Read Reunion: A Novel for Free Online

Just pay it off and be done. But instead of paying it off, you only pay it down. And just when it feels almost manageable, they send an offer: Take a month off from payments, they say. Just one month! We’ll increase your APR, but you’ll have thirty days—thirty whole days!—during which you won’t once lie awake thinking about how to repay it all. So you say, Yes. You say, Bring it on. And then one thousand turns to two and then two turns to four and then four turns to twelve, and then you realize there’s no way out. There’s no way out, that is, until this lovely human being asks you to marry him and it dawns on you that in order to say yes, you’re going to have to come clean. And so you do. Mostly.
      
    T HE FLIGHT ATTENDANT brings my gin and tonic. The man next to me orders tomato juice. I consider making small talk—perhaps offer to buy a mini bottle of vodka to go with his juice—but then I remember Frank from Wisconsin and decide against it.
    Instead I dial Rita. She answers on the first ring. Goddamn I love this woman sometimes. I mean, I always love her. But sometimes I just want to swallow her whole and carry her around in my belly.
    “Hi, you,” she says.
    “Hi,” I say. Every once in a while, I think about telling Rita the truth. I think maybe she’s the only one out of everyone who might possibly understand. In the movie version of our lives, she’s played by a young Diane Keaton or maybe a young Katharine Hepburn. It’s the mother in her, maybe, but I truly believe that I could tell her about the affair, about Peter’s talk of divorce, about the debt and how it’s almost over, about all the million secrets I tell myself every single night as I’m falling asleep, and she wouldn’t judge me. She’d just smile and nod, refill my glass of juice. Maybe.
    “How’s your brain?” she says.
    “Wishing it were on drugs.”
    I squeeze the dried-up lime wedge into my glass and then drop it in so that it’s floating there on top of the ice cubes.
    “Where are you?”
    “On a plane,” I say. “About to leave Chicago.”
    “Is Peter going with you?”
    I shake my head and take a sip of my drink, but then remember Rita can’t see me.
    “No,” I say. “He can’t miss work.” There are a few people I don’t like lying to, and Rita’s one of them.
    “That’s good,” she says. Rita can spin just about anything but her own life into something positive. “More time for you and Nell and Elliot. You guys need this. This will be good for you.”
    When I told Rita about calling off the adoption—this was almost a year ago exactly—she didn’t even blink. All she said was “Listen to your heart,” an expression whose cheesiness and overuse normally make me grimace, but which, given the circumstances, sounded like the wisest advice I’d ever heard.
    “How are the girls?” I say, happy for the moment not to be constructing a compare/contrast chart of me and my father in my head.
    “Getting ready for camp this weekend. Pigpie wants to back out.” Pigpie is Ellie, the blond demon and their youngest. “But she also wants a dwarf pig for her birthday, so what does she know?”
    “Are you going to let her?”
    “Get a dwarf pig? Uh, no.”
    “Skip camp,” I say.
    Rita laughs. “Right. Well. We’ll play it by ear. The mom in me knows she needs this experience. But the little girl in me thinks we’d have a blast just the two of us with Joe and Mimi gone.”
    “I wish you were coming to Atlanta,” I say, and I think I mean this. Because she has a point about the three of us—Nell, Elliot, and me—getting to be alone together. It’s been too long. But, again, there’s something soothing about Rita that I wouldn’t mind taking advantage of right now.
    “I might,” she says. “Once the girls are off, depending on how long you’re down there. I might just come.”
    We get off the phone and I realize that I haven’t even considered the return flight. Peter bought me a one-way