How to Look Happy (29 page)

I’m nodding. I do.

“But I’ve been thinking about…” She stops, seeming unsure. “I mean, I’ve always wanted to…”

“What?” I ask, flummoxed.

“Well, you know how I was talking about that café and bakery idea a while back?”

My mouth drops open slightly. “Carrie, I think that is a
fab
idea.”

“Really?” She stares at me for a couple of seconds. “I thought you’d tell me I was crazy. You know, start quoting all those stats about how most indie businesses close within the first two years and all that.”

Her voice trails off.

“No, silly. That’s just for me.” I laugh. “Because I don’t have the balls to strike out on my own. If anybody has the cojones to make it work, it’s you.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” she says. She laughs, looking as if a world of weight’s been lifted off her shoulders. I wonder how long she’s been carrying around this fear of disapproval. I also can’t believe how much we’ve been keeping from each other.

“Well, aren’t we just full of surprises?” I say.

She searches my face. “I don’t think you’ve finished surprising me yet.”

*  *  *

As soon as I open the door, Brandon answers with one of those long, low catcall whistles I’ve never understood how people do.

I glance down at myself.
Really?
I went as demure as possible—agonized over it—to be sure I don’t send the wrong message. I’m wearing a simple black cotton shift dress with a scoop neck…no curve-hugging, clingy fabrics tonight.

Underneath I have on white cotton panties from Victoria’s Secret and a matching bra, nothing to write home about—though I did shave my legs. I couldn’t
not
do it.

“Hi, Brandon.”

“Well, don’t sound quite so excited to see me.” He gives me half a smile, but I can’t seem to find the other half.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” I say, but I spin out of his reach. “Let me grab my bag.” Seeing him here, at my house, brings back a mental picture of last Saturday night. In fact, it’s all I can see when I look at him—his careful pressed and gelled façade stripped off along with his designer clothes, his hands hot and damp as they moved against my skin, frantic to revive his sagging erection.

“Where are we going anyway?” I ask, practically pushing him over the threshold as I try to erase the mental image. He’s just barely stepped inside.

Once he turns, I walk out behind him and lock the door as he starts down my porch steps toward his BMW. It’s jutting over the sidewalk, parked at a jaunty angle behind my car in my narrow driveway. The street spaces are all full—somebody must be having a party. I glance around, wishing I was invited.

“It’s a surprise,” he calls over his shoulder.

I raise my eyebrows, suddenly more worried. And in no small part I’m worried because I’m afraid I’m leading him on. Which, considering our history, is just ironic.

He opens the passenger-side door for me, and I climb in. “A surprise?”

He looks over at me with a mysterious smile. “Oh, yeah,” he says. He’s started the car and has begun backing out of my driveway, but he stops and shifts the car back into park. He picks up his phone from the center console and flicks it on. “Come closer.”

Puzzled, I lean in. And then I realize he wants to take a selfie. It seems to be a thing with him. I tilt my head so it’s near his and paste on a big smile that I can feel isn’t reaching my eyes.

Brandon turns the camera toward me so I can see our smiling faces. “It’s good,” I say, giving him an “okay, you’re nuts” kind of look.

He chuckles. “I’m doing an online journal,” he says. “On social media. Kind of a record of how I’m changing my life.”

“Oh,” I say. “Oh, well, that’s cool.” And surprising. And…a little weird. What’s weirder is how common this “change my life” theme seems to be among my friends and me lately. Me, Carrie, Jeremy, Brandon. Gen Y probably should be renamed “Generation Lost.”

Brandon taps at his phone screen for a few seconds longer and then resumes backing out of my driveway. When he exits my neighborhood and hits the main road, he doesn’t turn west as I’m expecting him to, toward Downtown or the going-out parts of Midtown. Instead he heads east—toward suburbs and childhood homes.

“Where are we heading?” I ask.

“I told you, it’s a surprise.” He glances over at me, and his eyes are excited. I get a sinking feeling in the pit of stomach.

We spend the next five minutes or so in relative silence, me watching the familiar planes of my city flash past the car windows…Overton Park, which wraps around the zoo and the Brooks Museum of Art with its dense canopy of green; the Central Library, with its high glass walls and colorful shelves; the strip-mall record store with a big glass display case at the top corner that for most of my life flaunted a life-size image of Elvis wearing the gold lamé jumpsuit, his hips scandalously mid-pivot. At some point in the past decade it disappeared, later replaced by a smaller cardboard cutout that somehow doesn’t have the same panache.

By the time Brandon turns onto the Ridgeway Loop, I’m not surprised. I could feel that we were heading here, back in time to our high school haunts, to this little, safe pocket we’d all carved out of the city as kids. It feels natural and completely weird when he pulls into the parking lot of the movie theater we used to come to every weekend. It’s a wonder it’s still around—so many have closed up or moved or changed to make way for giant Cineplexes. This little guy only has four screens. When we were in high school, it was the “cheap theater,” which meant it showed second-run movies for about a third of the cost of new releases. Now it’s been reformed into an art-house cinema.

“I hope you’re not starving?” Brandon asks. “I thought we’d get some popcorn here and then I made us a reservation for after.”

“Um, okay,” I say. I actually
am
hungry, but now my stomach is growling for buttery theater popcorn, which I love.

On the way up to the ticket window, Brandon grabs my hand, spreading this night with a new, thick layer of déjà vu. We buy tickets to a French film with subtitles that I’ve never heard of. But then again, I’ve had my head tucked so deep inside my job for so long that I’m not exactly up on culture or pop culture of any sort—even music, which is my thing. I feel a deep sense of longing for Eleanor’s and my old days of concert-going. I really need to surprise her with tickets to a show sometime soon.

