21. Reed

21

REED

“I REMEMBER EVERYTHING” – ZACH brYAN, FEATURING KACEY MUSGRAVE

I finish my late-night walk around the neighborhood and return to Sam’s apartment through her unlocked door. When I come inside, she’s in the same place I left her—at the kitchen island—with a second beer.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

She sighs. “I really love you. You know that, right?”

“I know that.”

She brings her eyes to mine. “I need to confess something.”

My heart feels like it’s ripping open in my chest as I consider what’s coming. And worse, I’ve no right to feel the way I do, considering my own actions.

“I kissed someone this weekend.”

“Brandon?”

She shakes her head. “No. This guy from abroad.”

I gulp down the feeling. Strangely, I know what she’s about to say. “The one you dated when I was in the Peace Corps?”

She nods, and my mind tumbles back again to the road trip we took from California last year. Guess I’m not crazy.

“Well, I’m gonna go,” I tell her.

“Where are you going?”

“There’s a bar around the corner. I saw it on the way here. I’m going to go there before I catch a flight back to Chicago.”

“You don’t want to be around me?”

“Look, I’m not blameless. Neither are you, though. I think it’s clear this isn’t working out. And I don’t want to stay here.” Pulling out my phone, I look up flights.

She nods. “This is a little odd, and you can say no, but do you mind if I come with you—to the bar, I mean?”

“Why?”

She puts her hand on my wrist. “You are one of the most important people in my life. We’ve had some really good times. We could toast them.”

“Yeah. All right.”

I find a 5:30 a.m. flight back, book it, and we walk together down to the bar.

It’s a little corner joint with a few older guys playing pool—the type of guys who drink on Sundays past midnight.

We find a table and have a few more beers. I’ve never been a drink-because-I’m-stressed type of person. But tonight is an exception.

I look across the table at Samantha. She’s a blue-eyed beauty, and I fell in love with her the moment I met her. “I just always thought it would be you,” I say.

She nods. “Me too. I mean, that it would be you.”

“What am I supposed to do with all these memories we have together? Like, who else visited me in the Peace Corps? Who else knows me like you do? Being twenty-one and getting drunk in college together at those dances? Those were some amazing times.” My chest feels heavy.

“I feel the same way.” She sips her drink and smiles. “Maybe it’s okay to just let those good memories be there, not try to change them. Let them be what they are.”

“Were you going to…tell me? That we weren’t right for each other?” I ask.

“I was planning to tell you. Somehow. I just couldn’t find a way.”

“That guy from Finland, are you in love with him?”

“Do you really want the answer to that question?”

“I don’t know.” I pause. Averting my eyes, I realize she just answered it anyway. “I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy. When you started talking about that job in San Francisco, I began to wonder.”

“Give me your hand.”

A little reluctantly, I slide my hand across the table.

She looks me in the eye as she takes it. “You deserve to be happy, too. Like, unbridled, ridiculous, passionate happiness. I want that for you.”

“What’s your favorite memory of us?” I ask, realizing this could be the last time we ever talk.

She smiles faintly. “Probably just hanging out with you and your friends during the summers in college at Dunn’s house. I really love your friends—Dunn, all those guys. You?”

“Maybe that night in Argentina when you handed me my guitar and demanded I play you a song, even though I was shy.”

“I remember that. I loved that.”

I stare into Samantha’s eyes, and I feel like I did on the night I met her. She’s a stranger again. In a few years, she’ll just be someone I used to know. “We had some really good times together. What are we going to do with all those memories?” I ask.

Sam thinks for a moment, then puts her hand on my wrist and squeezes. “I think we can just let those good times be what they were—good times in the past. We’ve been growing apart for some time now. I think we’ve both sensed it. That doesn’t change what we had, though. It just means our futures don’t align. What we have—what we had—ran its course. That’s okay.” She smiles, as if trying to comfort me.

At that moment, the song in the bar changes. It’s a Zach Bryan tune—“I Remember Everything.” Well, shit. If I didn’t get the hype before, I sure get it now. And I gotta be honest, he does more for me than Lady Antebellum, or whatever they call themselves now.

After another hour, I hug Samantha goodbye for the last time and watch her walk out the door of the bar.

Then I flag the bartender and request some rotgut whiskey.

