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“It’s fine. It’s good.” She sniffed and cleared her throat, banishing her sadness. “Needed to be done.” She squeezed her eyes shut and reopened them. I watched her shove her grief somewhere deeper.
Had she ever been allowed to mourn Granny? Or did she feel the need to jump right back into work and all her morbid extracurricular activities?
She turned to me, her eyes softer now, the sadness replaced with something duller. “This is your home. I guess some part of me had hoped you’d do this. Since I hadn’t been able to. I’m glad.” She said it on an exhale; shock turned to relief. But I wasn’t so sure it was real. “I’m glad.”
I knew a part of her hated me for doing it.
Decca
“He doesn’t sleep inthe same room with you?” Bethany asked.
“No.” I avoided her probing and concerned eyes.
“And since you came back from Memphis, he’s been cold?”
“Not cold. Just friendly. And I meanjustfriendly. He didn’t try to hug me or kiss me. When I was gone, I kind of hoped maybe he’d at leastthoughtabout me. He didn’t text me once. But I’m not so naïve to think there wouldn’t be a learning curve with us. Besides, I’m letting go. I’ve decided to stop trying to control my destiny, and other people, and... see what happens on whatever path the spirit leads me.”
“When you say not control people, does that include my diet?” Soula asked.
“Fair enough. Yes, I suppose it does.” I grimaced. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Soula would eat like shit if I didn’t do her meal preps for her. She didn’t mind, normally, as long as I hid the veggies. But she was pregnant with baby number two and still breastfeeding baby number one, which increased the need for me to get her to eat anything other than barbeque. She still had DHA to produce,and I’d given her the optimum number of calories every day, with every nutrient delivered from the most bio-available sources. That diet plan had taken me months. Could I really give up control over that?
I sighed. “Go ahead and eat your all pork diet and see how long it takes you to poop before you start adding vegetables again.”
“Hey, I eat the coleslaw. Besides, you’ve got Waylon cooking now. When he has time. You can keep feeding him recipes, anytime. He definitely doesn’t have time to find good ones.”
“Oh! That reminds me—”
“You don’t either, Decca,” Bethany jumped in before I could insist otherwise. She was right, of course. Bethany was always right. Especially when it came to people. Anything clinical—that was Soula’s domain. Mine was... I still didn’t know. I considered myself the lost lamb of the cohort. Maybe that’s why I inserted myself so domineeringly into their lives. I’d forced my way in, dared them to move me from their path. Maybe I was always searching for my place. Seeking out ways I could be useful and feel loved, wanted, and respected.
Bethany and Soula did that. Really and truly. It wasn’t their fault that I didn’t feel like I deserved it.
“I’m sorry, Dec, but I’m supposed to be the always busy one. I’m on call half the time I’m not already at work, but you’re the one we can never get hold of. You take on too much of our burdens as it is. You practically birthed Soula’s baby single-handedly, you help out with Sofia all the time, you work constantly at your real job, and you volunteer to sit vigil at people’s deathbeds whenever you’re not there. Have you stopped to think that Gus might like to sleep in bed with you, but you’re not around often enough to have an actual relationship with?”
“I know. I know all my pitfalls and shortcomings. I know I try to buy love wherever I go. It’s a side effect from being left by everyone I’ve ever loved.”
“You love us. We’ll never leave you,” Soula said.
“I know. And that means everything. I just hope that one day I’ll bring myself to believe it, instead of feeling the need to win you over with my usefulness.”
“Trust me. You’re not that useful. We love you in spite of it,” Bethany said, rolling her eyes and sipping her beverage from a tiny straw. She glanced up just in time to meet eyes with the cute, freckled redhead coming into the room, strapped and laden with so many bags, she looked like a New York City commuter instead of a woman meeting her friends at a neighborhood watering hole and pool hall. “Finally, the pool shark’s here.” She took another sip, waving Soula’s new forensic pathology fellow, Quinn, over to the corner high-top we were all squashed around.
“Sorry, I’m late. I walked from the office. What’d I miss?” Quinn asked, unstrapping her totes and messenger bags.
“Decca and Gus don’t know how to be married to each other yet,” Bethany recapped before turning back to me. “You need to give it time, Decca. You have a nontraditional marriage, you can’t expect it to sort itself out in traditional ways. Not immediately. Fuck’s sake, you’ve been gone longer than you’ve been there in the…what? Three weeks since your wedding? What do you expect?”
“I expected him to treat me like a wife. That’s what he wanted, after all. That’s why I proposed. I thought he wanted someone to share meals with, and have s about our bad days, and sleep together. That’s why I offered.”
“What a sacrifice.” Bethany gave me a sarcastic look, like she was calling me on some bullshit.
“I didn’t mean... Yeah, I wanted something in return. I wanted our marriage to be like our friendship. We were never awkward as friends. Even if our fingers accidentally brushed. If I squeezed around a tight corner and rubbed his elbow. We could be real with each other. We could live in human bodies. Now it’s like I’m a poison dart frog if my fingers accidentally touched his, reaching for the coffeepot. I don’t know what changed.”
“Sex changed. Or almost-sex.” Soula said, sipping her Coke. “You can’t have almost-sex and expect things to return to normal.”
Everyone at the table, even Quinn, who wasn’t even around when Soula was undergoing her own existential crisis/romance, stopped drinking and stared at her as if she’d suddenly announced she was going into labor.
Before Waylon, Soula didn’t do relationships. Ever. Thought they were disgusting, slimy things with tails that fell off and regenerated with DNA-shifting cells. She was very clear on that. Sure, she’d have sex, but only as a one-shot deal. The less a man knew about her, the better. Waylon broke down her defenses—and her uterus—and they figured out their own bones of love.
Nevertheless, Soula had been the reigning champ of “having sex and expecting things to return to normal” after, so hearing her say that even almost-sex could change things was a particularly loud record-skip.
