“I do,” she said. “It’s not a particularly stable way to live since I’ve been freelance. You know I had a staff job when I was first in Seattle?”
“I heard, yeah.”
“Had that until five or six years ago. Then that all collapsed. I’m lucky to work as much as I do now. I get to schedule myself, which you can tell from the fact that I hopped on a plane out here to do all this.” She waved her hands around.
“Well, it sounds like you’re doing amazing,” he said. “Even if you did end your engagement over a waffle iron.”
“Not over the waffle iron. Maybe after being enlightened by the waffle iron. Like you said, he just thought things were going to turn out one way, and I thought they were going to turn out another way. And I couldn’t get used to living with him.” She ran her finger around the edge of her plate.
“Why’s that?”
“I really like living by myself, honestly,” she repeated. “I can have breakfast for dinner, I can have dinner for breakfast, I can take a bath at two-fifteen in the afternoon on a Wednesday. And I sleep so well there. I don’t talk about it very much, but I’ve slept like garbage for most of my life.”
“Really.”
“Really. The whole thing, waking up with my clothes twisted and my sheets in knots. I had terrible dreams. I would wake up in the morning and feel like I hadn’t slept at all. I’d pass out in my breakfast or while I was trying to write. But then I moved into the house, and I bought this new queen bed after I had bounced on about a hundred mattresses. And I had these sheets, these linen sheets. They are so cool in the summer and cozy in the winter. It is the first bed where, when I sleep in it, I am just out. I am out, for hours and hours. When I wake up, I feel like I have a full battery.”
“And when you lived with him, you didn’t?”
“It was like having a hot water bottle in bed with me. It threw off everything. I was afraid to move because I didn’t want to wake him. I was afraid to sneeze because I didn’t want to wake him. I couldn’t splay my arm out, because it would land on his chest. I woke up at two in the morning, day after day after day, and I’d lie there listening to this ticking clock he brought over that was like listening to the audible expiration of my youth.”
“Did this happen with other boyfriends you had before him, or just him?”
“My boyfriend before Chris, we didn’t live together. Mostly, I went to his place instead of him coming over to mine. I liked it better that way. And it didn’t seem weird that I didn’t sleep well, since I wasn’t at home.”
“Should I ask what happened to that guy?”
Laurie took a sip of her drink. “Well,” she said, “Angus was great, honestly. I was very happy with him. We had all kinds of things in common, he was funny, he was comfortable, he was really smart.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“Yeah.” It had, in fact, been good so far—but only so far. “Unfortunately, he wanted kids, and I didn’t. When we met, he thought he probably wanted them and I thought I probably didn’t.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I like kids. I love my brothers’ kids, I love June’s kids. I just wanted other things more,” she said. “I never had that thing, the thing where people say they always wanted to be a parent, always dreamed about kids. I just never felt it. And we were together for a couple of years, you know, right at that age where if you want kids, you’re not really in a hurry, but you’re starting to think about when you will be in a hurry, you know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“We went to his cousin’s wedding, and I saw him with this adorable little girl who was there, maybe three or four? He was just great with her, totally at home, and he was so happy. He was just over the moon in love with this kid, you could tell.” She sighed. “We came home, we talked, and we broke up. That was a few years ago, and he has a wife and a daughter now.”
“Sounds like it ended the only way it could.”
“It did,” she said. “The only thing I should have done was figure out sooner that it wasn’t going to resolve itself. Anyway, a year later, I met Chris. And I liked him, and he did not want kids, and he did not mind that I was, as Angus used to say, ‘sturdy.’ And by then I was thirty-eight, and he was age-appropriate, and he was looking for someone who was age-appropriate. And I just thought…he was a stroke of luck.”