing cards, so I was thrown that he remembered my name.
I shifted my feet and felt the urge to lower my gaze. “Um, yeah, hi.” I wanted to make fun of myself for the awkwardness controlling my voice and body. “Is Adam here?”
Behind his dad, Adam peeked his head out from his room and the moment he saw me, he smiled. Butterflies filled my stomach and I took a step back. He was the only person who unsettled me like that. “Hey. I was just coming to get you.” Then his face fell and he looked first to his brother, who widened his eyes significantly in return, and then his dad. “I mean, I was going to make sure you got here okay, but then, I, um... I’m going to grab something to eat with...” He eyed his brother and dad again.
Oh.
Right.
The butterflies fled, a slick nausea flooded my stomach in their absence.
It was too fast. Too soon.
I needed to turn around and leave before I did something that’d be worse than getting sick.
“Oh yeah. Sure. That’s fine. I’ll catch you later.” And then, somehow, I was turning and stepping into the hall with no earthly idea where to go. The thought of hiding in my room all weekend made me feel so alone that my eyes stung. Where had I gone before Adam?