Page 2 of Anywhere with You

Florence came back from lunch, proclaiming that it was “Hotter’n the devil’s armpits out there.”

She took her spot at the register with another frustratingly pitying smile at me, and I retreated to my office, pushed aside the paltry stack of receipts, and picked up the envelope from the lawyers.

I wondered why they didn’t just mail it. It wasn’t like they had a therapist bring it to make sure the recipient could handle the emotional hailstorm that followed. No, they had a man in a suit do it instead of a nice, friendly postal worker.

I was always forgetting to stop by the mailbox.

Bridget had always been the mail checker, but then again, she was always the one who had ordered something and was waiting for it to arrive: earrings, coffee mugs, clothes that probably wouldn’t fit.

I didn’t think she even wanted most of that crap.

She just liked to get packages. She never even tracked the deliveries, just waited to be surprised.

She’d left so much behind when she moved out that I felt she’d proved my point.

Now, there was an envelope for me, one that I hadn’t asked for and was certain not to want.

I turned it over and over in my hands.

I was delaying. I literally lifted the envelope to my nose and sniffed it just so I could do something other than open it.

I put it down.

I picked it back up again.

I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t start that next part of my life yet, not when this one had, until recently, been so damned good.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. It said Dad and had a picture of him about to take a massive bite of an ice cream cone, mouth stretched comically wide.

I could ignore the call, but he would likely just keep calling because he was retired and didn’t have any hobbies.

“Hello?”

“Your mother is trying to poison me,” he said, then swore in Telugu. Dad had moved to Houston from Hyderabad when he was nineteen, alone. He’d never gone back, though he still talked about it from time to time.

Since the creation of video chat, he had become much closer to our family in India, and I’d met aunts and uncles and grandparents virtually that I’d only known from the occasional letter and awkward phone call.

“What?” I said with elaborate shock. “Did Mom try to sneak vegetables into your food again?”

“She made sweet potato brownies, Honey. It’s a travesty. She should be locked up.”

“I’ll call the FBI, right now.”

“Call the UN. These sweet potatoes are Canadian.”

I laughed, then realized I was still holding the horrid envelope and put it down, then pushed it to the far side of my desk so I couldn’t accidentally pick it up again. “How are you, Dad?”

“Not too bad, not too bad. I’m generally a cheery guy, don’t you know? How are you doing, my Honey?”

Before I could come up with a believable lie, my mother picked up the other extension.

Yes, they were calling on an honest-to-God landline, maybe one of the last in existence.

“Honoria!” my mother exclaimed, and I made the audible gagging sound I always made when she used my full name. She was never deterred.

To be fair, nothing had ever been able to deter my mother.

She played the trombone in college—I suspect because someone once told her she was too petite for it.

Throughout my childhood, she had brought it out to play the happy birthday song and Christmas carols, or to blast in my direction when I overslept as a teenager.

My father had played the trumpet back then. He’d never touched it after graduation.

That was how they’d met, in the college band, being loud together.

Growing up, I swore I’d never touch a brass instrument, but the music bug had bitten me anyway. I played guitar, bass, drums, piano, and ukulele. I’d even learned a bit of the trombone once I was an adult, but I’d never tell Mom about it.

“How’s sweet little Badger?” she asked.

“Badger is fine,” I replied, glancing at his photo on my office bookshelf.

He was a tiny black mop of a mutt, not the Labrador or Great Dane that I always imagined I’d have.

Instead, I had a miniature gremlin, a purse dog if ever there was one, and Bridget had said she loved him, then had walked out on him as effortlessly as she’d walked out on me.

“He loves his new doggy door. Zooms in and out of the backyard all day long. I’m fine, too, by the way.

Thanks for asking about my dog first, Mother. ”

“Mm. How are you really?” Mom asked. She obviously didn’t know about the envelope on my desk, but she knew that Bridget had moved out, leaving both me and Badger behind.

Mom found both abandonments incomprehensible.

I hadn’t told her about the Mesmio reels.

She would’ve seen them as an added betrayal.

And she would’ve been right.

I sighed. “I feel like I’ve barely survived a hurricane. My home, my store, and my future are suddenly entirely uncertain. But I’m at work today, so good for me.” I cringed. I was not good at lying.

Unlike my wife, who was apparently awesome at it.

“Good,” Dad said at the same time Mom said, “Are you sure that’s wise?”

Dad went on. “You know that if you need anything, we are here for you.”

“You can even have your old room back,” Mom said. My eyes found the picture next to Badger, one that had sat on my bedside table in that old room. Teenaged me was making a wow face, standing next to the poet Mary Oliver, who was signing a book for me. I loved that picture and that book.

Now my bedside table held a picture of Bridget and me on our wedding day.

I wore a deep purple A-line dress with a sweetheart neckline and shimmery silver along the hem.

Bridget wore a full ball gown in blush pink.

I had to wade through tulle to kiss her.

She’d been incredibly beautiful, shining with happiness, unwilling to let go of my hand even to let me pass my bouquet to my maid of honor.

“Honey?” Mom asked. “Are you listening?”

“Yes. Sorry. What did you say?”

“You can have your old room back. Anytime you want. I can—”

“No, thank you. Ever. No matter how many times you offer,” I said. Honestly, I’d lost count. “And now I’d like to talk about literally anything else. How’s the garden, Mom?”

Dad gave an exaggerated sigh of annoyance, but she immediately started telling me about how many types of tomato plants she’d planted and that she’d learned about companion planting them with basil and marigolds and that she got up at dawn every morning to search the leaves for hornworms because you could blink and they’d have eaten every leaf on the whole plant.

You’d go out and have nothing but naked stems.

She talked, and I listened with every bit of my focus because her brain seemed like a happier place to be than mine was at the moment.

When she was finished, Dad started telling me about a really good steak he’d eaten, in detail.

“Where was this?” I asked.

“At home. I cooked it,” Mom said.

“That’s ninety percent of the reason I married her,” Dad said.

“I won’t ask about the other ten percent,” I said, and they both giggled. Actually giggled.

I grew up with this. My whole life, it’s been the two of them, arguing and laughing and making comments about each other that I finally got old enough to understand and immediately wished I hadn’t. It was disgusting. It was annoying.

And it was no wonder I grew up believing in love.