Page 37 of Anywhere with You

I spent the next three days with my head in the store’s books, planning.

We were going to be in the black this month, for the first time ever.

I wanted to recklessly double Florence’s and Doug’s salaries, but I knew what a blow it would be to them if I couldn’t keep it going.

I settled on a one-time bonus, a thousand each for now, until we saw how long our luck would last.

And every time I took a break, I opened Mesmio.

Bridget and Lorenzo had returned from their cruise, their hair lighter, their skin darker, but that elation I’d seen in her earlier videos was still there.

They looked into each other’s eyes, even while speaking to the camera.

They touched constantly, as though afraid to find that they’d imagined it all, as though confirming that they were both there, together, every moment.

I wondered, not for the first time, how long they had loved each other.

Then I switched over to the videos of buff women chopping logs, as a palate cleanser.

But mostly, I watched Cara’s reels.

I hadn’t seen all the videos, even the ones she posted while we were traveling together. Others, I’d seen in their original versions, but Cara had edited and uploaded them, so I’d never watched the final product. She was good at video editing, probably better than she realized.

I started at the beginning and watched through to the end.

There we were, chatting together around the alien autopsy table and confiding in the bow-tied alien bartender.

Then Cara was filming herself as she gleefully sledded down hills of white sand.

Then we were together on the dunes, pointing out the mountains in the distance.

We walked through the cliff dwellings. We shared the Grand Canyon.

She had even taken a short clip of us, stuck in an elevator, talking about outrunning scorpions, our voices echoing.

There were diners and hotel rooms and so many clips of us being ridiculous in the car.

There were Mildred and Jeffrey, Mechanic Bill, and a video we’d taken with Lane just a couple of days before.

I’d already forgotten. There was me, with my guitar.

And there were the two of us at the hot springs, the incomparable beauty of the desert around us.

There were dozens of Mesmio reels, more than I could’ve imagined.

And then, of course, there were the new ones.

Cara sat in the cactus garden. Her eyes were swollen and teary, like when she’d come into my store just last week and asked me if I had known that her husband was cheating.

I hadn’t. She had, but it hadn’t crushed her any less. I knew that.

Now, she looked straight into the camera. “It looks like I’ll be finishing this adventure on my own. And it’s my fault, so keep that in mind when you comment.”

She turned the camera to show the cacti, like a terraced garden, in pots of varying heights around those in-ground.

She showed a few of the blooms up close, even catching a glimpse of a hummingbird hovering over a blossom, and then there was her face, a little calmer than it had seemed before.

It was seconds in Mesmio time, but it could’ve been hours later.

She smiled. “The world is still beautiful.”

In the next video, she and Lane were standing outside the house, holding her luggage.

“I couldn’t believe it when I got the call , ” she exclaimed. “Mechanic Bill is my favorite person in the world.”

“Hey,” Lane said, jovially, with a shoulder bump.

“Aww, you can be my second favorite,” she said.

Then, to the camera, “Lane has been my hero more than once over the past few days. First, they let us stay in this beautiful home. Second, they fed us so much and so well that I may have to drive all the way back here sometime soon for the diner’s divine chicken-fried steak.

And third”—here she stopped to take Lane’s arm in hers—“Lane has been a true friend when I needed one. When I was a blubbing fountain of emotion, they brought me ice cream and listened to me whine, and I will be grateful forever.”

Lane said, “Aww. And Cara doesn’t know this yet, but I’m taking her up on her invitation to visit Houston this summer.”

Cara squealed.

Lane laughed and hugged her.

In the next, Cara was back with her orange car, grinning and doing a little dance in the repair shop’s parking lot. I caught a glimpse of the awful motel in the background.

In the next, Cara was driving, dramatically putting on her sunglasses and turning up the radio. It wasn’t my playlist. That had come home with me.

In the next, she was on the side of the road, a Welcome to California sign in the background.

I sat up straighter.

“That’s right, guys. I’m finishing the journey alone, but damn it, I’m going to finish it. Fingers crossed my boss isn’t on Mesmio. She thinks I’m still stranded in Arizona.”

There were several after that with minimal monologue from Cara, just views of Joshua Tree National Park, waterfalls, a cupcake with a dried mango parrot perching in the icing, and the Pacific Ocean.

That was the most recent reel. Cara looked windblown and happy, the early sunrise turning the mountains behind her into black silhouettes.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen the Pacific Ocean.

The water is so cold, and the waves are so huge—I don’t know how anyone swims here.

Maybe they just surf.” She turned the camera out to catch surfers in wet suits rising and falling on the waves.

She looked around. Left and right, the beach stretched out, endless and almost empty.

Cara gave a wow face to the camera.

I watched it again, my heart as full with her happiness as it was empty with the knowledge that I should be there with her.

This was our adventure. I had abandoned it and her, not without reason. But still. I ached to be there with her.

Maybe one day, we could salvage our friendship.

But I was still in the process of ending a marriage with someone I couldn’t trust. I wasn’t eager to jump back into anything more than friendship, certainly not with someone who had already proven that she could lie to my face.

I tried to turn my attention back to the store’s books, but the bell over the door rang three times in five minutes, so I abandoned my desk with a sigh and went to see what was happening.

What was happening was that Strings & Things was fuller than I’d ever seen. I noticed something else, too, that I hadn’t before. People turned to look at me and smiled and turned back to their friends to whisper.

Oh God. Was I a Mesmio celebrity?

My fears were confirmed later when a young woman came up to me and very enthusiastically told me all the reasons Cara and I were soulmates.

And she wasn’t the last that day.

Fortunately, most people who came into the store that day were actually interested in making purchases. Several mentioned that they had seen me play a song online and followed the link for information about Strings & Things but didn’t seem to know anything else about Cara and me.

Sure enough, when I had a spare moment to check our Mesmio stats, my song at the rental house near the hot springs had ten times more views than any other, and Cara had, indeed, put in a link to the store’s website.

After the store closed that night, Florence and Doug waited for me while I took a look at the register numbers.

“You’re right,” I confirmed to Florence. “It’s the most profitable day in the store’s history.”

“I knew it,” she said. “Can’t sneak a chicken past a chicken hawk.”

I turned to Doug. “Want to work full-time?”

He did.

I sent them home for the night, and even though I really needed to go home, too, and pack up the house, at least the part of it that was inarguably mine, I balanced my phone on a shelf against some packs of ukulele strings and started recording.

I’d created a new Mesmio for the store. It didn’t feel right to post on the one Cara was still using, though I’d probably go through and message some of our followers there in the next few days, inviting them to follow the store, too.

I felt like I had a thousand songs in my head, everything that had been percolating during the trip, everything I’d worried about since. But I started with the one I sang the night before everything fell apart for me and Cara.

I’d added some lines, changed a few things here and there, and when I watched it, I realized that I hadn’t looked at the camera once. I was focused on the guitar in my hands. But the display of electric guitars behind me was gorgeous, so I went ahead and uploaded it.

I didn’t want to be a celebrity of any kind, but I wanted to keep running my business. If a video now and then would help that happen, well, Doug was full-time now. It could be his job.