“Jesus wept, man, I would not put up with all that crap, people digging into my business for no damn reason other than to proffer an opinion nobody asked for. I’ve had enough of strangers asking me personal questions to last a lifetime. None of them ever are actually concerned, they just want to pretend to be better than you.” The bitterness wasn’t out of her tone, not by a long shot. Foster care had been an experience; half a dozen families ranging from obnoxiously overbearing to abusive and in between. It had been a life she had been glad to be rid of when she turned 18. “Genie magic, huh? Where’s the lamp I gotta rub to get my three wishes?”
Abi did laugh softly at the idea of him in a house with partying journalists in his youth; so very Ernest Hemingway, wasn’t it? A party lifestyle. “Then you basically went to college. It’s all it is, a place for kids to fuck and drink and party while pretending to their parents that they’re getting their degrees and barely scraping past graduation…” She had memories of people bluffing on the phones to their mothers while at parties, saying they weren’t getting into the hard stuff. Kids.
“Nothing worth doing ever came easy though, did it?” she muttered in response. Abi knew she’d get there eventually; maybe nowhere near his level but she’d get there by the skin of her teeth if it killed her. Her name on a book cover, someone to read her message to the world. One person. It was a nice dream to have.
She had to smile again, seeming to be doing a lot of that during this… meeting? Date? Whatever it was. “Give or take a few inches, yeah,” she joked in response. “Everybody fucks up sooner or later, it’s just recognising it and making amends. That’s the part I’m bad at, admitting when I’m wrong. Stubborn as a mule and twice as pretty,” Abi smiled, shaking her head.
“I can see it from both points of view, being here. Nothing’s ever simple as good or as bad, in black and white. You start to see people in shades of grey and hope there’s more light than dark. I can’t wait to find out who I can connect with, you know? Maybe there’s more to this place than I’m already looking at.”
Perhaps she shouldn’t have asked him such a probing question but Abi would be lying if she said she’d never consider the answer he gave a part of who he was. She had that ability to see right into the soul of people, and hopefully to the good parts of who they were. Her first look was positive but she had the disadvantage of knowing his history and reputation before meeting the man himself, and that came with unclaimed baggage.
Her heart broke a little for all of them though; for Ernest and Hadley, his sons, for Pauline. None of them deserved an unstable home. Abi listened intently, her hand reaching back out to his arm once again as a thank you for his candidness. She could see how he had his head turned around, getting caught up in that world that treated him as something new. She was worried about that, if she was lucky enough to gain any measure of success.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as he finished the explanation. “You’re honest, I can tell. That lure, of being recognised, of your work suddenly having value in other people’s eyes, I know how much it can change a person into something they never wanted to be. These decisions we make show us who we are in that moment, not who we are as a whole. You get a few big choices in life and you maybe made a wrong call. I don’t know. You got more beautiful children out of your second marriage, you learned, grew up a bit. But you were just being honest with yourself then, and now. That’s all that matters, in the end.” Abi licked her lip again, nervous. “I don’t talk to people like this. Not ever. I know I push people away by making them uncomfortable, by arguing and pointing out their flaws until they hate me. It’s a cycle I try to break every time. Men bore me, Boston bored me. I never expected to find… to find someone I could talk to like this. Who would… be open so easily. How d’you do that?”
No man is an island. She knew that feeling well, trying to build bridges to the mainland from sticks and leaves. You had to have solid connections. She wanted those. “Fresh start… sounds good, doesn’t it?” Abi replied quietly. “Coffee’s all gone, though. Can’t have that.”