Page 7 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

Everything began innocuously. I looked over the bakery section, picked up some roast beef and a rotisserie chicken in the deli, and continued through the first row of dry foods. I was pushing my cart between pasta and dried beans when I caught sight of something at the seafood counter ahead. At first, I thought it was just a figment of my imagination, but I crept silently toward the end of the aisle and poked my head around the end cap.

Yes, Veronica Hamish was standing there poring over the glass case with Ally McLaughlin. My Veronica. Like the one who was supposed to be in St. Louis. I knew that hair and T-shirt anywhere. I had seen her silhouette as they walked by and I could hear the lilt of her voice now, discussing shellfish.

I blinked twice, but she didn’t go away like a clever mirage. What the actual fuck? I must have been standing there for a long time because a lady on my left cleared her throat. “Sorry,” I whispered and backed my cart out of her way.

I hugged the Ragu so closely I could feel the glass jars against my back and tried to breathe normally. This was completely absurd. She’d left just three months ago, for her great new job and her great new apartment in St. Louis, with all her earthly belongings. I’d packed them with her. I’d sat in her apartment atop the boxes with her and the goddamn tofu. Now, she was here, in Kroger, on a Tuesday evening, talking about dinner with someone else. How could she get off of work mid-week, less than three months into a new job? Was someone dead or something?

It sure didn’t look that way. It didn’t look like anyone was grieving at all. Actually, it looked quite like she and Ally were a little bit close. My jaw went tight. I peeked around the end cap again and promptly knocked two bags of cookies to the floor. So much for a stealth move. It didn’t matter, because when I looked up, they weren’t in the seafood department anymore.

That just meant they were ambulant and could come across me at any moment. I knew I should hold my head up high and continue my grocery shopping as if I knew nothing scandalous. I knew I should look surprised and say a pleasant hello if I ran into them. Instead of that, I did what any psycho ex-girlfriend would do: I abandoned my cart and started sneaking from aisle to aisle, looking for them.

Nothing in canned vegetables or ethnic foods. As I neared chips and crackers, I heard the creaking of a cart with a lame wheel too late. There they were, heading right in my direction. I busted ahead and ducked down the cereal aisle, heart pounding.

Now, I was running around the store with no cart to hide behind. I thought about going back to pasta sauce and grabbing it, but I had to turn my back quickly as they passed on their way toward the dairy end of the store.

I followed at a large distance, turning to futz with food every time I sensed them looking in my direction. I was watching them inspect the contents of egg cartons when I saw Veronica’s arm come around Ally’s waist.

I stood stock-still next to a case of frozen sausage, with nothing to hide me. I stood stock-still and stared and felt the icy air creeping through my body. I stood there until they picked out their eggs, laughed about something, and continued on their merry way. They did not look in my direction, which was good, because I couldn’t move a muscle.

Veronica and Ally? How? We’d all been friends. Veronica and I had been together and Ally had been our friend. Now Veronica was in town, putting her arm around her? I didn’t understand. I couldn’t begin to know what to think. I wanted to grab an armful of sausage packages and throw them. Take out a whole orange juice display. Crack a couple freezer cases.

Suddenly, I felt my eyes prickling, and I knew I had to get out of there. I made a beeline for the aisle full of overpriced toiletries, hoping it would be the least populous. Lo and behold, I was the only one there, and it cut a direct route toward the exit. There was no way they could get through self-checkout before I reached the door.

I had a vivid vision of randomly being stopped by the security guard and causing a scene, but nobody waylaid me. I was going fast enough to be irritated by the automatic doors, and continued at that clip all the way to my car, where I could cry in private.

Great. Now my ex was somehow back in town, touching Ally McLaughlin, and I didn’t have any milk. In the grand scheme of things, this had turned into a really shit day.

The evening wasn’t stellar either. I’d meant to make dinner and try to write for a couple of hours, but I spent the time looking through my phone instead. Pictures of Veronica at the riverfront. Veronica at the rooftop party. Veronica with Ollie. Veronica at Ally’s goddamn barbecue. Selfie after selfie of Veronica and me.

I’d texted her three times since she’d been gone. Once was to wish her a happy birthday, another time to ask how her new job was going, and the final time to simply check in. She’d answered me each time, completely amicably. Thank you for the birthday wishes; some of the people from the office took me out. Things are going pretty well, just a bit stressful learning new procedures. Good to hear from you, hope you’re doing okay too. I had more animated text conversations with some of my students about why they hadn’t turned in papers, but that was okay. We weren’t together anymore.

What if this was just one big farce? What if she really wasn’t in St. Louis at all? What if she had never left, just shuttled all of her boxes to a new apartment? What if she just wanted to be able to date Ally and created this whole crazy scenario just to get rid of me?

Okay, that’s fucking paranoid. Even I realized that, and I nipped those thoughts right in the bud. There was no way anyone would do something that insane. Anyway, if she wanted to break up with me, she could have just done it. I would have survived. I always did. I was better now, anyway. I wasn’t clingy and needy and volatile. I had grown so much since my last horrible attempts at being single.

I went to bed and pondered how this whole crazy thing I’d made up about pretending to leave town would make a great scene in my book, although Jace would probably tell me it wasn’t believable. I wanted to think about Lisa Sutherland and her perfect boobs in her perfect kitchen, but I fell asleep with the picture of Veronica’s arm around Ally in my mind.

The next morning, I stopped at Kroger to pick up the groceries I’d abandoned the evening before. I’d been worrying since I woke up that someone had helpfully put my chicken back under the warmers after it had been sitting out in the cart for hours. Surely that would give someone salmonella. Once back home, I made myself a sandwich and sat at the table, scrolling through my phone. I needed to call one of the other teachers at the college about something and, paging through my contacts, came across the law firm of Danziger, Langley, and Small. Without considering what I was doing, I hit send and speakerphone.

The receptionist, Janetta, picked up right away. “Good afternoon, Danziger, Langley, and Small. How may I direct your call?”

I kept myself from calling her by name and asking how she was doing like I had so many times before. “May I please speak with Veronica Hamish?”

“I’m sorry, but she doesn’t work here anymore,” Janetta said.

I let my breath out. There. You were just crazy paranoid last night. Making up a story. It’d be some story, ha-ha. “Thank you so much.” I said.

Before I could hang up, though, Janetta went on. “She’s with Horst and Mellon now. Would you like the number there?”

That was another local firm. When words eventually came out, my voice sounded completely cordial. “No, thank you. Have a nice day.”

I stared out the window, chewing on my sandwich, thinking about nothing. Certainly not thinking about the conversation I’d just had that confirmed that my ex-girlfriend actually staged a move out of state to get away from me.

Chapter Three

My first attempt at therapy came my senior year of college, when the lows went too low and started to get in the way of my schoolwork. For some people, that might have meant the threat of not graduating, but for me it was skipping enough classes to worry about losing my high honors. To my mother’s chagrin, I’d never been a straight-A student, but anything below a B meant failure, so I dragged my ass out of bed at four p.m. one day after missing two classes and walked into health services. Apparently, I sounded unstable enough that I was given an appointment for the next morning.

Nicole was a doctoral student in psychology. She was tall and thin with long, red, curly hair and little round glasses. She wore tweed and absolutely looked the part. During our first appointment, she decided that I exhibited signs of major depression. She also told me in a very proper voice that she could not work with me if I tried to kill myself. That hadn’t been a plan of mine for quite some time, and anyway, I figured that was the truth, that if I was dead, she couldn’t work with me anyway.