Page 11 of Delayed Intention

The Matter At Hand

Michelle’s kids are running in three different directions, and I’m losing my mind.

I love my sister, but even more than that, I’m in awe of how she can wrangle my three nieces.

With her husband serving overseas, she does it all on her own.

I see one of my nieces climbing a rock and feel my heart skip a beat.

Michelle is already there, intercepting Ella while her other two are busy with snack cups.

I smile at my sister as I pull out my phone and snap a picture of the four of them to text to Mom and my brother-in-law when cell service resumes.

I look at the photo and smile—everyone’s looking in a different direction.

Classic. They all look so much alike. My sister is tall and fair, like me, with wavy dark brown hair and bright blue eyes.

Her daughters share her facial features, but they all have brown eyes and curlier hair, reflecting their father’s Ethiopian heritage.

Miche is a few years older than I am, but it doesn’t show, and most people assume she is younger than me.

Sitting on the nearest rock, I reach into my backpack to pull out a snack.

“I have a bunch of these bars. You want one?” I ask her.

“Yeah, I’d love one, thanks. I always seem to remember snacks for the kids and not for myself.” She shakes her head as she sits on a nearby rock. I toss her a bottle of water, which she watches as it hits the dirt at her feet.

“Nice catch.”

“First of all, you know me better than to throw anything at me and expect me to catch it. Second, thanks, smart ass.”

I laugh and hand her a granola bar.

She gives me a pensive look. “I love coming here—thanks for having us up to your place, by the way. It almost makes me glad we had this week off, although I don’t love that Alan and I spend a fortune on a preschool that’s closed for most of the fall.”

“That’s part of the package when you choose a Jewish school, and you know it.”

She grins. “Of course, but I feel like there should be a high holiday seasonal discount.”

I look out at the lake, shielding my eyes.

Bear Lake, in the Rocky Mountain National Park, is the family-friendly choice for a trail with kids this age.

Just a circular trail around a mountain lake, it never seems like much in my mind.

But every time I come here, I am hit with a wave of memories, having hiked this very lake so many times when I was the same age as my nieces.

That and every view of the lake from around the trail gives such a different perspective.

It surprises me how great this lake still seems despite all the more advanced hikes I have access to now.

“I’m glad we came up here today,” I say, nodding my head in the direction of the girls who are watching the oldest draw shapes in the dirt with a stick. It reminds me of coming here in the summers when we were kids, with the Haddad clan, you know?”

“We were pretty lucky to grow up near such a magnificent place.”

“True.” I wait a beat before adding, “Speaking of the Haddad family, guess who just sent me a letter?”

“A letter? Do you mean an email?”

“No, an actual letter.”

“Unless it was Rose Haddad, I have no idea,” she laughs, refilling the girls’ snack cups before they start to wander off again. “Although last time I spoke with her, she was perfectly capable of using a cell phone.”

“Not Rose,” I say, “It was Lily.”

“Wow. Lily? What’d she want?” Her tone turned frosty.

“Relax, I’m not still a teenager with hurt pride—that was nearly twenty years ago.”

Michelle frowns. “She hurt more than your pride. You gave up after that. You used to be a romantic.”

“Easy, Miche, I grew up, is all—we live in the real world, remember?”

“Love exists in the real world, Josh.” She twists her wedding band in a move that is probably unconscious.

Alan Teferi, her husband, is a physician in the Army and is currently deployed.

Anyone who knows them can see the devotion they have to each other.

They met when Michelle had done a brief stint at a VA hospital as a travel nurse.

They are one of those sappy in-love couples I would enjoy hating if I didn’t adore them so much.

They aren’t perfect, but they always work through whatever life throws at them. I’ve seen it.

“Love exists, for you, sure. I take after Mom.” As long as I don’t take after Dad .

She rolls her eyes at me and decides to let it go.

“Okay, I’ll bite, what did Lily have to say?”

“She sent me an apology letter; I guess in the spirit of the holiday season.”

“That took a long time.” Michelle shoots me a suspicious look. “I wonder what prompted it.”

“I heard from Mom that Lily had a falling out with Ellen and came out to be with Rose for the holidays.”

“Ugh. Ellen Mendes is a piece of work. I can’t imagine having her as a mother. That couldn’t have been easy. But it doesn’t excuse her ghosting you for almost two decades.”

“Maybe,” I sigh. I got the feeling from the letter that there might be more to the story, but I decided to keep that to myself to spare my sister from further speculating about my supposed romantic nature.

Michelle is convinced that deep down, I secretly desire ‘true love’ and am looking for my perfect match.

That part of me had to grow up. Good riddance.

“Well, there’s more—I didn’t even tell you this yet, but Rose reached out to me. Eddie Mendes is getting married out here, you know. You got the invite?”

“I have the save-the-date, sure. What does that have to do with you?”

“Apparently, Eddie and his fiancée, Felicia, want to have the wedding in Estes Park, but they cannot come out here to do the in-person stuff: look at sites, taste food,… all that stuff…”

“So, Rose asked you to help out?”

“Not just me.”

“Lily.”

“Apparently.”

“Interesting.”

“I don’t see why. It’s just a family friend and sister of the groom with a flexible schedule helping a couple of busy surgeons with a few errands.”

“I think it’s interesting.”

I try for a change in subject. “You want to try to walk over to Alberta Falls, or do we need to get these monsters home?”

“I am not a monster, Uncle Josh,” Ella is laughing while jumping up and down in front of me.

“Really,” I say, looking down at her, “I think I need a closer look. Why don’t you freeze for a second so I can be sure? I mean, if you aren’t a monster, you should be able to freeze and hold very still.”

