Happy Birthday, Again

I woke up at 7:14 on the rusty patio sofa in Mollie's garage with a bathrobe draped over me and no memory of getting there, which is a bad way to start your twenty-ninth birthday. The bathrobe was hers, fuzzy and purple, and it smelled like her shampoo, and my head was pounding like somebody was knocking on a door inside my skull. Above me hung the broken café lights she'd strung up two summers ago and never fixed, half the bulbs dead, the rest glowing faintly in the morning light coming through the gap under the garage door. I sat up slow and my entire body complained about it.

The plastic crate was still sitting there as the coffee table, and the garage still smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and motor oil, and I was wearing my uniform trousers from last night's shift with my duty shirt somewhere else and just the t-shirt underneath. So I'd come here straight from work, apparently, still half in uniform, and apparently somebody had decided I shouldn't sleep sitting up in full patrol gear. That somebody was Mollie, I figured, because this was her garage and her robe on my shoulders.

The morning-after routine was familiar in a way I hated. I knew where she kept the spare glasses, in the cabinet over the dryer, because I'd put them there myself once. I knew the sound her kitchen window makes when she opens it. I knew that if I sat still long enough she'd come out here, and I knew I'd pretend I didn't know that.

She did come out, of course. The door from the house opened and she stepped down in her slippers with two mugs, thirty-one years old, hair still damp from the shower, wearing jeans and an old flannel of mine that I never got back. She handed me a mug of black coffee and two aspirin without a word, then sat down on the plastic crate across from me, which was a small thing to do and somehow felt enormous.

"Thanks," I said, and put the aspirin in my mouth and washed them down.

"You're welcome," she said, and wrapped both hands around her own mug, and then the silence just stretched out there between us like a rope neither of us wanted to pick up. The coffee was hot and bitter and exactly right. A car went by at the end of the cul-de-sac and I heard the mail truck idling somewhere up on Harbor Bend Circle, doing its route, because it was Thursday and the world was still going about its business while I sat in my ex's garage in a bathrobe.

I looked at my phone. Four missed calls from Genevieve, timestamped around one in the morning, and a text that just said did you make it there ok. And under those, the last thing I'd typed, which was Mollie's name, at 12:52 AM. I stared at that until it made sense.

"I called you," I said. "Last night. Drunk."

"You called me," she agreed, not making it easy, just drinking her coffee.

"And you... picked up? You actually picked up?"

"Third time you called. I figured the first two were accidental and the third one was you being stubborn about it." She blew on her coffee. "You sounded awful, Cyril. Not sad-drunk awful. Just, worn through, you know? Like a sock with a hole in it."

"So you told me to come over."

"I told you to take an Uber." She looked at me over the rim of her mug. "You said you were already walking. You said, and I quote, I'm basically already there, which was not true, you were like fifteen minutes away, but I wasn't going to let you wander Sunwick at one in the morning in your uniform looking like you'd been mugged by your own birthday."

I laughed, which hurt my head, and she didn't smile, and that told me more than anything else. She'd been up waiting. She'd gotten my duty shirt and belt off me and put her robe on my shoulders and I don't even know where she slept, whether she took the couch or sat up, and I wasn't going to ask because I was scared of the answer.

Here's what I pieced together about the night before, mostly in the shower of the garage bathroom with the coffee going cold on the crate. It was a bad shift, the kind where a domestic call goes sideways and you spend forty minutes talking a man off his own porch railing and then the paperwork eats the rest of your night. And it was the last shift of my twenty-eighth year, which shouldn't mean anything, except that lately every birthday has felt less like a party and more like a clock winding down, like some part of me keeps an internal audit of what I was supposed to have by now and comes back every October with a red mark in the margin.

So at some point around midnight I'd sat in the patrol car in the station lot and opened the dating app, which I've deleted and reinstalled four times since we broke up, and scrolled through strangers. And every single one of them was a stranger, was the thing, was a nice woman I'd have to explain myself to, was small talk and coffee dates and the slow careful work of letting somebody in from scratch, and I just couldn't. I couldn't do the from-scratch thing one more time on my birthday. So I called the one person who already knew me, and she picked up, and that's how I ended up here.

"You know Genevieve called you four times," I said, when I came back out with the coffee.

"I know, I heard your phone buzzing in your pocket like a wasp in a jar. She was convinced you were dead in a ditch." Mollie finally smiled a little, just at the corner. "I texted her at two. Dead in a ditch, but a warm ditch with coffee in the morning."

"She's going to be insufferable about this."

"She already is. She made me promise to make you stay for birthday dinner tonight. She's cooking. She bought a cake, Cyril, she bought it yesterday afternoon, before any of this happened, so don't go thinking we planned some kind of ambush."

"I wasn't thinking that."

