We Are Too Many by Hannah Pittard

Author:Hannah Pittard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

PART TWO

AN IMAGINED EXCHANGE

A few weeks ago, I heard from a friend that Holly had overdosed. She was fifty-one years old. The news was a totally unexpected blow, and I couldn’t get you out of my thoughts. You didn’t text. You didn’t call. It was completely unlike you—or, to be more accurate, completely unlike my version of you—not to take advantage of a tragedy in order to be in touch, whereby you’d have had an opportunity to be melancholic, mawkish even. I was surprised. To be honest, I was upset. I started wondering about your parents, to whom I’d once been so close, and whether or not you’d at least reach out when they died. After that, my thoughts spiraled, and I found myself contemplating the future funerals of everyone we’d ever had in common. When would a death finally bring us back together? Not together together. But I wondered what event would ultimately bring our orbits into view again. Eventually, my admittedly indulgent fantasies landed on my own mother. During our marriage, she’d been smitten with you and you with her. She sobbed when I told her we were splitting up. You two had lunch to hash out the whys and hows of your affair. It took her three years to actually remove you from her will. Will I call you when she dies? Will I text? Or will you hear the news from Hugh or from my brother-in-law? And when you hear the news, will you call me? Will I answer? Who can say? My point here is that Holly’s death sent me down an unexpected wormhole of nostalgia, and for a little while—because you hadn’t contacted me, because you hadn’t used her death as an excuse to reconnect with your past (this past)—I believed that you’d changed in some fundamental way. This very likely possibility stunned me. But then, not three nights ago, you texted—after almost two years and out of the blue!—to ask if a phishing attempt regarding an obviously bogus Home Depot order was mine. I wasn’t going to respond—there’s no way you could have believed the order was real—but in the end, I couldn’t resist: Don’t click the link! Scam. Not for me. Thx for asking. Your response was immediate and Essential Patrick, a spectacularly distilled blend of irony and insecurity from a hipster who never wanted to be regarded as a hipster: Thumbs-up emoji. There you were, the old you, and I knew you hadn’t changed. It was comforting in its way, knowing you were still you.

YOU: I disagree with much of how you’ve portrayed me.

Well, sure. Yeah. That makes sense.

YOU: Don’t condescend to me.

Wherever I go, there I am.

YOU: Let’s start with my affair.

That only seems right.

YOU: Your insistence that Trish made the first move is entirely wrong. I dislike that you’ve included a fictionalized version of the event that contradicts my own account. Your narrative—that I got off the plane from Paris and that she stood me in front of a mirror and started groping my hair—that’s one hundred percent fantasy.

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