Page 55 of Back for Seconds

She didn’t want it either. She liked her life without me. I knew she did. She had her new job in a new city. This was just a chance to kick me one last time before the door slammed shut and sealed permanently.

Amber’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “Joey, I…”

I pushed back from the table in a sudden rush of noise. Pulled on my jacket, yanked my hat down over my ears. Pushed my chair in.

“I’m sorry, Amber, really. I am. For how I let us end. For all the ways I let you down. For lying and withholding pieces of myself.”

Amber snapped her jaw shut and swallowed hard. Then, she nodded.

I waited for a moment. Was she sorry too?

I couldn’t shake the memory of Darla’s face when she saw Isaac. Ten years together. Had her parents ever met mine? Maybe once or twice. My parents had been to their cabin in the Poconos for the Fourth of July. Had they ever met Isaac? Maybe when he was still a surly teen, locked in his bedroom.

Had I really failed to bring up the nuances of his life? Isaac’s diagnosis wasn’t a weird thing to mention—it was just the water we swam in. But I could be really protective over him, wanting to shield Isaac from the endless ways prejudice and pre-conceived notions could slip into his life and hurt him where he least expected it. Yes, I was protective to a fault, I knew that…

But I had to wonder: Had it been Amber who held some things back?

I had a hand on the door handle when I turned back to face her. My heart pounded in my throat.

“Your mom met Isaac for the first time.” She looked at me, confused. “She didn’t know he used a wheelchair.”

Her lips parted. Lips I’d kissed hundreds, thousands of times. Lips I’d once known well enough to draw from memory. “Merry Christmas,” I said, and I let the door close behind me.

***

I had been a sensitive kid.

A big boy—tall and overweight—with a lot of big feelings. Commercials about dogs made my chest ripple with hurt; movies about kids getting left behind made me so scared, I’d have nightmares for weeks. I couldn’t crawl into bed with my parents, so I’d sleep on the floor by their bedroom door. Pillow under my head, focusing on the steady in and out of Mom’s soft snoring—that’s what calmed me down. The hymns at Mass made my eyes mist, so did the Nicene Creed. 9/11 confused me, terrified me, made me afraid of train stations and shopping malls.

And when it wasn’t safe to cry, I used my fists.

I fought with my older brothers when they wouldn’t slow down or make space for Isaac. I fought with Isaac’s classmates when they called him names, made hurtful jokes, left him out. I dove headfirst into fights between other kids, pulling them apart, taking the rogue swing, throwing back my own.

Words weren’t my forte—never have been—but I fought with my mom when she said we were moving to Miami, away from Evergreen, closer to her parents. Dad was softer, a quiet and gentle man, and he saw that same tender hurt in me. A scaredy-cat stuck in a big, fearsome body. He made sure we stayed.

Years later, I fought with my grandmother when, sometime around my eighteenth birthday, she said I was too old to spend Sundays at her house, the little blue cottage on Venus Avenue. I didn’t live there anymore. I needed to go out, meet a girl.

And I’d cried—sobbed until I felt sick—when she died, the summer I turned twenty-two. That was the first time I broke up with Amber. We’d only been together for seven months; I didn’t know that I was setting up the pieces for a game we’d play for the next nine years and three months.

Now, at thirty-one, I had a better handle on how I felt. On what I was supposed to feel, how I was supposed to feel it. There wasn’t time for me to sob with my head in my hands. People needed me—to be on time, to be emotionally regulated, to maintain the balance between my older brothers’ fiery joie de vivre that bordered on machismo and my younger brother’s wobbly sense of self as he began navigating adult life.

I channeled it all into lifting weights. Weights heavier than the sinking in my stomach.

As long as my muscles burned harder and hotter than the horrible acid that ran up and down my throat—as long as I could get out of my brain and into my body for just a moment—I knew I would be ok.

I left Amber at the coffee shop and walked ten blocks to the gym, battling against the frigid winter air whipping off the ocean and cutting across my cheeks like knives. The streets were empty, as was the gym, save for a few particularly dedicated and veiny gym bros whose focus was unmatched.

We greeted each other with terse head bobs. I stripped down to gym shorts and a T-shirt, put in my AirPods, and did exactly what June probably thought I did: I grunted like a caveman and threw some heavy shit around.

Wasted ten years of her life. That was how Amber saw us; who else had seen it that way? Had every fucking person in this town been shaking their heads and rolling their eyes behind my back?

I was just some bonehead townie trying to win over a woman I could never, ever make happy. It was becoming clear to me why I’d never given the future of my goofy-ass JoeyDaVegan page much thought. Amber hadn’t liked the time I spent working on it, hadn’t understood that it was an opportunity. She hadn’t even liked my food. Which, thematically, made a lot of sense.

Loss of her fucking life. That’s what June had said.

June. I needed to text her. I needed to take all the lessons I learned from Amber and do the exact opposite. I needed to be clear and upfront; I needed to make sure she always felt safe to be as soft as she was with me last night. I needed to make sure that things never calcified between us.

The realization hit me halfway through a set of deadlifts, and I barreled through, as fast as I could without hurting myself. I racked my weights and pulled out my phone.