Author: Eve Vang

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Short Story Memoir

The Goodbye

By Eve Vang

Stepping back and forth on the brakes was making her nauseous though she was the one in the driver’s seat. Back and forth, back and forth, bumper to bumper. She was a terrible driver – whether or not it was because of the cars lined up on the interstate like little ants bustling home causing her anxiety.

He was waiting for her by the lakeside on the other side of the city, just in time for the sunset. Her stomach wrenched, more so because she was afraid to hear what he had to say. They had agreed to meet before the sun faded into Lake Harriet. The crickets would be out by the time she arrived. She hadn’t been able to leave the house until one of the siblings came home to take care of her little brother. So once again, she was forced to wait, making a quick dinner, attempting to clean the house – dusting and reorganizing, spraying Febreeze into the bathroom, just enough to appease her mother’s demands.

She slowly maneuvered onto the exit as the cars finally let up. The immaculate houses of Victorian Era roots surrounded the lakes, each largely abstract, whose bricks were too dark, red and taunting, with perfectly trimmed shrubs and weeping willows dotting the yard. Even in the moonlight, their shadows encased the trees whose own shadows were lost within the reflection of the water. It stunned her how large these houses were every time she drove past them, but it seemed there was never anyone home.

Her boyfriend was about to embark on a bike ride across the country. Tousled hair and plaided shirt, his hippie friends had frightened her the first time she met him at a college house party. Dragged into the kegger by her Political Science major comrades, she reluctantly tagged along. Though she loved to have wine and chat with friends, the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans on the counters, beer bong and hookah on the coffee table, and the liquor tainted red couch in the living room wasn’t her usual scene. By the end of the night, the house had dimmed and his lips were on hers exchanging lingering breaths of Vodka in between.

Uncommon is common, as her elementary teacher used to say. She didn’t think she’d ever see him again after the party, but he seemed to appear and disappear like airplanes that weaved in and out of clouds on a stormy night, reminding her of his flight scheduled to leave in the morning. She wasn’t going to see him go.

At first, he smelled. Especially the nights he would release her, his hands finally out of her long dark locks. The two of them inevitably collapsing out of breath side by side in bed. The smell of his sweat was unfamiliar, but she was swimming in it. He gave her his t-shirt to wear home. She refused, afraid her mother would notice.

“I want to meet your family,” he said one day as they took her brother home from the playground. “How do you say ‘hello’ again?” His mouth formed funny sounds making his adam’s apple vibrate. He was really trying, he wanted to know. Kevin giggled in the back seat.

But, she wouldn’t bring him home. Her father’s voice echoed in her head, “They’ll use you.”

It was the night her parents would drive up to their farm that she finally let him bring over a movie to watch with Kevin. Grandma sat in her usual chair pushing a needle through her bright patterns. He wanted to ask what she was doing, but she led him away.

“Let’s watch that movie you brought.”

As the bandshell in the park came into view, she tried to think of something else besides the fact that her parents ended up coming home that night during the middle of the movie, and though only his arm was wrapped around her snuggly like dates at the movies, she threw it off her when she heard the old Toyota Sienna pull up in the driveway. “You have to go,” she said. She pulled him off the couch and locked him in the bathroom. Twenty minutes of her parents searching for their gardening tools while he waited behind the shower curtains.

He told her he was leaving with his friends on a bike trip the next day. He wouldn’t be back.

She pulled up now to his bike parked against the tree. He was crazy for riding all the way out here. The infatuation with riding long distances and discovering new things was what had pulled her towards him since the beginning, but it was the unintentional diversion of his curiosity now that was scaring him away. Her heart sank, she hadn’t known what to do and now he was leaving. A homebody at heart, the lakes and her family would hold her in place. But it seemed, this wasn’t his home.

She turned off the car, holding the keys too tightly it hurt. When he saw her tiny figure walking towards him, she saw his face smiling. He seemed to love her still, but she didn’t understand why because it wasn’t enough for him to stay. Together, they found a large rock on the edge of the beach shore. She tried to sit away from him, but he pulled her closer.

Pulling out a stone from his pocket, he said, “it’s rare,” and slipped it into her hand. There was an imprint of a butterfly on it.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered, wanting to take her apology back.

“I tried,” he said.

She shook her head,

“Me too.”