Maybe Once, Maybe Twice(66)
“My mom died three years ago,” she said. Summer’s eyes stayed on the moving trees out the train’s window, refusing to look at me, refusing to hold up a mirror to her own grief. She continued, “You’ll be okay. But…it’s going to be shitty for a while.”
I was desperate for a grief timeline, but I was too new to grief to recognize that no such thing existed. I wrongly assumed that my mysterious roommate was a professional.
“For how long?” I asked.
Summer shrugged her shoulders to the train car ceiling. My stomach flipped as I watched tears fill her eyes to the brim. If you’d told me Summer Groves had never cried, even as an infant, I would have believed you. More accurately, no one had seen Summer Groves cry since she was a little kid. She hadn’t even cried at her mother’s funeral.
I grabbed Summer’s hand from her lap, and I squeezed hard. I was less surprised by the fact that Summer let me hold her hand, and more surprised that when I unclenched my fingers around hers, she pulled my hand back and gripped tighter. Misery loves company, but even more so, misery loves understanding.
She understood.
Instead of pretending that I never snuck a glimpse past her armor, Summer kept me on the inside. From that moment forward, I was in on a secret: Summer Groves was terribly human.
* * *
HERE WE SAT, EIGHTEEN YEARS later, navigating heartbreak, but a different kind. I squeezed Summer’s hand tighter as she wiped away falling tears.
“You don’t know that you’re going to lose her,” I said. “Love is about compromise, right? And sacrifice?”
“Says the woman who kept expecting Garrett to pursue her? You’re mad at him because of shitty circumstances. You’re blaming him for something that’s not entirely his fault. Bad timing and holding back on true feelings goes both ways. Where’s the compromise there?”
I pulled my head back, stung by Summer’s words.
“I thought you said he was a giant coward.”
“He is. And there’s been a couple times where, when it comes to Garrett, I could have said the same thing about you.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” she said quietly.
“No, you’re not.”
She was never sorry about being brutally honest.
“No, I’m not. Mags, when one person has an idea of what their dining room table looks like ten years from now, and the other person’s vision looks a lot different—that’s a hard one to meet in the middle on. Valeria wants a loud, messy future full of sticky jam hands. She wants to sit at a full table. I love being the irresponsible one on a school night. I want to travel, and I want to build a career without the guilt. I want to sit at a hundred different tables all over the world with the same woman pulling up a chair beside me.”
Summer started to choke on her words. I got up from my chair and crouched down next to her, holding her hand.
“I’m not who she thought I was, Maggie. And I’m not who I thought I would become. This is my fault, not hers. And it’s going to break both our hearts. This is the first time—Mags, the first time in my marriage—that I haven’t been able to say exactly what’s in here,” Summer said, gripping the cotton shirt around her chest, tears effortlessly falling down her neck.
Summer was blunt. Her offhand candor was often mistaken for cruelty, even though she was not cruel. Through the years, she’d learned to soften her delivery—but she rarely had enough forethought to bite her tongue completely. It crushed me that Summer couldn’t uncage this truth—one that her partner deserved to know. For the first time, Summer’s entire heart was wrapped up in one of her beliefs. No matter the delivery, the truth would leave her heartbroken.
She stared at me, words falling out of her with tears. “No one tells women this when they get married in their twenties, you know? What we think we want at twenty-eight, it’s not always what we want at thirty-five. The things that make you feel safe and the things that set your heart on fire aren’t set in stone. I love my wife more than the day I married her, but, our ideal futures look very different.”
Maybe if I had spent more time planted on my own two feet and less time chasing a dream, I would have had ever-changing opinions about how I wanted my future to look. Instead, at thirty-five, I still wanted so many of the things I wanted at thirty, at twenty-three, at fourteen. I even wanted the same men. I was as afraid to die alone at thirty-five as I was at seventeen. I was as emphatic about my career today as I had been at fourteen.
Suddenly, there were waves of heat slapping my sunken chest, and I was bathed in compassion for the man who was breaking my heart. I wanted the pain to go down easier—for me to place the blame on his broad shoulders—but it wasn’t all Garrett’s fault. Garrett hadn’t betrayed me, he had simply grown out of the dreams I was still clinging to. I finally understood how Blink-182 could speak to someone’s heart
Well I guess this is growing up.
“Love is hard,” I whispered.
“It fucking blows,” Summer said, doubling down as she pulled her hand from my grip and angrily wiped tears away from her eyes.
I sat back down next to Summer, and I felt her hand grip mine. I squeezed back harder as we sat side by side, the whisky warm in our bellies, watching the fire burn the logs down to ashes. I studied my best friend—wet, puffy, red eyes atop her strong oval face. She was that beautiful Bob Seger song. Summer was always my rock. She didn’t have the patience or emotional capacity to crumple and overanalyze every little thing. She could pull back from my tornado of confusion and boil it down to one or two truths—a straight shooter. I sent my arrow on an emotional roller-coaster—twisting into dark woods, busting through a couple wrong targets, until finally finding the bull’s-eye—and even then, I questioned the bull’s-eye. Summer’s jaw was clenched with her chin pointed to the sky—a rock among her own personal rubble. I appreciated how intense I was about my feelings, but I envied what it must be like on the other side—the ability to close one’s eyes at night and not hear sirens running through your head.