She slammed on the brakes and we both jolted forward into our seatbelts. “Sorry! Holy shit! Ok, we’re not going to Pilates. My shoulder hurts too much, anyway,” she told me when I objected, since I knew that she been planning this all week and also how she was worried that she didn’t get enough exercise.
“I can walk home,” I offered. We had only traveled about half a block.
“No, I have an idea,” she said, and we started moving forward again. We ended up at what I might have called a dive bar on Detroit’s East Side, a place called the Crookstown. Ava ordered two Boilermakers.
“It’s a little early,” I pointed out, but she said we were going to be here for a while and would sip.
“What happened?” she demanded. “Why did he come to see you?”
I hadn’t bothered to type up a transcript because, although the words had seemed to seer into my brain as Grant had said them, my memories after he left were so confused that I hadn’t been able to get them out coherently. I rubbed my temples and tried to think.
“He…he…”
“Drink this first,” Ava said, and pushed a shot glass into my hand. “Ready?”
I had thought that we were going to sip, but then she tilted the bottom so that the liquor poured into my mouth. “Joder,” I gasped, when I had swallowed and finished coughing. “What is that?”
“Whiskey.” She gulped her shot then wiped off her mouth on her arm. “Go on and talk.”
The liquor had served to shake free some memories and release them from my lips. “First, he acted surprised at how I looked and he said that I was so beautiful,” I recalled. “But I’m just the same as I was before, now that I’m not grey anymore.”
“Grey?”
“Everything was,” I explained. “But not now. Levi and I spent so much time outside and the idea of being optimistic started as a joke, but then I really tried it. After a while, it came naturallyand then I felt better. Maybe that’s what Grant saw. Maybe I actually am different.”
“You look different to me,” she agreed. “You look a lot happier.”
“He said that, too. He was totally mystified by the fact that I wasn’t in a gutter crying because we’d broken up. He kept asking, ‘You’re really doing ok?’ As if I shouldn’t have been! He was the one who left me, not the other way around. He blocked my number while I was in the hospital when I needed him! Even though I already knew that we had to break up, I still wouldn’t have treated him that way if he had been the one who got hurt.”
“How’d you know that you had to break up?” Ava asked, and pushed the mug towards me. “Drink some beer.”
We both did. “When we had the accident, we were arguing about what he’d said at Lance and Vivienne’s party. We spun out of control to avoid a truck and time slowed down,” I said. “It couldn’t have been more than a second or two before we collided with the cement barrier, but it seemed to last for so long. I saw everything perfectly and I knew that Grant and I were over, that we shouldn’t have been together in the first place. It was crystal clear.”
“What had he said at the party at Landon and Genevieve’s house? What started the argument?” She looked at me over the top of her mug and when I didn’t immediately answer, she nudged me with it.
“It was Lance and Vivienne’s house. We were sitting around their pool and some of his friends started joking about how he was the holdout. They meant that Grant and I weren’t married,but almost everyone else in their group had tried it,” I explained. “Then Lance said, ‘When are you going to do it, Grant? We all have to walk the plank sometime.’” I paused, because the memory of this still hurt. I hadn’t bothered to put it in a transcript since I knew that it would always stick with me, the humiliation and anger I’d felt when my boyfriend had spoken.
“Grant looked at all his friends and told them, ‘I’ll get married someday. But I won’t marry her.’ Then he stared right at me and said, ‘Not Emerson, not ever.’”
“Holy shit,” Ava repeated. “What a douche canoe!”
“I hadn’t nagged him. I hadn’t suggested that we look at rings, I didn’t talk about what I wanted my dress to look like,” I said. “There was no pressure from me, but I thought that five years meant something.”
“Even if he felt that way, why would he have announced it in front of all your friends? Total asshole move.”
“They weren’tmyfriends,” I corrected. “They were his friends, and they thought it was funny. I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach but he wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. Today he explained why.”
“Why? Why?” she demanded.
“It was because of Vivi, his best friend’s wife. Well, she’s not anymore,” I amended, “because they’re getting a divorce.”
“Please explain again who the hell that woman is,” Ava ordered, and I talked about our interactions when Grant and I had beentogether and then her visits to my apartment. As I wrapped up, I noticed the giant number of notifications on my phone.
“Hold on, I have to tell Hernán that I haven’t been kidnapped,” I said. “Estoy bien,” I texted, and then came back to attention. “Where was I?”
“You had told me that Grant acted like a douche donut because of Vivienne but you didn’t explain it,” she answered quickly, gesturing at me to continue.
I rubbed my temples again as I replayed it in my mind. “Grant said that since our accident, his whole life has fallen apart.”