I’m dead drunk as I board the plane, and thankfully I pass out for the first couple of hours. When I come to consciousness, the sun is coming up, and there’s an older woman sitting in the seat next to me. She’s got white hair, and she’s probably in her seventies.

“Wow, you were really knocked out there,” she says.

“Sorry. Was I snoring?”

“No.” She smiles. “But we hit some turbulence, and you didn’t budge.”

“Oh.”

“Do you play the piano?”

“Uh, no… Why do you ask?”

“You have long fingers. They’d be perfect for playing piano.”

“I play guitar,” I offer.

“Very nice. Are you a rock star?”

“No.” I laugh. “Not at all.”

“Well, you’re very handsome. I think you’d make a good rock star.”

I smile. This old woman is exactly the kind of comic relief ego boost I need right now. “You’re too kind. I, uh, just broke up with my long-term girlfriend. So that’s not exactly on my mind right now. But I do like to write my own songs. I’m just not a rock star,”

“Not a rock star yet. ” She winks. “Every great songwriter writes their best songs after a breakup. That’s lucky.”

A slight smile forms on my face. “It’s lucky that I broke up with the girl I’ve thought for years I was going to marry? That’s one way to look at it.”

“If it was meant to be, it would be. It’s that simple. You and she weren’t meant to be.”

“She was… She was perfect, though,” I lament.

She pats my arm. “No, honey. She wasn’t. No one and nothing’s perfect. We’re all imperfect. It’s good you learn that now.”

“Well, I appreciate that framing. I need that in my life right now. What about you?”

“What about me? Hun, I’ve been married forty years.”

“Did you marry the love of your life?”

“Wow. I wasn’t expecting that question this morning.” Her wrinkled smile fades for a moment. “No, I didn’t. And then again, I did. It’s true that the one you build with is the one you really love and all that.”

“I must confess, I’m a little confused by that answer.”

“Okay, well, when I was twenty-five, I took this trip to Hawaii after grad school. Met a surfer. I stayed for two weeks, and he told me he loved me.”

“Whoa. And what did you do?”

“I finished my vacation and went back home. My mother was sick at the time. I wanted to be with her. Plus, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. But I realized later, there are years where nothing happens, and weeks where years happen, and you never forget them. So it goes.”

“So you never saw him again?”

“Never. And this was before the age of social media. I have no idea what became of him.”

“How do you know he’s the love of your life?”

“I just know.”

“That’s sad.”

“No, it’s not. I’m happy I got to have that experience.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“I got married and all that. Had four kids. They’re the real loves of my life.” She pulls out her phone and tries to open it. After a few tries she gets it.

I look at the photo of her and her kids. “You have a beautiful family.”

“I married my soulmate, you know. But there are different loves we have in this life. It’s up to us to decide what to do. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I’d stayed out there with him, in Hawaii. I don’t know if I would have been happy. Maybe it was just meant to be what it was: a fling.”

“But you just said he was the love of your life.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I’m still drunk, but that’s an unsettling answer.”

“Life is unsettling sometimes.”

“Indeed it is.”

“We only get to live once, though. So I think it’s important to do what we want. My only real regret is that I wish I’d told him I loved him back, so he knew.”

“You ever think about going back there?”

“To Hawaii?” She laughs. “Never. Sonny, who we are in a moment is never the same. So who you are right now is different than the person you’ll be in a few years. I’d rather just let surfer boy be a fond memory of mine. And stay that way.”

The girl with no name pops into my mind. The past weekend is filled with some of the fondest memories of my life.

“But you’re young. You’re in it. Be a rock star. Take chances. All that claptrap.” She laughs again. “But what do I know? I’m just an old woman.”

“Is it too early for a gin and tonic?” I ask.

“Not for me,” she says. “Especially not when I’m riding on a plane with a handsome future rock star.”

“Excuse me,” I say to the flight attendant as she passes. “We’ll take two gin and tonics, please.”

The old woman smiles at me. “Thank you. You’re quite sweet, you know. Some lucky woman will end up with you.”

“You’re pumping me up. This is what I need to hear right now,” I laugh.

When our drinks arrive, we clink our little plastic cups together, and right as I’m about to take a sip, I remember I have work in the morning.

As in, right now .

Hal won’t mind if I’m drinking gin and tonic when I log in. As long as he doesn’t try to FaceTime me…