Long pause.
“Not even... stop calling? Take a hint and leave me alone?”
I could hear it in his voice. It bothered Oliver that Jonas was trying to contact me. And that caused the hint of a smile to rise to my lips.
I set the glue gun down. “Jonas and I have been through several breakups over the years. Probably half a dozen.”
Oliver frowned.
“They’ve never lasted more than a week, month tops.”
The frown in his blue eyes deepened, and I hurried on. “And I always let him come back. It’s been three years without a breakup. I thought we had finally moved beyond the threat of one. I thought we had finally moved on to...” I hesitate, not wanting to say the wordmarriageor anything related to it. “To other things, but obviously that wasn’t the case. And... maybe he hasn’t moved on, but I have.”
I lifted my chin, as Elodie almost nightly instructed me to during her evening TED Talk with me as the single audience member. The theme:Why You Are Better than JonasandHow You Will Do Everything I Say to Get Him Rinsed Out of Your Life.“So. I’m going to do things my way this time. And that includes letting Elodie act as my contact and mediator on my behalf.”
The air visibly lifted with Elodie’s name. Oliver had heard enough of Elodie by this time—even heard her over speakerphone a time or two in all her brassy glory—to like and trust her intrinsically. “And so what do you do?”
“My job,” I raise my chin, “according to Elodie, is to silence my phone. Next week I’m supposed to move on to blocking the number, but . . . I’m just not quite there yet.”
I felt cowardly as I said it. After all, what sort of idiot hung on to the threads of a bad relationship? Even if it was just a number you didn’t ever want to answer?
“Ah. I see. Elodie does have it all figured out.” But despite his tone, Oliver’s eyes were warm. In them he seemed to be holding a well-ful of thoughts. “And really, it’s wise not to rush,” he said at last, then picked up the glue gun and held it out to me. “Sometimes, I think, just sitting with the reality of what you inevitably must do is enough.”
That night, I blocked Jonas’s number.
And, surprisingly, didn’t feel that sense of remorse I had so dreaded. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel anything at all.
I pause in my scanning of the newspaper and turn to the chessboard on the seat beside me. It’s been an hour now, and I still haven’t pressed the trigger on a move.
“He’s going to go for the bishop,” Clarence says, and I look over to see a heaping spoonful of oatmeal in his hand, the bowl half empty.
“I thought about that. But surely he wouldn’t expose his castle this early in the game...”
I spend another minute mulling it over, then hasten when Clarence announces he spies Oliver coming down the aisle.
I knock over his pawn with my bishop a millisecond before I feel him standing over me. He pats my chair.
“Cutting it a little close, aren’t you, Fairbanks? So. Have Istumped you?” Oliver stands above me, hand resting easily on the top of my chair, looking like a child who knows he’s two moves away from undeniable victory.
“Like the last two times? Oh wait. Sorry, I get so confused between you and Clarence.”
Clarence, who did in fact win the past two games, grins surreptitiously over his bowl.
It didn’t take long for Oliver to go from being the interested bystander in our games to wanting a go of his own on the board. The only problem, of course, was that a single game tended to clog up an entire day with how busy he was running from game to business. So eventually at a stop outside Cleveland one night, we found a solution. Found another board, and now we keep two games running: one between Clarence and me, and one with Oliver. The only rule is that every time he passes by our compartment, a movemustbe made, and every time he stops at our seats, I must’ve made my own move or else I forfeit a piece.
This, as one might expect given how often he finds himself rushing from one car to another, often turns out to be quite humorous. Let’s just say I’ve won (and lost) my share of queens by millisecond mistakes.
“Will you be coming out tonight?” I say to Clarence, who has chosen a quieter evening in his car the past two nights over the fray.
I see Clarence give his son a meaningful look, although why, I can’t tell. “Plan on it. Going to help Mrs.Byrd out with a little inventory this afternoon first.”
I shake my head. “You put the definition of retirement to shame, Clarence. I think you work more than most employed people here.”
And it’s true, although I’ve learned over the past two weeks that that’s exactly how he likes it. Much like me, Clarence can’t seem to completely cease work, and more often than not in the afternoons, I find him gone missing into the kitchen to help with some disaster. (According to Mrs.Byrd it’s always a disaster, whereas to Clarence, pots could be flying past his head and he’d comment about the flock of Canadian geese out the window.) And the number of times staff have deferred to him... I have literally had to stop an elf from waking Clarence up over a question about restocking toilet paper. It seems that no matter what, when you’ve been in charge for so long, there’s just no getting out of the wordsconductor in chief.
Which, to be fair, did save me. It was the afternoon after the fiasco of a room tour with Ian, and I was head deep into a book when Ian sidled up to me.
“Package delivery, MissFairbanks,” he had said, his voice a near whisper as his eyes shifted from Clarence’s sleeping face back to mine. There was a twinkle in his eye as he held the gold-and-green package in both hands. “Now I know it isn’t Christmas yet, and we’ll have to keep it in my room for a while, but as this came special from the North Pole...”
