Always Something There to Remind Me (35 page)

Because I was honestly sure that—Cam aside—I would have been far happier all these years with Nate than without him.

And that was taking into consideration all the great things that had happened to me in my real adult life.

It still would have been better with him.

Now, how could I hide that, as it came to me right when Cam started questioning me?

Maybe someone stronger could have, but I couldn’t.

Still, I tried to be the adult. As much as I could, that is, when I was obviously in tears. “Look, Cam,” I said, opening up all the doors to honesty that I’d tried to keep shut. “Yes, I really, really loved him. And I think he loved me too. The same way. But I’m really torn about telling you the truth here, because I just don’t
know
what would have happened.” I shrugged. “And I really don’t want to give you the impression that you’re supposed to find the love of your life as a teenager, because most people don’t.”

“I know
that
,” she said. “Obviously.”

I was surprised. “You
do
?”

She looked at me like I was a pitiable moron. Which, maybe, I was. “Obviously. None of the coolest couples meet in
high school
.” She rolled her eyes. “No offense. But it’s not like I’m going to be trying to imitate that.”

I had to smile. “Good.”

She was on a roll. “I mean, can you imagine Brad and Angelina meeting in high school? I mean, I know they’re kaput now, or so everyone’s saying, but either way most normal hot relationships don’t start in civics class. Jeez.”

She was
so
right. Not only about Brad and Angelina—who were said to be totally kaput—but about the unliklihood of teenage romance ever meaning anything. I didn’t know anyone who thought anything more than
I wonder how X is doing now
about their high school sweetheart.

I mean it, I really, literally didn’t.

Why was I the lone exception that looked back, wishing, still, to be understood or forgiven or—maybe this was the big point—fought for?

Yet even that didn’t feel right. What I longed for was just the everyday life I always thought I’d have with him: the intellectual equality, the same sense of humor, the same values … and I knew that Nate would feel like home to me no matter where we ended up living.

Nate was home, and I hadn’t felt at home in years.

And I could go the rest of my life like this, don’t get me wrong. This was reality and I’d certainly learned to adapt to that reality. I didn’t love it, I’d never
loved
it, but I lived with it pretty well.

But it was a life spent denying something that had once felt important to me. Something that had once felt as obvious to me as breathing. And I don’t just mean Nate; I mean the way it felt to love him and be loved by him. I had taken for granted that
that
was what love felt like, and that
that
feeling would always be part of my life.

That’s the assumption, right? When you’re young, you wonder who you’ll marry when you grow up. Because, at least in my circle, marriage and family were always obviously going to happen.

Even into my twenties, as a single mother, I’d kept a tenuous hold on that assumption.
He
—whoever he was—was out there.

So it was kind of jarring to realize maybe that wasn’t going to happen. Then it was depressing.

Then it was just how it was. I was resigned to the fact that passionate love wasn’t going to be part of my adult life the way I’d assumed it would be when I was a kid.

Actually, I’d assumed that was how it was for everyone. Then I started noticing that people around me, people my age who had been married for years, still seemed to be in love. Jordan and her husband Curtis were a good example.

I didn’t know where all this left me. All I knew for sure was that my life wasn’t fulfilling in all the ways it could be and now my daughter was learning all the wrong things from me about relationships.

“Do you miss him?” Cam asked, interrupting the swell of thoughts and guilt that were taking over my mind.

“Nate?”

She nodded.

I hesitated. There had to be a way to say this properly. To phrase it like an Oprah interview somehow. I ran my hands through my hair and took a breath that felt like it came from underwater.

“Until recently, I hardly ever thought of him,” I said. True. Yet the reason was that it was too painful to think of him. There was no resolution, just an open-ended question. Who needs that?

Cam furrowed her brow. “That’s just really sad.”

“Sad? Why? Isn’t it better if you move on and don’t hold on to that kind of thing?”

She shrugged. “You wrote all this stuff in your diary about how much you loved him and what it was going to be like when you were old together. Like that movie you both saw—”

“Whoa! You
read my diary
too?”

“Well, it’s
ancient
! Do you really care if I read something you wrote when you were fifteen?”

Um,
yes
. There were enough details in there to lose me credibility in just about every arena with her: sex, alcohol, sneaking out.… Of course I didn’t want her reading it! “Cam, that’s private stuff no matter how old it is. How much did you read?”

I saw her trying to guess how much she could play this to her advantage and realized, right away, that she hadn’t gotten any real dirt. “Just a little,” she admitted. “There was stuff, like, about him going to the barn with you and you wishing on a star that you’d marry him. That’s what’s so sad. You loved each other
soo
much. You wanted to
marry
him! And now you’re just all,
Yeah, I saw him, it was nice, la-di-da
.…”

I sighed. “Okay, well, it wasn’t nice, and it definitely wasn’t
la-di-da
. But once you’re grown, you can’t really sit around your room sobbing to old records about the one person you’ll never forget. You have to move on and live your life. Sometimes that means not allowing yourself to indulge in those melancholy thoughts.”

She really did look sad. This had affected her, whether it should or not, in some sort of real way. “Then how do you ever trust anything you feel? Are all my feelings wrong right now? Will they be in two years?” A challenge rose in her voice. “When do you reach the point where you can
believe
what you feel? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Do you even believe anything you feel now? I don’t see how you could.”

Some small, teenagery part of me resented her assault on me like this, but now wasn’t the time for me to be adolescent.

“Cam,” I said, quietly but firmly, “you know in your heart what’s real and what isn’t. The mistake we tend to make as teenagers is that we believe it all without really thinking about it. That’s why you make deals with God to please please please let you marry some punk you’ve got a crush on and a month later the sight of him makes you sick.”

She laughed reluctantly. “But that’s not how it was for you.”

