I’M in the cereal aisle again, trying to decide which anthropomorphized cartoon animal has the sort of sugar that I want right now.
Which cereal will quell the hollow, gnawing feeling in my chest?
Will Froot Loops make me feel better about tanking the most significant relationship of my life with one bad decision?
Will Cookie Crisp let me go back in time and take Rusty to the playground instead?
Perhaps Tony the Tiger, who seems very charismatic, can give Daniel the give her one more chance talk.
It’s six in the morning. I didn’t sleep for shit last night, even though I was up late with Elizabeth, drinking Slurpees in the 7-11 parking lot because we’re classy like that. She still thinks I should go to the hearing. I disagree, and since it’s my life, I get to decide.
Fuck it. I want Lucky Charms, because those marshmallows are delicious. My arms are already full, because yet again I underestimated the amount of stuff I’d be buying this morning, so I put my phone on the shelf by the Cheerios, grab the Lucky Charms, shove the box under one arm, and promptly knock several boxes of Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran off the shelf with the huge bags of tortilla chips I’m holding in my other hand.
“Dammit,” I whisper under my breath.
I put everything on the floor. I pick up the cereal, put it back. I put the Lucky Charms back, remember why I’m there, grab it again, shove it under my arm, pick up the tortilla chips and the salsa and the queso dip and then finally maneuver myself to the checkout, where I take a plastic bag because obviously I forgot the reusable ones.
Then I put my pity food into my car and drive off.
IT’S close to noon when I realize I left my phone in front of the Cheerios. I’m at work, shaping a dovetail joint on a side table, when I suddenly have a vision of it, sitting there in front of the yellow box where I put it down for just a second.
I don’t know why I didn’t put it in my pocket. I just didn’t.
I borrow the phone in the office and call the grocery store. While I’m on hold I sit back in the uncomfortable upholstered chair from 1970, a spring sticking straight into my butt, and look at the knickknacks that Donna, who runs the office, keeps on her desk. One is a small ceramic dog peeing on a ceramic fire hydrant, and I wonder why on earth anyone would want such a thing.
“Hi. Miss?” the voice on the other end of the phone says. “No one’s turned it in and there’s no phone in the cereal aisle.”
For a moment, I just look at the peeing dog.
“It’s not there?” I echo. Somehow, that hadn’t occurred to me — Sprucevale is a small, safe town, so I assumed I’d just waltz back to the store after work and grab my phone.
“Sorry,” he says. “But I’ll put a bulletin out for it if anyone’s seen it.”
I lean back in the uncomfortable chair and do my goddamn best not to cry, because of course I did something dumb and lost my phone. I mean, I’m constantly misplacing it — I found it in my medicine cabinet a few weeks ago with no memory of putting it there — but this is the first time it’s actually gone missing missing.
Shit. Now, on top of everything else, I probably need a new phone.
“Thanks,” I say, give him the office number, and we hang up.
Then I go to the bathroom, and for the first time ever, I cry at work.
I’M WATCHING stupid TV that night when Elizabeth knocks on my door. I’ve still got my coveralls on, and I’m probably coating my whole apartment in sawdust right now, but I just can’t be bothered to care.
“What?” I shout.
The door opens, because it wasn’t locked.
“You stopped answering your phone again,” she says.
“It got stolen,” I say, still slumped on the couch.
Elizabeth frowns in alarm and comes inside. She has dry cleaning in one hand, and it swishes inside, the light plastic rustling.
“What happened? Was it stolen at work? Did your car get broken into? Did you—”
“I left it in the cereal aisle for six hours and someone took it,” I say.
I see her eyes flick to my coffee table, which has an empty cereal bowl, a giant bag of tortilla chips haphazardly opened, and the jar of queso dip on it.
“Oh,” she says. “Well, I hope they find it. That sucks.”
“I called. They didn’t,” I say.
“Did you go check yourself?”
“Yes,” I say, feeling a little exasperated. “It wasn’t where I put it, because either someone stole it or it fell through a very small wormhole that doesn’t seem to have affected the rest of the fabric of our reality, just my phone.”
She just sighs again, then comes over to me, the dry cleaning in the garment bag swishing, and drops a kiss on top of my head.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I brought you a suit.”
