The Last Love Note(3)
I look out the window.
‘Don’t let him see the penguins!’ Grace instructs, glaring at the Oodie. ‘Kate, you look the complete opposite of DTF right now.’
I am the opposite of it. I’m about to remind her of the reason for my multi-year celibacy streak, when the object of Grace’s fascination emerges from the truck. Sandy blond hair. Five-o’clock shadow. Ripped everything – jeans, six-pack, biceps. There’s something very Jon Bon Jovi in Moonlight and Valentino about the way he’s getting the job done. No fuss. Unintentionally gorgeous.
‘I know you’re grieving, Kate, and Officially Not Interested, but come on now. Surely even you can’t fail to appreciate this.’
He tilts the king-size bedframe he’s carrying, and we tilt our heads in unison, hypnotised. Gawd! I feel instantly guilty, and take a step back from the window into the shadows.
‘You are allowed to notice other men,’ Grace says, more gently now. ‘The whole world knows you’ll love Cam forever.’
Yes. ‘’Til death do us part’ was just the start of it.
I thought love would fade, the way grief does. Was terrified it would, at first. Scared a day might come when I’d forget the exact shape of the hairline at Cam’s neck. Or the way the scent of Aramis would announce his presence behind me, fresh from a shave and a shower, towel wrapped around his waist, drops of water falling from the tips of his hair onto my skin as he kissed me.
I needn’t have worried. Once the sharpest angles of early grief softened and blurry glimpses of a new life without him began to come into focus, my love for him only intensified exponentially, rendering all other men incomparable.
Even Grace’s guy across the road, now coming back out of his house. He bounds up into the truck and drags a chest of drawers carefully down its ramp on a trolley, shifts a few boxes to make a path for it and disappears back inside. Capable. Focused.
‘Good work ethic,’ I note. From the expression on Grace’s face I can tell the observation falls flat.
People tell me I’m still young. They say I’ll meet someone else. They point out that, at forty, my longest relationship might still be ahead of me. I get it, intellectually. But Cam is an impossible act to follow. Ours is an impossible vibe to recreate. It’s why I cannot be standing here at my front window, leering at some flannelette-clad, DTF non-public-servant as he wields half of IKEA out of a truck, solo.
‘It’s been two years,’ Grace reminds me. I bristle at the implication that I should be over my grief by now. Or that it might be time to ‘move on’. The thought of doing that panics me. How would I even conduct a first date with some unsuspecting victim who hasn’t been properly briefed on the extent of my brokenness? Why would anyone sign up for what can only ever be a half-share of me?
‘I’m not ready, Grace. I’m not even interested in the idea of it, academically. I’ve got Charlie, and the novel, and Mum, and work—’
She silences my catalogue of excuses with a gentle hand on my arm. ‘You’re scared.’
Grace should be scared too. Her backstory wasn’t easy either. A grand romance that swept away most of the last decade and spat her out, at thirty-eight, straight into an IVF clinic with borderline unviable eggs and a dream so tenacious even the fertility specialist’s ‘five per cent chance’ hasn’t dulled her hope. I don’t know how she isn’t terrified of relationships now, like I am.
Of course, just as I’m about to retreat to the safety of my manuscript, the guy across the road glances up at my house and catches the two of us ogling. Fantastic.
‘To hot new neighbours,’ Grace says under her breath, waving her wineglass at him through my window as if we’re admiring him across a bar.
‘Why did Daddy have a grenade in his study?’ Charlie asks, materialising beside me.
But this is no time for war games. In the interests of future neighbourly relations, I’m mentally searching for plausible explanations as to why Grace and I have been all but dangling out the window. Neighbourhood Watch?
‘Er, DEFCON 1’, she whispers.
‘I know. I’m mortified.’
‘No! Not Jon Bon Jovi across the road,’ she says. ‘Charlie!’
I look down at my son. He’s got his dad’s golden curls, his freckles, his mischievous blue eyes . . . and his grenade?
Cam might have taught English, but his real love was history. He was always collecting souvenirs from overseas battlefields. Bullets from France. Random bits of gun shells. A little vial of sand from the beach at Gallipoli. And apparently the very legitimate-looking grenade that’s currently in the hot little hand of our excitable five-year-old.
‘Let me see that,’ I say, lifting it off Charlie’s palm as gently as possible. Of course there’s no chance it’s live. Cam only ever bought artifacts from bona fide collectors and registered antiques dealers. If he was here now, he’d crouch down beside Charlie and explain how it worked, Charlie would graduate from the conversation slightly more knowledgeable, and I would have one less thing to explain about the world. The thought of all the lost conversations between them makes my heart ache as much as it hurts my head trying to bridge the gap.
‘This is Peak Kate,’ Grace says, snapping a photo of me holding the grenade. She crops it so it’s just my Oodie-clad forearm and hand in the frame and has it uploaded to Facebook before I can think straight. I know she tags me in it, because my phone flashes with a notification on the sofa. I’ve got my settings locked down for situations exactly like this, where Grace’s love of drama clashes with my desire to not invite my entire friends list to witness every single episode of my mayhem.