The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (6 page)

Vernie snorted. "I wrote some other movies too."

"Like what?"

Vernie named a couple of films I'd never heard of, and also one called
Borrowing Trouble
.

"I know that one!" I said. "But I haven't seen it."

"Don't bother. It wasn't what I wrote either. I love Hollywood, but it's a crazy place. And it was a different world back then for women. Or maybe not so different. Do you like movies?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I was in one once."

"You were?"

"
Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies
."

"Well, I absolutely love the title."

"Yeah, well, I was just an extra, but you can see me in the cafeteria scene. But like you said, don't bother. It's terrible. Not even direct-to-DVD, I don't think. Direct-to-Netflix."

Vernie nodded soberly. "Yes, that's the way it often goes. But that's not the point. Did you like it?"

"What?"

"Acting."

I thought back. "Not really. I mean, it was sort of fun, even though it was a weird time in my life. But acting isn't for me."

"Then it's a really good thing you did it."

"Why?"

"You found out you didn't like acting. How great is that?"

I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it did sort of make sense.

I took a sip of wine. We'd had cocktails before dinner and now wine with the food. I was just glad I'd taken the bus.

"So if not acting," Vernie said, "what do you wanna do with your life? What are your hopes and dreams?"

At that, I took
another
drink of wine. But it didn't help me answer the question.

"I'm not sure I have any," I said.

"Of course you do. What did you study in school?"

"Psychology and political science. They're okay. But mostly I chose them just to shut my parents up."

"Fantastic! That's two more things you can check off your list. What about your job?"             

"Well, lifeguarding definitely isn't my dream. Although I'm glad I was doing it this week."

Vernie grinned.

"And I also work in a bakery, but, well, I hate it."

"You know what that means," Vernie said.

"Okay, yeah, but now that I know those things aren't my dream, how come I have to keep doing them?"

Vernie laughed. "Oh, you're
definitely
a whiskey sour. Don't worry. It'll all be clear in the end."

"I guess." I explained how envious I was of my friends Min and Gunnar for having Unstoppable Career Drive and Passionate Aimlessness when I didn't have either, and how it seemed like everyone around me was on one of those two tracks. Everyone except me.

Vernie leaned in closer. "I'll let you in on a little secret. It's not just your friends, and it's not just now. Those have always been the two choices in life, at least if you wanna be happy."

"So I'm never going to be happy?"

"Sure, you are," Vernie said. "It's just like with your drink. Just because you don't know what your dream is, that doesn't mean you don't have one. It just means you haven't discovered it yet."

I didn't like the turn this conversation was taking. I'd finally found someone to tell me that there really
was
a secret to life, something that everyone else knew except me, but it was something stupid like,
The secret is different for everyone.
Or,
It's something you must discover on your own.
Fuck that. I wanted ANSWERS. Clear! Understandable! Answers! Was that really too much to ask?

"Russel?"

I looked up at her.

"I'm an old lady. You have to humor me on this, okay?"

I smiled. "Okay."

"I mean it. The fact that you don't know your dream? That's a
good
thing. That means it's a
good
dream. Dreams aren't like drinks—they're not as easy to pick, and they're harder to change. I was thirty before I realized I wanted to be a screenwriter."

"You were? Wow." At least I caught myself before I said, "That's
old
!"

We were mostly done with dinner now, so Vernie said, "Hold on, I'll be right back." Then she gathered up our plates and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a little cake and candles.

"You didn't need to do that," I said.

"Of course I did. You saved my life! And remember, one day I'm going to pay you back by saving yours too."

And as she was slicing up the cake, I thought to myself,
Okay, Vernie definitely isn't Stifler's Mom, or Blanche Dubois, or even Kathy Griffin.

She was better.

CHAPTER FIVE

For what it's worth, I couldn't stop thinking about Kevin. Which was just stupid. I mean, it was so blindingly obvious what it was all about: I was disappointed with my life, I'd run into my high school boyfriend who reminded me of the last time I'd been truly happy, and now I was stupidly assuming that if I was back together with him, I'd be happy again, just like before.

But it wasn't that easy. Life didn't work like that. I'd changed, he'd changed. You can't go home again, you never step in the same river twice, you can't reassemble the scrambled eggs.

The past is the past.

