Page 28 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

Here is what happened tonight, and he’ll never know it happened. He sat four feet from me and mourned me to my face. He said the kindest things anyone has ever said about me — said them right in front of me, to a woman he thinks never met her. He misses a woman I deleted in April. He hopes she’s okay. I sat there and watched him hope it.

Pieces of what he said keep coming back. The follow-up question. The hotel breakfast. Fourteen months of him trying to get her — trying to get me — to ask him for one single thing.

He noticed. All those nights, three in the morning, I sat half asleep at the ring light telling myself it was rent money and nothing else. He was on the other end, noticing that I never asked for anything. Nobody in my life has ever noticed that. The people who know me best have known me for years and never once caught it, and a man who didn’t know my name caught it from a chat window.

I get up because sitting still has stopped being possible. I don’t decide anything. I’m just moving — out my door, down the hall. Then I’m standing in front of his door with my hand up, knuckles an inch from the wood, and the light is still on underneath it.

Two words. It’s me.

I stand there and run it forward, because that’s the only thing I know how to do with a decision. I say it’s me. There’s a second where it doesn’t land. Then it lands. And then his face changes — that’s what I can’t get past, no matter which version I run. In every single one, his face changes, and it never changes back. He’s the man who told me the whole thing tonight, plainly, with his hands quiet on a wine glass. He’d go back through every sentence he’s ever said to me and watch it mean something different. The gala. The stairs. Tonight. And everything we’ve built in these two months would turn into something different in his memory. Tonight I watched him refuse to think less of her. There’s no version where he doesn’t think less of me.

And I’d lose everything on the same night, in order. The job. Teddy’s wake-ups. Margot’s yogurt smile that isn’t for me yet but was getting there. And him — both of him, the man who typed goodnight and the man who says it through a door. Gone in one sentence. And I’d have been the one who said it.

Two months ago the list of things I could lose in this house was a paycheck. Look at it now.

My hand is still up. The light under his door goes off while I’m standing there. It would be easy to say that’s what decided it. Nothing decided it. I put my hand down myself. That one is mine to own. I walk back down the hall on the outsides of my feet, past the kids’ empty rooms. Nobody will ever know how close I came except me.

* * *

Three in the morning finds me where it always finds me. Kitchen, no big light, the pan I don’t have to think about.

Rice, a fried egg on top, soy sauce. I eat it standing at the counter in the dark. This exact plate has been dinner on the worst nights of my whole life. It always helps a little, and a little is what I’ve got room for. Brenda, for once, keeps her opinions to herself.

My phone sits on the counter while I eat. I pick it up and put it down twice. Bex would wake up for this — she’d be kind, and quick, and on my side in four seconds flat. But half of this secret belongs to a man asleep upstairs, and I can’t give his half away to feel better about mine.

He was FOURTEEN. I am JUNO. Tonight he told June the whole story of JUNO, start to finish, and every person in that story is standing at this counter eating rice. He is the only man alive who could forgive both of us, and he’s the one person I can never ask.

I wash the pan, dry it, put it away, and go up while it’s still dark.

He comes down at eight looking like he slept the whole night through. Hair wrecked, Saturday sweater, easy in his shoulders in a way I’ve never seen him. “Morning,” he says, and pours my coffee before his own, like it’s nothing, like it’s a thing that happens in this kitchen.

A man who finally told his secret to somebody, and slept better for it. Except the somebody he told is the one person on earth who already knew the other half. His secret and mine are the same secret now, and I’m the only one holding it. I did this to myself. I asked the question.

“Big plans today?” he says.

I answer something normal — I couldn’t tell you what. All I can think about is what I’m doing. Standing in his kitchen. Holding my coffee. Liking him this much. Lying to him. All at the same time, in daylight.

Gus

I spend Friday finding reasons not to be home, which takes some doing when your kids are at their grandmother’s and your calendar is empty.

I drive to the facility and sit through a practice nobody needs me at. Lunch is with Mitch, who watches me chew for most of it and finally says, “You’re chewing very thoughtfully,” which from Mitch is an interrogation. There’s a haircut involved, two weeks after my last one, and the barber has the sense not to mention it. By the time I run out of city, it’s dark, and I’ve admitted the thing I’ve been driving around all day. I told her everything last night, and it was the easiest three hours of my life. It should have been hard. The fact that it was easy — that everything with her is easy — scares me more than the secret ever did.

The kitchen is lit up like a control tower when I come in. Every cabinet is open. The counters are covered in everything we own — cans, flour, the good pot, the bad pots, a shoebox of loose birthday candles I could not have told you we had. June is on the step stool with her back to me, unloading the highest shelf with more force than shelving requires.

“We got burgled,” I say. “They took nothing and alphabetized us.”

“Your pantry was a crime scene.” She doesn’t turn around. “There were three open bags of the same rice. Three, Gus.”

It’s nine o’clock on her Friday night. The kids are gone, the house is empty, and she’s on a step stool sorting my rice. I know her by now — I know what busy hands mean, and I know what this much busy means. I put my keys in the bowl.

“Leave it,” I say. “It’s your weekend too. I’ll order something. Go call Bex, watch a movie, be a person.”

“This is me being a person.”

“June. Off duty. The shelf will still be a crime scene tomorrow.”

“I’m almost done.”