Say You'll Remember Me(57)

He looked so tired.

I nudged him. “How you doing, Dad?”

“Fine. Is there a reason the sofa is massacred on the curb?” He looked at me.

“Yeah, about that. Mom had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“An accident, accident.”

He nodded and peered wearily out at the orange tree next to the driveway.

“There is good news though.” I held out my thumb. Dad stared at the wedding ring he put on Mom over three decades ago. He pulled it off my thumb and held it in the palm of his hand.

He studied it for a long time. “She never took this off,” he said quietly. “Not ever. Not even to wash dishes.”

He stared at it another long moment. Then he closed his fist around it and without another word he got up and walked into the house.

An email pinged on my phone and I sighed. Back to work.

It was from Murkle’s. Marked urgent.

It was a notice for an on-site meeting at the corporate office to discuss the Dijon launch. They wanted to fly me to Minnesota. Next week. I got up and did a happy dance on the porch.

I had been given a blessing from the benevolent mustard gods.

I couldn’t leave my family for some bs reason, but for a mandatory meeting? I didn’t have a choice. I had to go to Minnesota. And work was going to pay for it!

I got tickets for the following Monday to Thursday. I debated whether to tell Xavier I was coming. I decided not to tell him. It’s not like he needed to take time off to see me—it was a work trip so I’d be working when he was, no point—and I wanted to surprise him.

Three whole nights with him. I was beyond excited—right up until I landed.

I don’t think I’d processed how truly far away he was until I stepped outside baggage claim and I realized it was thirty-five degrees outside. I’d lived here for four years, I knew what Minnesota was like in October.

But somehow this place in relation to Xavier had been suspended in my mind. He was summer. We were summer.

It was almost jarring to realize he was living in fall.

Xavier was on a different rotation around the sun than I was.

In Southern California you decorate for holidays that take place during seasons you never get. I remembered the first time I saw autumn in Minnesota. The fake orange and red leaves that we’d used on our Thanksgiving table in Glendale were actually on the trees here. Then in the winter the mistletoe and the red berries and the snow. Light green pushing up in the spring, seas of dandelions and white blossoms on the wild pear trees. You earned your flowers in the Midwest. You waited for them for eight months. In California you had lemons in December.

His world would change around him and mine would stay the same. There would be a day two months from now when he’d be wearing a jacket and snow pants in negative ten–degree weather, a full beard, and I’d be in shorts buying cucumbers at a farmers market—that’s how far away we were.

How could this possibly work?

We were delusional.

We felt doomed all of a sudden.

It was so ridiculous but seeing Minnesota in autumn sent me on an existential spiral the whole Uber ride to his clinic. He was two thousand miles from me.

Two thousand miles.

I could drive to Vancouver, Canada, and be in a totally different country and it was still eight hundred miles closer than Xavier was to me at any given moment. And we thought we could make a relationship work? This was unhinged. My boyfriend was living in a whole different universe—an eight-hour trip away door to door—with no possible end in sight.

Tristan called me while I was in my Uber, deep in the throes of my silent panic attack.

“Uh, your skid mark of a cat is out of the garbage you feed her? What am I supposed to do about that?”

I rubbed my forehead. “I forgot to go to the store. Sorry. Just go buy her some. I’ll pay you back.”

Silence.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, like he was annoyed he had to ask it.

“Nothing.”

“Okay, did he have some bitch there when you got there? Because if he did, I’m enlisting his ass in the navy.”

I scoffed. “You can’t do that.”

“Oh, really? Because my ex is in the middle of the Pacific right now.”

He got a laugh out of me. Also, I was pretty sure he wasn’t kidding.

“No, he didn’t have a girl there,” I said, putting my forehead into my hand. “I’m not even there yet.”

“So what’s your problem, then?”

I let a breath out through my nose. “He’s so far away, Tristan.”

He scoffed. “And? This isn’t 1851. You’re not waiting five months for a handwritten letter coming on a steam train. Get your shit together.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.

I heard the sound of car keys on the other end. “Watch shows together, get a ring light, text him nudes, go see him. It’s not that fucking hard. I’m going to get your cat food,” he said. “Call me if you change your mind about the navy. Bye.” He hung up.

The pep talk did help. A little.

And not a moment too soon because we were almost there. I had the driver pull around the side so Xavier wouldn’t see me getting out of the car.

I got my bag, took a deep breath, and forced myself to walk around the building to the door in the blustering Minnesota air. I saw him the moment I rounded the corner.