“Please don't,” I said, looking behind him to see if Monica had arrived. I could see he was hurting, and it made pretending it didn't happen all the harder. “I'm meeting Monica here. I guess you remembered that.”
He shoved hands in his jacket pocket. “I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have come, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. I haven't felt this way in… in a long time. Maybe ever.”
I cocked my head, trying to brush off the weight of his words. Arm's length, Ramona! “ You're forgetting one key fact: you're with my sister. You were with her all weekend, were you not? Didn't you have a dinner date at Monica's last night?”
“I couldn't cancel. But things aren't serious with Rachel. We haven't even been together yet.”
I leaned in. “In case you've forgotten, you keyed her. What are you going to do, put a lock on your bedroom door to keep her out?”
Cortland stiffened. “So you're telling me things are that serious between you and da Vinci? Just say the word and I'll back off. But I have to know. It's driving me crazy.”
Through the window, I could see Monica emerge from her red Mercedes, wearing a crisp red suit, different than the first one I'd seen her in that day at school. A power suit. The color of love. A suit that said, Stop! Pay attention to me! I'm important. “ I'm sorry, Cortland. I can't do this.”
He bit his lip and nodded slowly. “Thanks for clearing that up.” He turned to leave, and I could feel my bruised heart beating within me, aching, yearning, begging me to go after him and plan a grown-up kind of talk in a private place. This was crazy. It was all crazy, the whole lot of it. I had to be careful, just as Panchal had said. I wasn't thinking rationally. My heart had made me do some stupid things in the last month. In my effort to find joy and adventure, I had inadvertently opened the dam. But I had Monica to deal with. I had to resolve my past before I could think about my future.
Monica shook hands with Cortland on her way in, and I surveyed my outfit, black dress pants and a fitted black sweater, wishing I had the confidence to wear a color- any color-other than black. I was still dressed in mourning gear.
“Your sister is amazing,” Monica said as we wrapped our hands around our steaming cups minutes later. I had figured Monica as the no-fat latte kind of girl, but she surprised me. Like me, her favorite was the café mocha.
“Chocolate fiend,” she said, flashing a white smile at me. Where were the coffee stains?
“Me, too,” I confessed.
“Joel used to say we were like a Reese's cup-him with the peanut butter and me with the chocolate.”
My heart burned at the mention of his name. Of course, Joel's peanut butter addiction did not belong to me. And thankfully he had never called us Reese's. I would've been offended if he'd used the same term of endearment. I wished I could've been the bigger person and let my jealousy wash away, but it was there. I was jealous of all the years she had Joel before me and all the space she had occupied in his mind and heart after she had left him.
“Yes, the peanut butter,” I said. “I couldn't bear to throw away the last jar of it. I know a food can't define a person, but he wouldn't have been Joel without the peanut butter.”
Monica laughed. “Or the way he made a pizza sandwich by putting one piece on top of the other.”
“My kids still do that,” I said, then lowered my voice. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“No, thank you. Like I said before, I've thought about you often. How you and your family are doing, and I guess I have some unresolved issues where Joel is concerned.”
I could feel my throat strain and I forced down some of my coffee. I had to stay strong. “Well, he had an unresolved life. Isn't that the worst part of dying young?”
Monica's voice softened. “The worst part is that you're left behind. God, I can't even imagine. Even though things have never been great with my husband, I can't believe how dependent on him I am. I can't imagine.”
“I get by. We get by. I mean, it's not easy, but you have to keep going. For the sake of the kids.”
“I don't know how to say this without just coming right out and saying it, Ramona. I feel selfish for even bringing it up. I have such respect for your marriage. I do.”
“I appreciate your saying that, but I can't take away the history that you two had together. I know he loved you. I'd be a fool to think that went away when you left him.”
Monica cringed. “Is that what he told you? That I left him?”
“That you broke off the engagement.”
“It's complicated.”
“Look, you don't have to tell me. It's none of my business.”
“But it is,” she said earnestly, her voice rising. “I've lived with such guilt over the years. Some days I worry I'll die without talking to you. And I can't let this go unfinished.”
My hands began to shake. “I don't know if I'm strong enough to hear what you have to tell me. Maybe that's why I never called you before now.”
Monica's eyes glistened with tears. “What did he tell you about me?”
“At first, it was just that you broke off the engagement because you were in love with another man. I often thought I should thank you for doing that. If you'd married him, I wouldn't have ever met him.”
Monica shook her head. “I cheated on him with his best friend.”
“I'd heard it was something like that. Judith refuses to talk about it.”
“She hates me and rightly so I guess. He was humiliated. The whole family was.”
“You have to admit, it's a soap opera moment.”
“We were all best friends, since junior high. The guys since they were babies. They were inseparable. I guess by dating one, in some ways I thought I was dating both of them. Joel was the nice one, the funny guy. The boy-next-door type, you know? I had dated Jonathon first, in junior high. We were king and queen of our eighth-grade dance. But then Jonathon got seriously girl-crazy and he broke my heart. So to get back at him, I started dating his best friend.”
“Joel.”
“Exactly. And the thing is, Joel was my best friend, too, so it was easy to love him. I pined for Jonathon off and on, and when Joel and I would break up, Jonathon was there to console me, and one thing would lead to another. I was on and off with Joel in the public and Jonathon in private.”
I'd never known. How could Joel not tell me? “But you were kids then.”
“I don't buy that. Teenagers and college students may not have the logic yet, but they have the passion. I was passionately in love with both Jonathon and Joel, but it was different. I was more attracted to Jonathon, but knew that Joel was the one I should marry. I knew this even when I was fifteen. And that never changed.”
“So what happened?”
“Something I never expected: Jonathon finally grew up. He quit his womanizing ways. He'd slept with half the sorority girls on campus already. He was a player, but as my wedding with Joel approached, Jonathan came to me and said he was done with other girls-that I was the one that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.”
“So you broke things off with Joel?”
Monica grabbed a napkin and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No. Even though I wanted to believe Jonathon, I couldn't believe he'd changed. We were twenty-five. I was in law school, Joel was at his first architecture firm and we were planning on getting married two months later. Joel had wanted to elope in college, but I wasn't ready. I convinced him we should wait until after I graduated from law school, but Joel insisted we not wait another year. I guess I was putting it off because I wasn't sure I should marry Joel. Not without him knowing the truth.”