Why We Broke Up Read online

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  For Charlotte—why we got together

  —D.H. + M.K.

  In a sec you’ll hear a thunk. At your front door, the one nobody uses. It’ll rattle the hinges a bit when it lands, because it’s so weighty and important, a little jangle along with the thunk, and Joan will look up from whatever she’s cooking. She will look down in her saucepan, worried that if she goes to see what it is it’ll boil over. I can see her frown in the reflection of the bubbly sauce or whatnot. But she’ll go, she’ll go and see. You won’t, Ed. You wouldn’t. You’re upstairs probably, sweaty and alone. You should be taking a shower, but you’re heartbroken on the bed, I hope, so it’s your sister, Joan, who will open the door even though the thunk’s for you. You won’t even know or hear what’s being dumped at your door. You won’t even know why it even happened.

  It’s a beautiful day, sunny and whatnot. The sort of day when you think everything will be all right, etc. Not the right day for this, not for us, who went out when it rains, from October 5 until November 12. But it’s December now, and the sky is bright, and it’s clear to me. I’m telling you why we broke up, Ed. I’m writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.

  The thunk is the box, Ed. This is what I am leaving you. I found it down in the basement, just grabbed the box when all of our things were too much for my bed stand drawer. Plus I thought my mom would find some of the things, because she’s a snoop for my secrets. So it all went into the box and the box went into my closet with some shoes on top of it I never wear. Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes and the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything and whatnot kicked to the curb. I’m dumping the whole box back into your life, Ed, every item of you and me. I’m dumping this box on your porch, Ed, but it is you, Ed, who is getting dumped.

  The thunk, I admit it, will make me smile. A rare thing lately. Lately I’ve been like Aimeé Rondelé in The Sky Cries Too, a movie, French, you haven’t seen. She plays an assassin and dress designer, and she only smiles twice in the whole film. Once is when the kingpin who killed her father gets thrown off the building, which is not the time I’m thinking of. It’s the time at the end, when she finally has the envelope with the photographs and burns it unopened in the gorgeous ashtray and she knows it’s over and lights a cigarette and stands in that perfect green of a dress watching the blackbirds swarm and flurry around the church spire. I can see it. The world is right again, is the smile. I loved you and now here’s back your stuff, out of my life like you belong, is the smile. I know you can’t see it, not you, Ed, but maybe if I tell you the whole plot you’ll understand it this once, because even now I want you to see it. I don’t love you anymore, of course I don’t, but still there’s something I can show you. You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

  I wrote my favorite quote on the lid of this box, from Hawk Davies, who is a legend, and I’m writing this letter with the lid of this box as a desk so I can feel Hawk Davies flowing through every word I write to you. Al’s father’s shop’s truck rattles so sometimes the words are shaky, so that’s your tough luck as you read every word of this. I called Al this morning, and right away when I said, “Guess what?” he said, “You’re going to ask me to help you run an errand in my dad’s truck.”

  “You’re good at guessing,” I said. “That’s very close.”

  “Close?”

  “OK, yes, that’s it.”

  “OK, give me a sec to find my keys and I’ll pick you up.”

  “They should be in your jacket, from last night.”

  “You’re good too.”

  “Don’t you want to know what the errand is?”

  “You can tell me when I get there.”

  “I want to tell you now.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Min,” he said.

  “Call me La Desperada,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m giving back Ed’s stuff.” I said it after a deep breath, and then I heard him take one, too.

  “Finally.”

  “Yeah. My end of the deal, right?”

  “When you’re ready, yeah. So, you’re ready?”

  Another one, deeper but shakier. “Yes.”

  “Are you sad about it?”

  “No.”

  “Min.”

  “OK, yes.”

  “OK, I have my keys. Five minutes.”

  “OK.”

  “OK?”

  “It’s just that I’m looking at the quote on the box. You know, Hawk Davies. You either have the feeling or you don’t.”

  “Five minutes, Min.”

  “Al, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even—”

  “Min, it’s OK.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s just that the box is so heavy I don’t know—”

  “It’s OK, Min. And of course I have to.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed through the phone and I kept staring at the top of the box. I’ll miss seeing the quote when I open my closet, but I will not, Ed, I don’t miss you. “Because, Min,” Al said, “the keys were right in my jacket, where you said they’d be.”

  Al is a good, good person, Ed. It was Al’s party where you and I first met, not that he invited you because he had no opinion of you then and so didn’t invite you or any of your grunty jock crowd to his Bitter Sixteen party. I left school early to help him with the dandelion green pesto made with gorgonzola cheese instead of parmesan for extra bitterness that we served on top of the squid ink gnocchi from his dad’s shop and mix up the blood orange vinaigrette for the fruit salad and cook up that huge 89 percent cacao dark chocolate cake in the shape of a big black heart so bitter we couldn’t really eat it, but you just waltzed in uninvited with Trevor and Christian and all them to skulk in the corner and not touch anything except, like, nine bottles of Scarpia’s Bitter Black Ale. I was a good guest, Ed, and you didn’t even say “bitter birthday” to your host and give a present, and that is why we broke up.

