She’d wanted me to know it, too. She’d wanted me to say yes to everything. She’d wanted me to go all in.
But when she died, I went the other way.
I’m not judging myself. I was a kid. I didn’t know how to cope with losing her—or any of the hardships that followed. But I guess that’s the great thing about life—it gives you chance after chance to rethink it all. Who you want to be. How you want to live. What really matters.
I did want to go to the art show. I’d earned my right to be there. I didn’t, of course, want to be humiliated. But it was looking like I couldn’t have one without the other. And I just wasn’t going to let the things I was afraid of hold me back anymore.
I had no idea how that decision would turn out, but I knew one thing for sure: My mom would approve.
As the time approached, I zipped myself into her pink dress—much tighter and slinkier now. Sue had gifted me a makeover from her cousin who worked at Macy’s and a hair blowout from her cousin’s roommate.
I did it all.
If I had to go to this art show all alone, I would do my damnedest to look good.
There was, of course, still a chance that Joe might show up in a surprise twist and whisk me off like Cinderella. But as I clanked down the metal stairs from the rooftop in a set of gorgeous but actively painful heels, he was running out of time.
I walked down our long hallway, hoping to see him.
I rode down in the elevator, hoping to see him.
I walked out to the street in front of our building to meet my Uber, still hoping to see him.
Waiting there in the late-afternoon light—my hair done, a daisy behind my ear as an ode to my mother, and with so much mascara on that I could actually see my own eyelashes—I decided to try to text him one last time.
This would be it. My final attempt.
And then, when he didn’t reply, I’d call it: Time of death for my thing with Joe. Saturday night, seven P.M.
Then I’d go ahead and let myself mourn.
But after the art show.
And then, right there near the streetlamp by the crosswalk, as if the decision to give up had called forth some kind of magic from the universe, I saw him.
Joe. In his bowling jacket and his glasses. Coming out of our building. With a suitcase.
“Hey!” I shouted, my body walking toward him without my brain’s permission.
My Uber pulled up as I was walking away.
“Hey!” I called again.
Joe looked up, took in the sight of me in by far the fanciest getup any of us had ever seen, and held very still.
If I had wanted him to whistle or ogle or tell me I looked great—or even longed against longing for some kind of shift in his body language at the pleasure of seeing me—I would’ve been sorely disappointed.
The man was a total statue.
Fortunately, I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted to confront him.
I’d been having imaginary confrontations with him for days, of course. Where had he been? What was going on? Who the hell did he think he was?
But once it was really happening? I panicked.
For a second, no words came out at all. Finally, I managed: “I’ve been texting you.”
Useless. Joe’s body language stayed blank.
“And calling,” I added. God, now I sounded like Lucinda.
Joe just stood there.
At last I generated an interrogative: “Have you been sick?”
And at last, a response: “No.”
“Have you been … out of town?”
“No. But I’m leaving now.”
“You’re leaving town? Now?” I glanced down at his suitcase. “Right now?”
“Yes.”
I regrouped. “Do you happen to remember”—I felt a hitch in my throat—“that you were going to be my date to my art show tonight?”
Joe looked away, like he couldn’t stand the sight of me. The face might be unreadable, but the body language was unmistakable.
What on earth had I done to him?
Or maybe I hadn’t done anything.
Sometimes when I’m watching a movie and there’s a simple Big Misunderstanding between two people—he thinks she’s a space alien or something—I want to shout, “Just talk to each other!”
But of course nothing in real life is ever simple like that.
Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention to.
It’s a wonder we ever get anything straight at all.
And of course for me, for most of my life, the number one go-to for deciphering any human interaction was facial expressions.