At last, I actually look at the garment bag. All day I’ve felt like I was watching the world through a haze, like something was separating me from everyone and everything. A fancy shower door or something.
“Thanks,” I say automatically.
I pause for a moment, looking at the suit.
“…why?” I ask.
“For Daniel’s hearing tomorrow,” she says, as if we’ve discussed it, decided that I’m going, and I had any idea that she was letting me borrow a suit for the occasion.
Finally, I stand from the couch and turn off the trashy reality TV show I was watching, grab my empty cereal bowl, take it to the kitchen.
“I’m not going,” I call, putting it in the sink and balancing it carefully on several other bowls. “I promise you that if I go, I’ll make everything worse, because that’s what I do, and Daniel has made it pretty clear that I should stop making everything worse for him—”
“Daniel said what he said standing the hallway of the emergency room,” Elizabeth says. I turn back to my living room, and she’s still standing there, freshly dry-cleaned suit hanging off of one finger. “No one is their best self in an emergency room. Except maybe the doctors and nurses, or at least I would hope—”
“I’m not gonna be the reason he loses his daughter,” I say.
“Charlie.”
“Elizabeth.”
“You should go,” she says. “If nothing else, prove that Daniel wasn’t lying.”
“He was,” I point out, but she just waves one hand in the air.
“Only technically,” she says.
“That’s lying! Technically lying is still lying!”
Elizabeth turns, walks to the door to my room, and hangs the suit from the top of the door.
“You should go,” she says, simply. “You said you would, and right now you need to be the bigger person and go to the hearing, even if Daniel never speaks to you again afterward.”
I look at the suit, hanging on the door. Of course Elizabeth would both try to push me down a hill inside a tractor tire and be responsible enough to dry-clean her suit before lending it to me. Even though I know I’m lucky to have her, right now I’m annoyed at her for being so much better at life than I am.
“I’ll think about it,” I lie. I’m not going to think about it, because I’m not going.
I’m not going, and I’m never going to feel better, and I’m just going to wallow in my sadness and self-pity and eat Lucky Charms and queso until my butt literally fuses with my couch, and I’d like to see my stupid, responsible sister try to stop me.
“Thank you,” she says.
Then she walks over and wraps me in a hug.
I’m surprised. It takes me a minute before I hug her back. Her hair smells like flowers, of course, and mine probably smells like sawdust, but she squeezes me a little tighter and then releases me.
“Call me when it’s over, I want to hear how it goes,” she says, giving my hair a light ruffle.
“I’m not going, and I don’t have a phone,” I remind her.
“Use Daniel’s,” she says, heading for my door. “Bye, Chuck. Good luck. Love you.”
“Love you too,” I call out, ignoring the part about using Daniel’s phone, and then the door closes behind her.
I take the suit and put it in my closet, and then I go back to dumb television and queso dip.
I’m not going.
I’m never going to feel better.
I will become one with this couch, and that’s what I deserve.
THAT NIGHT, I sleep like the dead, and I wake up late because my alarm was on my phone. I shower as fast as I can. I eat cereal. I run out the door, hop into my car, start on my way to work.
I’m halfway there when a rabbit runs across the road, right in front of me, and I slam on the brakes. I lurch forward into my seatbelt, bracing my whole body for the sickening thump of flesh under my tires, but it doesn’t come.
A second later, the bunny disappears into the grass on the side of the road, safe and sound, probably with no idea that it nearly met a gruesome death just now.
I feel it like a fist right to the chest, like my ribcage is being squeezed, my organs shaken, and I start sobbing. Right there, still stopped in the middle of the road, I start crying hysterically about the bunny who didn’t die and about the sister who’s too nice to me and about Rusty who was so brave about getting her arm broken and mostly, I cry because I’m sorry and because I already miss my best friend.
I pull into someone’s driveway so I’m not in the road anymore, and I stay there for at least ten minutes, crying. I wonder if Elizabeth is right and I wonder if she’s always right, if maybe I should listen to my sister who can remember her reusable bags and who responds promptly to emails.
Finally, I reach for my phone, but it’s not there. I cry a little more, but then I turn around and head back to Sprucevale, where I have to find a pay phone — a pay phone — before I can call my boss and tell him that I have horrible food poisoning and won’t be coming to work today.
