Chapter 10
The diner on High Street was almost empty at seven. The neon in the window buzzed and threw pink light across the wet sidewalk outside. I got there first and took the booth in the back, the one with the cracked vinyl I always slid toward so I didn't have to sit with my back to the door. I ordered coffee because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
Jenna came in shaking rain off her coat. She had her tote bag and a manila folder tucked under her arm like she was coming to a meeting, which I guess she was.
"You beat me," she said. She slid in across from me and didn't take her coat off right away. "I thought you'd be late. You drive slow when you're anxious."
"I drove exactly the speed limit," I said, and she smiled.
The waitress poured her coffee without asking. Jenna waited until the woman walked away, then pushed the folder across the laminate toward me.
"I printed it," she said. "Because I knew you'd say you couldn't picture it."
Inside was a single sheet. My handwriting next to hers. A simple budget table she'd made on her laptop. My savings from three semesters of adjunct teaching, the exact amount in my checking account that I'd told her two weeks ago and then pretended I'd forgotten. Next to it, the fellowship stipend amount from my letter — $18,000 plus tuition — broken into monthly. Rent for my one-bedroom. Utilities. Gas. Groceries.
I stared at it. The numbers were so plain.
"You can do it," Jenna said quietly. "Not easily. Not luxuriously. But you don't need his two hundred dollars a month. You haven't needed it since September. Look."
She tapped the line where she'd highlighted my checking balance. "You've already survived without it. You just kept letting him send it so you wouldn't have to have the fight."
I felt my throat get tight. The diner smelled like grill oil and coffee that had been on too long. Somewhere behind us a bus tub clattered.
"I brought the letter to Christmas because I wanted them to choose me," I said. The sentence came out smaller than I meant it to. "That sounds so stupid now."
"It doesn't," Jenna said.
"I told myself I was just sharing good news. But really I was testing them. If David would put the knife down. If Mom would look at me instead of him. I held it like — like if I held it long enough someone would finally say they were proud of me."
Jenna didn't look away. She never did that thing where she checked her phone while I talked.
"Honey," she said, after a second. "They answered."
I looked up.
"At that table," she said. "The two people on their phones. Your mom looking at David instead of you. David doing that thing with his hand like you were interrupting his dinner. That was the answer."
My eyes filled before I could stop it. I didn't sob. I just sat there in the booth with coffee going cold and tears running down my face while the line cooks called orders. I wiped at my cheeks with the heel of my hand and then just let them come. Jenna reached across and put her hand over mine and didn't say anything for a long minute. She let me cry quietly the way I needed to, not the way people want you to get over it fast.
When I could breathe again I picked up the budget sheet. My hands weren't shaking anymore.
"The fellowship can't be deferred," I said. "She told me yesterday. If I don't take it, it's gone. I'd have to reapply next year and maybe not get it."
"I know," Jenna said.
"I keep drafting a text to my mom in my head where I ask if it's okay if I go. Like, 'Would you be very upset if—'"
"Don't send that text," Jenna said, not unkindly.
I folded the sheet in half and then in half again. The paper was warm from my hands.
"I'm not going to ask," I said. It surprised me how steady I sounded. "I'm going to tell them. I'm going home tomorrow morning and I'm going to read the whole letter out loud and then I'm going to tell them I'm going. Not ask."
Jenna squeezed my hand. "Where will you tell them?"
"At their house. At the table if I have to. I want David to hear it while he's sitting there. I want Mom to hear the part about the faculty, the part where they said my manuscript had 'exceptional promise.' I want them to hear it in my voice, not read it on a phone."
"Are you going to take the teaching contract with you?"
I nodded. It was still unsigned in my tote bag, next to the letter. "To show them I'm not asking them to fix it. I'm just telling them what I already decided."
Jenna finally pulled her coat off and flagged the waitress. "We need pie," she said to me. "If you're going to drive to your parents' house tomorrow and blow up Christmas part two, you need pie tonight."
May you like
I actually laughed then, a real one that hurt my throat a little. She ordered apple for both of us. While we waited, I unfolded the budget sheet again and smoothed it flat. I borrowed her pen and wrote ACCEPT at the top in my own handwriting and circled it.
I wouldn't click the portal until after I'd said it to their faces. But sitting in that booth, with the rain ticking against the diner windows and Jenna across from me not looking at her phone once, I felt the decision settle. It wasn't permission I needed. It had been in my tote bag for a week, waiting for me to stop holding it against my chest like a shield and start holding it like proof.
