All the more reason to follow Lauren’s instructions.
Josh looked at his watch. Six o’clock on a Friday night. Normal people would have plans. He’d had dinner with his mother a few days ago, had gone to Jen’s last night and got to read Sebastian a bedtime story. Octavia was talking a little bit—mama, dada, cup—and Jen had tried to get her to say Josh, but she just tucked her head against Jen’s neck and smiled sweetly. Both kids had pictures in their rooms of Lauren holding them. Josh couldn’t look at those for more than a glancing second, though (the denial bit, probably).
He read her letter again, almost able to smell the salty Cape air, see the achingly blue sky. Maybe he should go there; he had rented the house again for this summer back in January, thinking they’d have longer. Wanting Lauren to have another spring and summer by the sea. If he rented it again, she’d have to live longer, too, right?
Hello, bargaining.
He should let someone else use that house. It was a shame to have it empty. Immediately, he felt guilty that this hadn’t occurred to him yet. He texted Asmaa and offered it to her and her fiancé, and asked her to find some Hope Center families who’d like to use it.
The memory of that deck, the sound of the ocean, the seagulls, his wife’s laughter . . . Longing, strong enough to make him shudder, hit him like a wave.
Pebbles put her head on his knee. “I have to go to the mall,” he said. It felt like he’d be journeying to hell.
An hour later, he was proven right. The mall was hell. Teenagers, families, people rushing . . . the place was mobbed. He was jostled, carried along by throngs of consumers, jammed by the great unwashed.
Didn’t children have bedtimes anymore? Didn’t people want to be outside on this beautiful May night?
“Would you like to try this amazing anti-aging cream?” asked a man, leaping out from a kiosk with a sample in his hand.
“I’m thirty years old,” Josh said.
“Never too soon to start! Maybe bring some home to your wife?”
Josh jolted to a stop. “My wife?”
The man pointed at his left hand. “Or husband. Sorry.”
Ah. Yes, he still wore his wedding ring. He kept going without answering the man, got stuck behind a cluster of girls all talking loudly in clichéd phrases.
“OMG, I stan him!”
“Yeah, no thanks!”
“She’s the GOAT!”
They jolted to a halt outside a cheap-looking clothing store, and he almost ran into them. “Excuse me,” he hissed, walking around them, inexplicably furious.
“Super sorry, mister!” one of them yelled, and they all cackled.
“What his problem?”
“Okay, boomer!”
Jesus Christ. He was not a boomer. He pictured tossing them to the side like the Incredible Hulk, flinging them out of his way. Then, because Lauren wouldn’t have approved—in fact, Lauren had probably been like these girls, hair-stroking and in love with herself—he pictured them simply in jail instead. Still too mean. Fine. In a room without internet, makeup or hair products.
Speaking of hair, up ahead was a place called Tanglzz. Such a Rhode Island name. His mother had told him he needed a haircut and had offered to do it—he hadn’t had one since Lauren died, and it was shaggy—but given the bowl haircuts he’d sported as a child, he passed.
“Do you take walk-ins?” he asked the woman behind the counter.
“Sure do!” said the receptionist, and a minute later, Josh was sitting in a chair, a woman with pink highlights washing his hair. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“Providence.”
“Awesome!” she crowed, as if staying in his home city were award-worthy. “I’m Britney, by the way,” she said, squirting something new onto his head. Yes. Her nametag told him that. “My parents named me after Britney Spears, right?”
Thus cursing her. “That’s nice.”
“What’s your name, hon?”
“James.” He’d pay in cash. Telling her his name felt too personal.
“Oh, my God! I got a cousin named James. Jimmy, we call him. He’s in jail right now? But he’s not so bad.” She scrubbed his scalp with her fingertips.
Aside from sympathy hugs, Britney was the first woman to touch him since Lauren died. He felt nothing. Ostensibly, the warm water and brisk shampoo should’ve been pleasant. Instead, it was just something to be endured.
“Have you ever been to California?” Britney asked for no apparent reason.
“Yes.”
“That’s wicked awesome. California’s the best.” She didn’t ask which parts of California he’d been to, but apparently anywhere in California was good enough. “Me, I’ve never traveled much. I went to see my aunt in Pennsylvania once? It was wicked boring. Like, kind of a city? But not really? All these cornfields and antique stores. My aunt? She’s only eight years older than I am? So I’m like, ‘Girl, where do you pahty?’”
Her voice chattered on, requiring nothing from Josh. She asked what kind of haircut he wanted, and he said “short” so he wouldn’t have to do this again soon, and after fifteen or twenty or a thousand minutes, she was done, brushing off the back of his neck.
“There! You’re wicked gorgeous now, James.” She smiled and squeezed his arm, and he felt bad for disliking her. Left her a twenty for a tip, even though the haircut only cost twelve dollars.
He was weary, but he wanted to do what his wife had told him to do. Still wanting to make her happy.
It had been his life’s work, after all.
He walked aimlessly through the mall, past chain jewelry stores and women’s lingerie shops and kiosks selling hair extensions and sparkly jewelry, past the crappy food places that sold hot pretzels and ice cream, until he came to a store with men’s clothing in the window. More teenage girls, maybe the coven he’d passed earlier, cruised around him. Two of them walked with their arms linked.
Lauren and Sarah had done that sometimes. Maybe they’d been to this very same mall as teenagers, and been much the same as these girls, chattering, self-involved, too confident in their beauty. After all, that’s how he’d viewed Lauren the first time he met her. A shallow twit.
Imagine that. The love of his life, the woman he’d married, and he’d given up, what . . . six years with her? No. Almost seven. The thought nearly felled him. If he hadn’t been a condescending prick at that party, they might have had seven more years.
His heart was racing. He could’ve had almost a decade more with her.