  These are the caps from the bottles of Scarpia’s Bitter Black Ale that you and I drank in Al’s backyard that night. I can see the stars bright and prickly and our breathing steamy in the cold, you in your team jacket and me in that cardigan of Al’s I always borrow at his house. He had it waiting, clean and folded, when I went upstairs with him to give him his present before the guests arrived.

  “I told you I didn’t want a present,” Al said. “The party was enough I told you, without the obligatory—”

  “It’s not obligatory,” I said, having used the same vocabulary flash cards with Al when we were freshmen. “I found something. It’s perfect. Open it.”

  He took the bag from me, nervous.

  “Come on, happy birthday.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your heart’s desire. I hope. Open it. You’re driving me crazy.”

  Rustle rustle rip, and he sort of gasped. It was very satisfying. “Where did you find this?”

  “Does it not,” I said, “I mean exactly, look like what the guy wears in the party scene in Una settimana straordinaria?”

  He smiled into the slender box. It was a necktie, dark green with modern diamond shapes stitched into it in a line. It’d been in my sock drawer for months, waiting. “Take it out,” I said. “Wear it tonight. Does it not, exactly?”

  “When he gets out of the Porcini XL10,” he said, but he was looking at me.

  “Your absolute favorite scene in any movie. I hope you love it.”

  “I do, Min. I do love it. Where did you find it?”


  “I snuck off to Italy and seduced Carlo Ronzi, and when he fell asleep I slipped into his costume archives—”

  “Min.”

  “Tag sale. Let me put it on you.”

  “I can tie my own tie, Min.”

  “Not on your birthday.” I fiddled with his collar. “They’re going to eat you up in this.”

  “Who is?”

  “Girls. Women. At the party.”

  “Min, it’s going to be the same friends who always come.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “Min.”

  “Aren’t you ready? I mean, I am. Totally over Joe. That make-out date in the summer, no way. And you. LA was like a million years—”

  “It was last year. This year, really, but last school year.”

  “Yeah, and junior year’s started up, the first big thing we’re having. Aren’t you ready? For a party and romance and Una settimana straordinaria? Aren’t you, I don’t know, hungry for—”

  “I’m hungry for the pesto.”

  “Al.”

  “And for people to have fun. That’s it. It’s just a birthday.”

  “It’s Bitter Sixteen! You’re telling me that if the girl pulled up in the Porcini whatever—”

  “OK, yes, the car I’m ready for.”

  “When you’re twenty-one,” I told him, “I’ll buy you the car. Tonight it’s the tie, and something—”

  He sighed, so slow, at me. “You can’t do this, Min.”

  “I can find you your heart’s desire. Look, I did it once.”

  “It’s the tie you can’t do. It’s like you’re braiding a lanyard. Let go.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “But thank you.”

  I fixed his hair. “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “The cardigan’s over there when you get cold.”

  “Yes, because I’ll be huddled outside somewhere and you’ll be in a world of passion and adventure.”

  “And pesto, Min. Don’t forget about the pesto.”

  Downstairs Jordan had put on the bitter mix we’d slaved over, and Lauren was walking around with a long wooden match lighting candles. Quiet on the set, is how it felt, just ten minutes with everything crackling in the air and nothing happening. And then with a swoosh of his parents’ screen door, a carload of Monica and her brother and that guy who plays tennis came in with wine they’d snitched from her mom’s housewarming—still wrapped in silly gift paper—and turned up the music and the night began to begin. I kept quiet about my quest but kept looking for someone for Al. But the girls were wrong that night, glitter on their cheeks or too jumpy, stupid about movies or already having boyfriends. And then it was late, the ice mostly water in the big glass bowl, like the end of the polar caps. Al kept saying it wasn’t time for the cake and then like a song we’d forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.

  You looked strong, Ed. I guess you always looked strong, your shoulders and your jaw, your arms leading you through the room, your neck where I know now you like to be kissed. Strong and showered, confident, friendly even, but not eager to please. Enormous like a shout, well rested, able-bodied. Showered I said. Gorgeous, Ed, is what I mean. I gasped like Al did when I gave him the perfect present.

  “I love this song,” somebody said.

  You must always do this at a party, Ed, a slow shrugging path from room to room, nodding at everyone with your eyes on the next place to go. Some people glared, a few guys high-fived you and Trevor and Christian almost blocked them like bodyguards. Trevor was really drunk and you followed him as he slid through a doorway out of view and I made myself wait until the song hit the chorus again before I went looking. I don’t know why, Ed. It’s not like I hadn’t seen you before. Everyone had, you’re like, I don’t know, some movie everyone sees growing up, everybody’s seen you, nobody can remember not seeing you. But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night. I squoze by that guy who won the science prize, and looked in the dining room, the den with the framed photos of Al uncomfortable on the steps of church. It was flushed, every room, too hot and too loud, and I ran up the stairs, knocked in case people were in Al’s bed already, picked up the cardigan, and then slipped outside for air and in case you were in the yard. And you were, you were. What would bring me to do such a thing, you standing grinning holding two beers with Trevor sick in Al’s mom’s flower bed? I wasn’t supposed to be looking, not for me. It wasn’t my birthday, is what I thought. There’s no reason I should have been out here like this, in the yard, on a limb. You were Ed Slaterton, for God’s sake, I said to myself, you weren’t even invited. What was wrong with me? What was I doing? But out loud I was talking to you and asking you what was wrong.