"You were a little bit thinking that." She set her mug down on the crate and looked at me, and her voice went quieter, the way it does when she's about to say the true thing. "We should talk about this before your birthday dinner. Whatever this is. Because you showing up drunk at my door six months after I ended it, on the eve of you turning twenty-nine, that's not nothing, and I'm not going to pretend it's nothing so we can eat Gen's cake and never say it out loud."

I held the mug with both hands and watched the steam come off it and didn't have anything yet.

"I keep a spare key under the frog," she went on, "and last night I stood in my kitchen for a full minute deciding whether to just tell you where it was, and I did, and you said, you remember what you said? You said, I don't need the key, I'll wait, like an idiot, and then you stood on my porch in the cold until I opened the door."

"That sounds like me."

"It does." She rubbed her thumb along the handle of her mug, back and forth. "You looked at me like I was going to turn you away. And I want to know why you thought that, when you've got a key to this house, Cyril, you've had one since February and you've never once used it."

The garage was quiet except for the mail truck pulling away up the street, and I sat there in her robe with her coffee going cold in my hands and no good answer, because the true one was going to take longer than one breath, and I could tell she knew that too, and was willing to wait for it.

I set the mug down on the crate and looked at the broken café lights strung along the ceiling, the ones we put up two summers ago and never fixed, half of them dark, and I said, "Okay. The true thing. The reason I've never used the key is that using the key means I live here, or could, and every time things got good between us I started waiting for the part where you'd realize I wasn't..." I stopped, because the sentence had a floor I wasn't ready to look at.

"Realize what," she said, not unkindly.

"That I wasn't somebody you'd want long term. That is the entire shape of it, Mol. I kept waiting for you to get tired of me, so I got tired of you first, in a way, I just did it quietly, by pulling back every time you asked for more."

She took that in, and she didn't reach for my hand or soften it, which I appreciated even as it stung. "Thank you," she said. "That's the most honest thing you've said to me in about a year. And I need you to hear the next part with that same honesty, because it changes the math." She pulled the flannel tighter around herself, my flannel, the one I never got back, and she said, "I'm seeing someone."

The words landed in my chest before my brain got involved. "Seeing someone," I repeated, like a parrot. "Like dating. Like, right now, currently?"

"Her name is Reid. She's thirty, she's a welder, she's got forearms like a dockworker and she's very patient with me, which is more than I can say for some people." She wasn't being cruel about it, she was being careful, the way you handle something you know is going to cut somebody. "We've had three dates. It's new. But it's real, and I'm not going to hide it from you to protect your feelings, because hiding things is what broke us."

And here's the ugly part, the part I didn't expect. I felt jealous. Not a little wistful oh-isn't-that-nice feeling, but a hot, sharp, hand-around-the-lung kind of jealousy, the kind I've only felt chasing a car that just blew a red light, and I hated myself for it within about two seconds, because what right did I have. Six months. She ended it. I deleted and reinstalled a dating app four times instead of calling her, and now she goes on three dates with a woman who fixes things for a living and my body reacts like it's an emergency.

"Okay," I said, and my voice came out strange. "Okay. Good for you. Reid. Welder."

"Cyril."

"No, it's fine, I'm fine, I'm happy for you, I'm." I picked up the coffee and put it back down without drinking any. "I guess I thought, coming here last night, that the clock had been stopped this whole time, for both of us, you know, like a museum. And it wasn't. You kept living. You were allowed to keep living. I just didn't think about what that meant until you said a name I've never heard."

She watched me for a moment and then she got up and came around the crate and sat down next to me on the rusty sofa, close but not touching, and the springs complained under both of us. "I'm not telling you that to wound you," she said. "I'm telling you because if we're going to figure out what last night was, you need to know the field you're playing on. And also because if you felt that in your chest just now, that awful pinch, I need you to look at it. Not run from it into a bottle or a patrol car or a stranger's apartment. Look at it and tell me what it is."

"It's me being an idiot," I said.

"It might be," she said. "Or it might be the first time in a year you've let yourself want something out loud, even to yourself. Those can feel identical from the inside."

I thought about that. I thought about Reid, who I'd never met, and I tried to picture her and couldn't, and the weird thing was the jealousy wasn't really about her at all, it was about the three dates, the ordinary Tuesdays and Fridays that Mollie had without me, the life going on. "I'm not going to ask you to stop seeing her," I said finally. "That would be insane. I showed up drunk on your porch six hours ago."

"You are the only person who gets to decide what you ask for," she said. "But I'm glad you know that."

At which point the mudroom door banged open and Genevieve came through it carrying a laundry basket, twenty-seven years old, hair piled up with a pencil stuck in it, wearing Mollie's other robe, the gray one, and she stopped dead when she saw me sitting on the sofa in the purple robe with the cold coffee. She looked at me, then at Mollie, then back at me, and one eyebrow went up about a millimeter, which from Genevieve is a whole paragraph.