In the darkened theater, I start to feel more comfortable. This movie house sells alcohol, and Brandon and I each have a glass of wine, along with one big tub of extra-buttery popcorn. Our greasy fingers collide every time I reach into the bucket, to the point that it starts to feel intentional. I glance over at Brandon, suspicious, the next time it happens. He responds by lifting a few kernels out of the bucket, reaching up, and popping them into my mouth before I can protest. And then he chuckles.

At the risk of feeling
un
comfortable again, I drink more wine. The movie—a quirky wartime film that seems to pivot between romance and tragedy—draws me in and helps me relax, and when we finish the popcorn and Brandon twines his fingers into mine again, I don’t protest or move away.

Once the movie is over and credits start to roll, I stand, but Brandon remains in his seat. I cock my head at him, but he’s staring at the theater screen and not looking at me, and so as the other theatergoers file out, I sit back down beside him.

“You okay?” I ask.

He finally looks at me. “Yeah, I’m fine.” His voice has surprise in it and an edge of something else. “I was just thinking, trying to remember how many times we did this, all those years ago.” He gestures around us. “We might have even sat in these very seats.”

I shake my head. “Brandon.” But he ignores me.

“I kissed you for the first time in this place. Do you remember?”

Oh, God. Oh, God oh God oh God.
Why am I letting myself be pulled into this game he’s playing? He’s clearly in a place that I am not. I search in my head for the right words, the words to let him know that going back again isn’t the best way forward, but nothing comes.

He leans toward me and places one finger under my chin, tilting my face up to meet his. When his lips meet mine, my thoughts are still racing, but I can’t help myself—I’m drawn into the moment too, drawn back in time, and for a minute it feels good. Before I know it I’m kissing him back, and he’s right. It does feel almost sacred, in this place, like going home.

And then a sudden flash lights up the room, and I pull back from him, stunned. “What the hell?”

He chuckles. “Sorry.” His fingers are clasped around his phone. I’m thinking,
Really???

“Please don’t do anything with that picture.”

He holds up two fingers. “Scout’s promise. This one’s just for me.”

I stare at him for a long second, until I’m sure he’s telling the truth. “Way to kill the mood, Royer.”

At this, he gives me a sad smile. “I seem to be good at that.”

*  *  *

He takes me to Jim’s Place, an upscale restaurant and an institution in the city—it’s been around since before our time. But at least we never came here in high school. It was outside the reach of our meager part-time wages.

Over dinner, we discuss things we haven’t yet talked about. He finally asks a few questions about me, and I tell him about design school and living in Atlanta and my early days at the firm after landing my job with Candace. For some reason, I don’t go into anything that’s currently happening. It feels safer this way, to hold him at a distance.

He tells me about his job—although, after a lengthy explanation I still don’t have the foggiest idea what he
does
. He’s verbose about the past, like me, but when I ask him about plans for the future, he’s reticent. He turns the conversation to me again, to me and Jeremy, and I haltingly tell him about our seven years of on-again, off-again dating, but I leave out the details of how it ended. He talks more about his ex-fiancée, really just repeating things I already know. I notice, as we’re talking, that he’s drinking at a much more moderate pace tonight. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or bad.

“Her baby’s due in a few weeks,” he says, and just before he says it, he downs the remaining few sips of his wine, as if he needs it to get the words out.

My thoughts flit to Jeremy and Brianna. I almost tell Brandon about them, but for some reason, I hold it in. I’m wondering how far along Brianna is in her pregnancy when Brandon adds, “I wish it was my baby.”

“Oh, Brandon.” I move my hand and rest it on top of his, wishing I could be what he needed and wishing he didn’t need me to be those things all at the same time.

He flips his hand over and takes my fingers in his. And when the server comes, he gestures for another glass of wine, and I can feel the night tipping dangerously close to where it went the last time. I shake my head and make a motion that we’re finished and ask if we can get our bill. As the server walks away Brandon gives me a look that’s mingled with surprise, resignation, and something like loneliness. My heart aches for him.

Since I’m not sure how hard Brandon is buzzing, I insist on taking his keys, and I drive myself home. After I pull up to the curb and cut the engine, I remain seated, anxious in the sudden pool of dark. Brandon watches me, brooding.

“This was a nice night,” I say. “Thank you.”

He’s still watching me, but he doesn’t make a move toward me. “You’re not inviting me in, are you?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He closes his eyes for a brief moment, then says, “Jenny.” He leans toward me and, tensing up, I let him. As his lips meet mine I inhale, breathing in the sweet scent of a past we can’t get back, no matter how much he might think he wants it. No matter that there’s a part of me that wants it too.

When the kiss starts to grow heated, I gently excise myself from his grasp, turning my head from his. His lips move to my cheek, travel down my jaw, and his right hand moves from my knee, up my thigh, up. “Jenny,” he says again.

I inhale sharply as his fingers graze my inner thigh so, so dangerously close to losing my control of this situation.

I push his hand away, edge back from him. “Brandon,” I say.

His lips are still moving against my ear, against my hair. “Brandon.” I say it more firmly, but he doesn’t move away.

“Brandon, I’m sorry.”

Finally, he pulls back and looks at me with disbelief. “I thought you wanted me.”

It hits me then that he’s always thought I wanted him. That he’s probably
always known
I wanted him. I’ve been his backup plan, his emergency supply, this heartbroken woman waiting in the wings that he could scoop back up and rescue any time he needed. I think about how wrong he was, and how right he was, and how weird his timing was, that he came into my life at a time when I almost was that woman.

Finally, I say the only thing I can think of that will get me out of this car. “There’s somebody else, Brandon. Somebody else I want.”

He pulls away, proving my instincts correct. The relief of it melts away a tiny degree of my tension. “I thought things were over between you.”