God In The Kitchen (23 page)

            I loosened my grip and took a step back, still seething as I flattened the envelope against my pants. I wasn’t going to apologize, but I needed to back off. I had him cornered. He wasn’t going anywhere until I knew what I needed to know.

            “Where is Ian?” I asked. “How did you talk Chloe into this?”

            “Who do you think I am?” the guy asked. But then I watched the realization wash over him and he continued. “Greg,” he said. “You think I’m Greg.”

            “You’re not?” I asked, fully prepared to call him a liar.

            “No, man,” the guy said, straightening out his worn shirt, though it didn’t look as if it were ever wrinkle free. “I’m Frank. Greg’s brother. What’s this about Ian and Chloe? Are they not home?”

            “Greg’s brother?” I was trying to process the information. I supposed it was possible. He looked too much like Ian to be a complete stranger but now that I saw him up close, he also looked much older than Chloe. Not that she couldn’t have married someone older, but he just didn’t quite fit. “What do you know about this?” I asked, gesturing towards the empty apartment.

            “About what, man? You gotta give me something to work with here.”

            “Chloe and Ian. They’re gone. The apartment. It’s empty,” I said, speaking in short, staccato sentences to get my point across. “They’re with Greg.” I said, ending my last sentence more like a question than a statement.

            Frank shook his head and I found his ponytail annoying. “Ah, they’re back together are they?” he asked as if he knew it was going to happen.

            “What are you doing here anyways?” I asked. “I saw you here once before and Chloe didn’t seem to want you around.”

            “No, she wouldn’t, man,” he said. “I was trying to talk her into getting back with Greg. I told her it was just a matter of time before he found her and she would have to face him, but she always just told me to go away and leave her alone.”

            “So what are you doing here today?” I asked, trying to get as much information as I could.

            “Actually, I came here to warn her,” he said. “She seemed so adamant about not seeing Greg I wanted to let her know that he knew where she was.”

            “Knew where she was…” I repeated. “How?”

            “He saw her on TV, man,” Frank said, shaking his head as a blonde hair came loose from the haphazard ponytail. “National news. Didn’t take long to figure out where that little fundraiser was and how to get to her from there.”

            I slapped my hand against my forehead. Of course. I didn’t know much about Chloe and Greg’s relationship but she had said that he had disappeared and she had even moved and wasn’t sure if he could find her again if he tried. Apparently he didn’t even have to try real hard. I had delivered her right to his TV set myself. On a silver platter.

            “Not to worry, man,” Frank said, clapping his hand down onto my shoulder like we were buddies, only to remove it when I gave him a dirty look. “He seemed better. I think he’s going to make it this time. All he really wanted was to get his family back together again.”

            “You knew where she was, though? The whole time?” I asked, thinking the story sounded kind of fishy. “And you never told him?”

            Frank shook his head. “Nah, man. I couldn’t do that to the little guy. It wasn’t my place. I was just trying to drive her back to him. It had to be her choice.”

            I nodded, thinking that was a rather mature decision for someone who I was judging to be so far beneath me. “And the lemonade stand?” I asked. “You were there?”

            Frank nodded. “Just checking in. I don’t really have a day job, man. My band plays gigs at night on occasion and I liked to keep tabs on Chloe. She DOES have my nephew with her, after all.”

            I wasn’t sure if that was sweet or stalker-like, but it wasn’t the issue at hand. “Do you have any idea where they might have headed?”

            Frank raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “I didn’t even know they were gone. My guess is that once Greg realized his family was in the same town as me, he figured out pretty fast that I knew where they were all along. Every time he called me and cried to me about missing his wife…his little boy…and I didn’t tell him? I don’t expect I’ll ever hear from him again.”

            On that front, I couldn’t blame Greg. I would feel betrayed as well, but I respected Frank for protecting Chloe and staying out of the situation as much as he felt he could.

            “But you said he sounded better? Greg? You think they’ll be okay?”

            Frank ran his hand over his loose strands of hair and down his ponytail. “He really did, man. He must be back on his meds again. He said he had a good job. Steady pay. Benefits. I think he really wanted to do things right this time.”

            I blinked. At least I had that comfort. The only recourse I had now was to hold on to the hope that Chloe and Ian were okay. And maybe they were even where they should be. Even if all I wanted was for them to be inside that shabby apartment, blowing up balloons, eating ice cream, and playing train.

            “Thanks,” I muttered, starting to move past Frank back out to the street so I could put the Summerfield Apartments behind me for the last time.

            “You going to be okay?” Frank asked and I wondered if he knew who I was. He was perceptive enough to figure out how things would eventually go between Chloe and Greg.

            “I don’t know, man,” I said, using his own catch phrase. “I don’t have a choice but to be okay, I guess,” I answered over my shoulder as I pushed the door to the stairs open and started going down, feeling every step from the ball of my foot clear through my body.