  “Nothing with me,” you said. “Trev’s a little sick, though.”

  “Fuck you,” Trevor gurgled from the bushes.

  You laughed and I laughed too. You held up the bottles to the porch light to see which was which. “Here, nobody’s touched this one.”

  I don’t usually drink beer. Or, really, anything. I took the bottle. “Wasn’t this for your friend?”

  “He shouldn’t mix,” you said. “He’s already had half a bottle of Parker’s.”

  “Really?”

  You looked at me, and then took the bottle back because I couldn’t get it open. You did it in a sec and dropped the two caps in my hand like coins, secret treasure, when you handed the beer back to me. “We lost,” you explained.

  “What does he do when you win?” I asked.

  “Drinks half a bottle of Parker’s,” you said, and then you—

  Joan told me later that you got beat up once at a jock party after a losing game so that’s why you end up at other people’s parties when you lose. She told me it would be hard dating her brother the basketball star. “You’ll be a widow,” she told me, licking the spoon and turning up Hawk. “A basketball widow, bored out of your mind while he dribbles all over the world.”

  I thought, and I was stupid, that I didn’t care.

  —and then you asked me my name. I told you it was Min, short for Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, because my dad was getting his master’s when I was born, and that, don’t even ask, no you couldn’t, only my grandmother could call me Minnie because, she told me and I imitated her voice, she loved me the best of anyone.

  You said your name was Ed. Like I might not know that. I asked you how you lost.

  “Don’t,” you said. “If I have to tell you how we lost, it will hurt all of my feelings.”

  I liked that, all of my feelings. “Every last one?” I asked. “Really?”

  “Well,” you said, and took a sip, “I might have one or two left. I might still have a feeling.”

  I had a feeling too. Of course you told me anyway, Ed, because you’re a boy, how you lost the game. Trevor snored on the lawn. The beer tasted bad to me, and I quietly poured it behind my back into the cold ground, and inside people were singing. Bitter birthday to you, bitter birthday to you, bitter birthday to Al—and Al never gave me a hard time about staying out there with a boy he had no opinion about instead of coming in to watch him blow out the sixteen black candles on that dark, inedible heart—bitter birthday to you. You told the whole story, your lean arms in your jacket crackling and jerky, and you replayed all your moves. Basketball is still incomprehensible to me, some shouty frantic bouncing thing in uniform, and although I didn’t listen I hung on every word. Do you know what I liked, Ed? The word layup, the sexy plan of it. I savored that word, layup layup layup, through your feints and penalties, your free throws and blocked shots and the screwups that made it all go down. The layup, the swooping move of doing it like you planned, while all the guests kept singing in the house, For he’s a bitter good fellow, for he’s a bitter good fellow, for he’s a bitter good fellow, which nobody can deny. The song I’d keep, for the movie, so loud through the window your words were all a sporty blur as you finished your game and threw the b
ottle into an elegant shatter on the fence, and then you started to ask:

  “Could I call you—”

  I thought you were going to ask if you could call me Minnie. But you just wanted to know if you could call me. Who were you to do that, who was I saying yes? I would have said yes, Ed, would have let you call me the thing I hated to be called except by the one who loves me best of anyone. Instead I said yes, sure, you could call me about maybe a movie next weekend, and Ed, the thing with your heart’s desire is that your heart doesn’t even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted, the best gift. I hadn’t even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart’s desire kicking Trevor awake and loping off into the sweet late night.

  “Was that—Ed Slaterton?” Lauren asked, with a bag in her hand.

  “When?” I said.

  “Before. Don’t say when. It was. Who invited him? That’s crazy, him here.”

  “I know,” I said. “Right? Nobody.”

  “And was he getting your number?”

  I closed my hand on the bottle caps so nobody could see them. “Um.”

  “Ed Slaterton is asking you out? Ed Slaterton asked you out?”

  “He didn’t ask me out,” I said, technically. “He just asked me if he could—”

  “If he could what?”

  The bag rustled in the wind. “If he could ask me out,” I admitted.

  “Dear God in heaven,” Lauren said, and then, quickly, “as my mother would say.”

  “Lauren—”

  “Min just got asked out by Ed Slaterton,” she called into the house.

  “What?” Jordan stepped out. Al peered startled and suddenly through the kitchen window, frowning over the sink like I was a raccoon.

  “Min just got asked out—”

  Jordan looked around the yard for him. “Really?”

  “No,” I said, “not really. He just asked for my number.”