I hesitated. “No. It wasn’t. If I had it to do over again, I’d treat the whole thing with a lot more respect. I would have honored my feelings more and understood that, even though I was young, they were real and rare. And I would have honored his feelings a lot more too. I would have treated him with a lot more respect. That’s the lesson to take out of this—don’t treat someone in a way that you wouldn’t want to be treated. You can quote me on that.”

She persisted, ignoring my levity. “What
happened
? Why did you break up?”

I considered her for a moment. “Because I flirted with one of his friends.”

She waited for a moment, then her jaw dropped. “That’s
it
? That’s
all
?”

“Well … I think I kissed him for a few seconds. I can’t honestly remember for sure now. But he came to my house in the middle of the night, and … it looked bad.” I thought back on it. “It looked really bad.”

“But that was
all
you did?”

I nodded. “It was enough.”

She lowered her brow. “That’s just weird. If he loved you so much, why would he let you go because of something so small?”

Exactly!
That had been
exactly
my question at the time. Now I understood a little more, though. A little, I thought. “He took it as a measure of respect, or, more specifically,
lack
of respect. It didn’t ultimately matter what I did or didn’t do; as he saw it, the intention to flirt with someone else was there and it didn’t matter to me that it was his friend or that his other friends would see it. That was bigger to him than one mistake.”

“What a douche!”

“Cam!” I cautioned her. I hated hearing that kind of thing come out of her mouth even though I said worse all the time. “This is what I’m saying: you have to see someone else’s point of view. I didn’t treat him with enough respect and finally that broke us.”

“Sounds like a big ego problem to me.”

I sighed. “The night it happened, his parents had announced they were getting a divorce. I found that out later. I guess he wasn’t feeling all that up on relationships in general.” It was a big deal. I knew later it had been a
very
big deal to him. Of course.

But honestly, at the time I’d been such a selfish adolescent that even if he’d told me, I probably still would have argued that he wasn’t being nice enough to
me.

Cam rolled her eyes. “So much for love.”

I shook my head. “Listen, Cam, seriously. You need to hear me telling you this, because it’s one of the most important lessons you can learn. If you love someone, you should make sure they know it every day and make even more sure you never hurt them in the name of gratifying your own ego, which was what I did.”

“You mean because it flattered you that this other guy was interested.”

“Yup.” At that age, still so close to a particularly awkward and gawky adolescence, I had been very vulnerable to ego gratification. I looked down. “I knew Nate was off that night, acting weird, but I didn’t even ask him what was going on.” My hands felt shaky, thinking about it. I laced my fingers tight. “That was pretty crappy of me.”

And it had never
once
occurred to me to consider how that might have made anyone else feel. At least not until Nate dumped me.

“I don’t know.” She looked skeptical. “I still can’t see how he let that end everything when he loved you so much.”

“Maybe he didn’t.” I shrugged. “Or maybe he did and he regretted it later.” I remembered his words from just the other day.

I had no idea this would ever matter again.

“We both should have listened to our hearts more,” I added. “We just didn’t know it at the time. Neither of us knew it.”

“I think it sucks,” Cam concluded.

“It did.” I went and gave her a hug. Suddenly this conversation was too heavy for me to carry. “Now you know everything you need to know about my deep, dark past. So go clean up your room and stay out of my private stuff from now on, would you?”

“I’m sorry. I really thought it wouldn’t matter because it was so old.”

“Hey. Calling me old isn’t going to help!”

She laughed, then sobered and said, “So tell me one more thing. When did everything change?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you decide not to listen to your heart anymore?”

“Who said I’m not?”

“Are you in love with Rick? I mean, I think you’re talking about marrying him, but I don’t see you acting like he’s the big love of your life or anything. You haven’t doodled
Mr. and Mrs. Rick Samuels
or
Erin Samuels
on
anything
.”

Another diary reference. I could tell these were going to get old fast. “Yeah, well, I also haven’t doodled
Erin Lawson
anywhere in a while either, so your example proves nothing.” Except it did. I hadn’t even toyed with our names together, Rick’s and mine, in my head. Rings, names, retirement plans … none of the stuff that usually came with marriage had entered my mind at all. “So, Cam, I have a question and I want you to answer it honestly. Please.”

“Okay…?”

“If things didn’t work out with Rick and me, would that be a problem for your friendship with Amy?”

I thought she’d think about it for a moment, maybe wince or pale or have some other telltale sign of concern, but instead she looked at me like I was nuts. “No!”

“No?”

“Um,
no
.”

“Okay, elaborate. I need more than
no
. How could that just be okay for you two?”

“Because we’re not friends because of
you two
. Jeez, Mom, I’m not a baby. You don’t make or break my friendships.” She looked at me and her tone softened. “I mean, I
appreciate
that you care, I really do, but Amy and I were friends before you and Rick got together and, in some ways, we’d probably be better friends if you
weren’t
together.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, obviously it’s cool if we become, like, sisters. But there’s a little bit of my-real-dad-versus-your-dad, and my-real-mom-versus-your-mom between us, and it would be kind of cool to
not
have that.” She paused for just a second before adding, “Not that it’s a problem. I mean, don’t break up with him because of that. But, Mom, seriously. If you never got over someone else—not that I’m saying you never got over someone else”—she looked at me pointedly—“but if you didn’t, you would be stupid to marry Rick.”

Stupid.

The mouths of babes.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” I said, already considering Nate for the forty millionth time that day. His lips, his tongue, his hands, his … everything. His everything. “Now go,” I said, because I wasn’t really holding it together all that well. I wanted to be alone. “You’ve got things to do that
don’t
involve violating my privacy.”

“Fine, fine, fine. But promise me you heard what I said.”

“Oh, I heard you. Loud and clear.”

“Good. And good night.” She went.