            The little boy who I had grown to love so much had been ripped from my life. The woman I had chosen had chosen someone else. The time and effort I had put into the relationship had all been for nothing.

            As I stepped out into the light of day and felt the sunshine down on me, I stopped myself. None of it had been for nothing. Ian was alive and he would stay that way. If nothing more came out of it than that, it was enough. I would pick up the pieces and carry on and live each day with that knowledge in the back of my mind. I could be happy with that. I had no other choice.

            By the time I got home, I could feel my heart breaking in two. I felt as if I had lost my father all over again. This time, though, instead of losing the past, I was losing the future.

            I made it no farther than the couch inside my door before I collapsed. The tears burning in m
y eyes and the questions running through my head. What had I done wrong? Was there anything I could have done differently to prevent this from happening? I kept trying to tell myself that Ian was happy and healthy and that was really all that mattered, but it did nothing to help my own despair.

            The slight rustle that came from the kitchen was so distant at first I almost thought it was coming from somewhere outside. When the rustle turned from slight to significant and was followed by a loud bang, I shot up from the couch and rushed to the kitchen. Had I been in my right mind, I might have expected an intruder and grabbed a baseball bat on my way. Since I had just lost what I considered to be my entire future, I no longer cared what happened to me and I entered the kitchen unprotected.

            Evan was bent over at the waist, inspecting the contents of the fridge, moving items from one shelf to another.

            “Got anything good in here?” he asked without turning around to acknowledge my presence.

            “I think I have some peaches in the drawer,” I answered, sniffing back my tears and moving to take over his station at the fridge.

            “Ick,” Evan said and I was surprised. Granted, he had only made a couple of appearances in my kitchen but his appetite seemed to be never ending. I had never stopped to think that maybe he had dislikes just like anyone else. “Got any Cheetos?” he asked as he moved away from the fridge and plopped into his regular chair at the back of the table. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, shaking his hair away from his face and I wondered if he was about to dive into the whole Chloe, Ian, Greg ordeal. “I need Cheetos like I need a hole in the head, right? But I just can’t get enough of those things.”

            It hadn’t been what I was thinking, but I was pretty sure he knew that given his track record for reading my thoughts. In fact, he probably knew I had a brand new, unopened bag of Cheetos in the back of my cupboard just waiting to be opened and eaten. I reached into the cupboard, grabbed the bag and threw them on the table, sitting in the chair opposite Evan.

            Evan grabbed the bag and noisily opened it, but he didn’t dive into the Cheetos immediately. “Rough day, huh?” he asked, giving me a sympathetic look with his big, kind eyes.

            I wanted to hurl the Cheetos bag at his head. I wanted to yell at him and ask if he knew this was going to happen all along. I wanted to know why he had put me through all of this and what good it was doing. But the look on his face prevented all of my possible rampages. All I could do was feel the love he had exuding from him and somehow, it took all of my anger away and left only the sadness.

            “You could say that,” I said, letting my shoulders sag on either side of me. “Did I make the wrong choice?” I asked, knowing that he would throw that back in my face eventually. The fact that I wanted a family, but that I had told him I wanted to choose my own wife.

            Evan nodded. “Looks that way,” he said as he reached into the Cheetos bag, inspected his options, and extracted one single Cheeto. He held it out in front of him, turned it side to side, and stuck the whole thing in his mouth.

            “Was there anything I could have done?” I asked, wanting to feel the same peace about the situation as he looked like he felt about everything the world had to offer…especially the Cheetos.

            “There’s always something that can be done differently,” Evan replied. “But that doesn’t mean the outcome would have been different.”

            That’s about as clear as mud, I thought and Evan laughed.

            “Sorry,” he said. “A lot of times I go into these things knowing what I mean so it’s hard to explain it to someone else. I already understand so it seems obvious to me. I forget that not everyone knows what I know.”

            “What DO you know?” I asked, wanting simply to understand what he understood so that everything would be as clear to me as it was to him.

            “I know that you have the freedom to choose on your own and that’s exactly what you did,” Evan said, taking another Cheeto from the bag and devouring it after inspecting it on all sides again.

            “And had I chosen differently?” I asked, thinking about the look on Abigail’s face when I tried to explain the situation with Chloe to her.

            “Is that what you want?” Evan asked, a third Cheeto halfway to his lips.

            I sighed. As obvious as Evan thought his knowledge was, I felt as if nothing I thought I knew was true any longer.

            After a long pause, I finally decided to answer the best I could. “I guess,” I said, not sure where it would get me.

            “So you want to take back what happened with Chloe,” Evan began, eyeing the Cheeto bag longingly, “and perhaps continue your relationship with Abigail instead?”

            I sat back in my chair, remembering the good times I had with Chloe and all of the time I had enjoyed with Ian. I didn’t want to erase it. But Evan was right, if I had the chance and knew the outcome, I WOULD do things differently.

            “How would you change it all?” Evan asked, reading my thoughts before I could answer and reaching for another Cheeto while I thought.