Say You'll Remember Me(61)

Janessa wordlessly filled our coffee mugs and left.

I peeled the tops off three vanilla creamers and slid them to Samantha one at a time. Then “Come On Eileen” came on over the café’s quiet speakers. We locked eyes and immediately started laughing.

It occurred to me that nobody else in the entire world would get why this was funny. If we’d been having breakfast with friends, they’d think we’d lost it.

This was the parallel life. Some of it anyway.

My smile fell and I focused on drinking my coffee.

“What?” she said, noticing I’d gone silent.

I set my mug down.

“Nothing. I just like being here with you,” I said quietly. “This is how it could have been. If you didn’t leave.”

She looked at the contents of her mug. “I know. I was thinking the same thing.” She peered at me. “When I was on my way here, I think it hit me how far away you are. It scared me a little.”

I felt my pulse pick up. Like she was about to tell me it was too much for her.

“You could have a girlfriend who lives here, you know. I’m sure Janessa isn’t always crabby.”

I scoffed.

She put her mug to her lips, smiling.

“I got my tickets for next month,” I said.

“Oh, cool. When?”

“November eighteen through the twentieth.”

She pulled out her phone. “So four weeks from now. Then I won’t see you until I come out for the cabin, six weeks after that. Okay.”

“I booked a red-eye,” I said. “I get there at five thirty Saturday morning. I can get an Uber.”

“No, I want to pick you up,” she said. “I don’t want to miss any time with you. We have to do dinner on the eighteenth with my family though,” she said. “It’s my mom’s birthday.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

She gave me a playful look. “You haven’t had enough of my people yet? You haven’t even met Grandma. That’s a whole other experience.”

“I don’t mind.”

I wanted to meet everyone. I should have insisted on it the last time I was there. I wanted to get to know all her family. That way when she talked about them, I knew who they were. I could put faces to names.

“Mom can’t leave the house so we’re all cooking a dish,” she said.

“So chorizo from Tristan?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Probably. He got a new job,” she said, picking up her coffee. “He’s apprenticing at a tattoo shop.”

I arched an eyebrow. “He can do those?”

“Oh, yes. He’s as gifted as he is annoying,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Oh!” she said, lowering her mug. “I wanted to ask you this couple’s question I saw.”

“Okay.”

“If you could be an egg for a year in exchange for a million dollars, but you’d have to find someone to keep you safe during that time and not break you, and if they do break you they get the million, who would you pick?”

“You,” I said without thinking about it.

“Just like that? You’d trust me not to break you for a whole year?”

“Of course. I’ve seen you with Pooter and your mom.”

“I’m going to go so far as to say that if you’re dating someone you wouldn’t trust to not break you as an egg, they’re probably not the one,” she said.

“So you’d pick me?” I asked, smiling.

“Totally,” she said. “We wouldn’t get to talk to each other for a whole year though. That would suck. But the million dollars would be nice.”

It would be nice. It would be the answer to all my problems actually.

If I had a million dollars, I’d pay off the clinic. Then I’d hire another doctor to run it and I’d leave for California so fast my head would spin. I’d open a second practice there, somewhere close to her house. Then I’d have two. And I’d have her.

It’s amazing how easily I knew this. How quickly I’d leave everyone and everything behind for her.

The only thing that would change my plans would be if she wanted to do something different, because the money would be hers too.

“I bet I know what you’d do with the million,” she said.

“What?”

“You’d pay off the clinic. Probably open another one, because it would stick it to your parents if you had two.”

The corner of my lip went up. “I’d open the second one in California.”

She grinned.

“What would you do with the money?” I asked.

“The same thing. Pay off your clinic. I would also like to stick it to your parents.”

“There’s nothing else you’d do with the money?”

“There’s nothing else that would make me happy. There’s no cure for dementia. Even if you have a million dollars.”

“If there was, that’s what I would use the money for,” I said, meaning it.

Her eyes went soft. “I know you would. That’s why I like being alone in rooms with you.”

We talked through breakfast. When it got as late as we dared before both of us missed work, I put her in an Uber. I wanted to drive her to her office, but it was in the opposite direction and I would have been late and she refused to let me. So I kissed her goodbye at the curb and watched her drive off, then I went back inside to pay the bill. Janessa was ringing me up.