Ella freezes, and Miche tosses me some type of wet wipe, and I clean off Ella’s sticky hands and face while she tries to be still. “What do you know? She isn’t a monster after all.” This entire process momentarily transfixed the other girls, so Michelle was able to wipe them down as well.

Michelle looks at her little ladies. “Let’s burn off some more energy and walk back around the lake the other way. Then we can head back to Uncle Josh’s and take a nap.” Ella groans at the suggestion that she will be napping. Looking at her, I give her five minutes in the car before she passes out.

As we start the walk back around, I take a turn schlepping the youngest, Etty, in the baby backpack contraption to give Miche a break. I can feel her grow heavier as sleep takes over. Her little face is resting heavily on the back of my neck.

“So, are you going to write her back? Or call her or whatever? I guess you’ll have to call her if you are going to be sampling wedding cakes together.” I can hear in her tone that Michelle is feeling protective about this.

I already know the answer, but to pretend to care less than I do, I take my time to answer. “I mean, sure, why not?”

“Why not? Because she took almost twenty years to write you an apology, which means she’s either thoughtless, selfish, or a total mess from being in that crazy family. I mean, why else couldn’t she write to you before now?”

“Something to think about,” I say in the tone I usually reserve for patients who have been researching their symptoms for hours on the internet.

These are all valid points, but they don’t matter for my purpose. I’ve read through the letter a few times. Okay, maybe more than a few times.

I don’t admit to my sister that she was right with her first comment about Lily and me. In 2005, Lily’s disappearing act hurt. Looking back as an adult, I recognize that because Dad had just left us, I was vulnerable to being more wounded than I otherwise may have been.

These days, I approach the opposite sex with a cool calculation.

I do everything I can to avoid too much hassle, for the most part.

I tolerate dating—I certainly enjoy sex when it’s available.

I know Michelle considers me a slut, but the truth is I do try to keep my hook-ups pretty infrequent—especially since that disaster with Rachel.

I try to be careful and keep my encounters with people who are like-minded about being casual.

The problem with working in mostly rural places is that the selection of available women is slim, which is how I ended up being less discerning and receiving threats from a woman like Lara.

I’ve already decided to keep that whole situation to myself.

No sense in worrying my family because of my carelessness.

The office had gotten back to me—there have been no scathing reviews online for the practice or me, personally.

There’s been no trolling on our group’s social media accounts.

Maybe Lara was just spouting off empty threats.

Still, she has me spooked, which is why I’m not seeing anyone right now.

In any case, I barely even mentioned Lara’s existence to anyone, so no reason to get into it now.

When I was younger, I had a fantasy that I’d see Lily again—I would take her out on the date of a lifetime, listen to all of her hopes and dreams, and then not return any of her calls afterward.

Time has faded my resentment. That said, it did occur to me the morning after I read her letter that if I were to hook up with her, it might be a way to achieve a sense of closure.

It’s hard to imagine Lily Mendes as someone that I could have casual sex with, however. From the little I know about her, she doesn’t seem to get out much. Then again, that may just be the image of herself she shares with her family. Reality may be something else altogether.

The idea of facing Rose Haddad, let alone my mother, after possibly hurting Lily, is less than ideal. For now, I’ve decided to write Lily back and give her a chance to apologize or whatever, and leave the past in the past.

From what my mother told me, I’m aware that Lily’s not only single, but she also hasn’t seriously dated anyone.

The unspoken understanding in her family is that she is either gay or asexual.

Having read her letter and her admission that she had feelings for me when we were teens, I wonder if either of those things is true.

She says she’s sorry and would like us to be friends again.

Well, unlike when I was sixteen, I have plenty of friends, and I don’t need a long-distance friendship with a possibly unhinged single woman with a clinical anxiety disorder.

Simultaneously, I’m no fool. I’m very aware that Rose and possibly my mother have a misguided notion about playing matchmaker.

What Rose doesn’t know and my mother refuses to believe is that I have evolved.

I know better than to believe in the notion of a match out there for me.

Love may exist for some people, but I’m certain it’s not for me.

Ella and Erin took over the rest of the conversation during our hike. They are both becoming more talkative the closer they get to passing out for nap time. I hung back a bit since I had Etty sleeping on my back, and also to sort my thoughts on Michelle’s observations.

The truth is, I don’t know exactly what to expect when I see Lily face to face.

I don’t mind admitting to myself, if not my sister, that I’m intrigued to see her—part of me has wondered how she’s turned out.

I mean, there was a time when we were best friends.

I can hear echoes of that girl who was my friend in the letter she wrote.

It’s only natural that my interest is piqued.

Of course, it will be something to see her again.

I wonder how she looks, how she carries herself.

If she’s ever learned to master that frizzy brown hair she always complained about.

She didn’t believe me, but I found her to be attractive.

She had expressive brown eyes and a smile that would light up a room.

As her friend, she’d tell me the things she saw were flaws in her appearance but from my point of view, she was beautiful.

I shake my head to myself, which stirs little Etty. We approach Michelle’s SUV, and I hand off the sleepy toddler to her. When we get the kids strapped in and take off down the road, I check for messages now that my cell service has returned.

Rose Haddad has sent me a text with the contact information for Lily Mendes, accompanied by a winking emoji.

Of course, I already have the same information from Lily’s letter.

I laugh aloud at the emoji while also seeing what Rose is up to.

Underneath my laugh, there’s a feeling of looking forward to seeing my old friend again and a reminder that I should write her back soon.

Pushing aside figuring out what capacity I want to see her in, I text the picture of the girls that I took to my mother and their father.

Plenty of time to figure that out later.