I'm the One Who Got Away by Andrea Jarrell

Author:Andrea Jarrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

I half expected Wes’s interest in me to be a whirlwind fluke. But even before his scent was gone from my pillows, I began receiving long letters urging me not only to visit him in Santa Fe, but to move there, to live with him. Like a soldier writing from the front, he wrote on any paper handy—envelope backs, mismatched stationery, notebook paper with frayed edges. More truths spilled out—about a small trust fund he’d blown, about other universities he’d dropped out of, and always, always about the way he wanted me.

In his mother’s class, sometimes it felt as if we were the two people carrying on a romance. We betrayed my fellow students with our knowing glances, her hand on my shoulder, me hanging back after class to go for coffee. Given Wes’s history with women, I thought Isabel might have her doubts about the wisdom of me actually considering moving to Santa Fe. But on the last night of the workshop, she indicated I was lucky to have the opportunity at all.

Sliding into our regular booth at the corner coffee shop, she said, “You know, I was going to introduce him to someone else.” She named a pretty writer whose first novel I admired. I’d praised the book a few weeks before, but at the time Isabel hadn’t said she knew her.

The waiter came over with his green notepad.

“Just coffee,” I told him.

“I thought you were having pie?” Isabel seemed genuinely disappointed. But my appetite was gone.

After the waiter left, she said, “This is better, though. You, I mean, not the pie.”

I noticed her pink lipstick had traveled to her front teeth, which then disappeared behind her satisfied, close-lipped smile. I suspected then that she hadn’t actually planned to introduce Wes to that pretty writer—but she knew that saying she had would make her son even more attractive to me. She thought I would enjoy the idea that I had beaten the other writer. She was right.

When I went home for Christmas a month later, my mother made me blush by buying me a negligee. I sat on the edge of her bed to open the box she’d handed me. She leaned forward for a better look while I shyly lifted the silk nightgown out of its tissue paper. It was pale aqua, a color for a mermaid.

“For your trousseau,” she said.

“We’re not getting married.”

“I want you to feel special.”

I’d told her about Wes’s letters and the way he had begun insisting that I live with him. I waited for her to warn me not to trust his urgency. For her to say that it had always been the same with my father.

From my fingertips, the silky peignoir hung like a delicate curtain between my mother and me. “What’s the worst that can happen?” I asked her. But then I answered my own question, because I thought I knew. After my mother had given birth to me, there’d been no turning back. Once she’d had a child, her life changed forever.

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