I sit back down.
She walks around the table and shakes hands with everyone. When she gets to me, I stand up again, turn around, face her. “I’m Abby,” she says.
I ask if I can hug her, because what if this is my only chance? She smiles and opens her arms. Then—the smell that will become home to me—skin like powder and fabric softener blended with the wool of her coat and her cologne and something that smelled like air, like outdoors, like crisp sky, like a baby and a woman and a man and the whole world.
The only seat left is at the far end of the table, so she walks away from me and sits down. She’ll later tell me that she didn’t eat or speak because all of her energy was spent trying not to stare. Mine, too.
Dinner ends, and there is more milling. Oh my God, more milling and now with a revolution in the room. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and kill two milling minutes. When I walk out, she is standing in the hallway, watching the bathroom door, waiting. She motions to me to come over. I look behind me to make sure it’s me she’s talking to. She laughs. She laughs.
Then it’s time to walk to the ballroom. We separate ourselves from the pack somehow. There are people three feet in front of us and behind us, but here we are, walking alone, together. I want so badly to be interesting. But she is so cool, and I don’t know how to be cool. I’ve not been cool a day in my life. I am warm—burning up—sweating through my shirt already.
She starts talking, thank God. She tells me about the book she’s about to release. She says, “But things are hard right now. You’ve probably heard.”
“Heard what? I have not heard. What would I have heard, and where would I have heard it?”
She says, “The news, maybe? ESPN?”
“Um, no, I have not heard the news on ESPN,” I say.
She speaks, slowly at first, then all at once.
“I’m a soccer player. Was a soccer player. I just retired, and I’m not sure what I am now. I got a DUI last month. It was all over the news. I watched my mug shot scroll across the ticker for days. I can’t believe I did it. I’ve been really lost and depressed the last couple of years, and I just…I screwed up. I’ve always been about honor, and I ruined my whole legacy. I let everybody down. I hurt the whole team, maybe. And now they want me to write my book as some kind of hero athlete puff piece, but I keep thinking: What if I’m just honest? What if I write the truth about my life?”
I am sad for her, but I am thrilled for me. In our four minutes together she has asked me about the three subjects I know best: drinking, writing, and shame. This is my jam. I’ve got this. Hot damn.
I put my hand on her arm. Electrical currents. I pull back and recover enough to say, “Listen, I have a rap sheet as long as your arm. I’d write it all. I’d be honest. I don’t know much about the sports world, but I do know that out here in the real world, we like real people.”
She stops walking, so I do, too. She turns and looks directly at me. It appears that she’s about to say something. I hold my breath. Then she turns and keeps walking. I start breathing and walking, too. We enter the ballroom and follow the other authors through a sea of round tables, white tablecloths, thirty-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers. We end up at the dais, climb the stairs, and see that we’ve been seated next to each other. We walk toward our places, and when we arrive, she puts her hand on the back of my chair. She cannot decide whether to pull it out for me. She does. “Thank you,” I say.
We sit down, and the writer seated next to Abby asks where she’s from.
“We live in Portland,” Abby answers.
The writer says, “Oh, I love Portland.”
Abby says, “Yeah.”
Something about the way she says “Yeah” makes me listen very, very hard.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there. We moved there because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”
I can tell, just by the way she says this, that there is no we left. I want to save her from follow-up questions, so I say, “Oh, people like us can’t live in Portland. We’re Portland on the inside. We need sunshine on the outside.”
I am immediately embarrassed by what I’ve just said. Portland on the inside? What the hell do those words even mean? People like us? Why did I say us? Us? How terribly presumptuous to suggest the concept of us. Us.
Us. Us. Us.
She looks at me, her eyes widen, and she smiles. I change my mind. I don’t know what I meant, but I’m glad I said it. I decide that heaven is saying anything that makes this woman smile like that.
The event begins. When it is my turn to walk to the podium and speak, I disregard half of my planned speech and say things about shame and freedom that I want Abby to hear. I look at the hundreds of people in front of me and think only of her behind me. When I finish, I sit down and Abby looks at me. Her eyes are red.
The dinner ends, and people begin to approach our table. A line forms in front of Abby fifty people deep. She turns and asks me to sign a copy of my book for her. I do. Then she turns back toward the crowd and starts smiling, signing, making small talk. She is comfortable, confident, gracious. She is used to this.
A curly-haired woman who had walked into dinner behind Abby approaches our table. I can tell she is waiting to talk to me. I smile and motion her over. She leans in to me, as close as possible, and whispers, “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before. I just, I know Abby really well, like a sister. I don’t know what happened here in the last hour, but I’ve never seen her like this. I just, I really feel like she needs you in her life. Somehow. This is so weird. I’m sorry.” This woman is flustered, and she has tears in her eyes. She hands me her business card. I understand that my answer will be important to her.
I say, “Okay. Yes. Yes, of course.”
My friend Dynna from my publishing house is waiting so that we can walk out together. I look over at Abby, still forty fans left to sign for.
I am not sad to leave Abby. I am excited to leave her so I can think about her. I am excited to leave because I realize I have never in my life felt this alive, and now I just want to go out into the world and walk around feeling this alive. I just want to start being this new person I have just suddenly, somehow become.
I say, “Bye Abby.” Oh my God, I’ve said her name. Abby. I wonder if it’s okay or if I should have asked permission to use this word that sends shock waves rippling through me. She turns toward me, smiles, waves. She looks expectant. Her face is asking a question that one day I’ll answer.
Dynna and I walk out of the ballroom and into a grand hallway. She stops me and asks, “How do you think it went?”
I say, “It was amazing.”
Dynna says, “I agree. You were on fire up there. Different somehow.”
“Oh, you meant the speech. I was talking about the whole night. I felt the oddest thing. I felt like Abby and I had some kind of connection.”
Dynna grabbed my arm and said, “I cannot believe you just said that. I can’t believe this. I swear to God, I felt it, too. I felt something happening between you from all the way in the back of the ballroom. This is so wild.”
I stared at her and said, “It was. It is. This whole night…the connection between us…it was just like…”
Dynna looked hard at me and then said, “Like you two would have been together in another life?”