Still, I'd been thinking about this enough that I knew I had to talk to someone about it. I'd been too embarrassed to ask Min and Gunnar, "So what's the secret to life that everyone knows except me?" But I could ask them this. So a couple of days after my dinner with Vernie, I decided to talk to them about Kevin.

Gunnar was holed up in his bedroom on the computer, but Min and I were sitting up on the deck on the top of the houseboat, watching the sunset. The view from up there was just ridiculously beautiful, with the sleek glass skyscrapers of downtown reflecting the orange glow of the sinking sun. All it needed was little CGI spaceships flying around, and it'd be a stunning futuristic paradise in some James Cameron movie. And you can literally see the Space Needle from there, which is just so cool, like moving to Hollywood and having a view of the "Hollywood" sign out your apartment window.

The houseboat rocked slightly, and water gurgled. On the lake in front of us, sailboats floated by. I always wondered who these people were, the folks out sailboating at eight o'clock on a Tuesday evening. How had they arranged their lives that they were able to not work and afford boats like that? More importantly, why were they not me?

Finally, I turned to Min. "Do you think I should call Kevin?"

"Yes," Min said.

"Really? You do?"

"Absolutely. Call him. You know you want to. And it's the right thing to do."

"I do want to," I said "But it just seems so pathetic. I mean, I dump him because I'm feeling pissy and ignored. Then three years later, after my life goes completely to shit, I go pathetically crawling back, saying, 'Please, Kevin, I was wrong, take me back.'"

"Your life hasn't gone to shit," she said. "You're being completely melodramatic as usual. But you should still call him."

"You really think so?" I said.

"Absolutely, without a doubt, no question."

I looked back toward downtown. The last few years, Seattle has sort of gone crazy—economically, I mean. Things may have been tough in the rest of the country, but not here. The whole South Lake Union area—the area between Lake Union and downtown—is being transformed. It used to be run-down warehouses and vacant lots, but they've cleared all that away. Now they're basically building a second downtown. Part of that is the new Amazon.com headquarters, which is supposed to include these three massive glass balls—each one big enough to fit a little park inside, with grass and trees and everything. I counted once, and I could literally see twenty-four different cranes just from the top of our houseboat. What would it all look like in five years when it was done?

Kevin's and my future was like that rising skyline—full of promise, full of optimism. Staring at it all, it was hard not to feel emboldened, to grab my phone and call him up and ask him to marry me right then and there.

"But what if he doesn't want to see me?" I said to Min.

Okay, so I didn't feel
that
emboldened.

But before Min could answer, there was a creak on the deck behind us. At first I thought it was Gunnar joining us from his bedroom at last. I turned around, a smile on my face.

It wasn't Gunnar. It was the Min-ions, Trai and Lena.

The smiled slipped from my face like the sun disappearing behind the Olympic Mountains.

"Oh!" Min said. "Hey." Her face had lit up, the exact opposite of mine.

"Gunnar let us in," Lena explained.

"Hey," I said to the two of them, and Lena
sort of
nodded.

They both pulled up chairs on the other side of Min, which was awkward and a little insulting, since Min and I had basically been centered in the middle of the deck.

"
So
?" Lena said to Min, all excited. "How'd it go with Kennedy? Did you get the extension?"

Something to do with their graduate program. And sure enough, Min filled them both in on all the drama.

I stayed up on the deck a little while after that, staring over at the darkening skyline, trying to pay attention to what they were saying, despite it being totally boring. Finally I left, and I'm not sure Min even realized I was gone.

*   *   *

As for Kevin, I didn't call him. But truthfully, for a while, even I wasn't sure why I didn't. Then it finally occurred to me: I was kind of
afraid
to contact him—even if I wasn't exactly sure what I was afraid
of
. That we'd get back together and I'd still be frustrated and unhappy? Then I'd have to accept that the problem with my life wasn't my lack of Kevin at all—that the problem was
me.

I guess on some level I sort of liked the idea that Kevin was out there somewhere, just waiting to step in and solve all my problems and make my life wonderful. The minute I actually saw him again, all that went away. It really was like that South Lake Union skyline. It was full of promise as long as it was all scaffolding and cranes, but what happened when the buildings were finally done? What if they were ugly? What if they didn't fit well together? What if Amazon's celebrated geodesic balls turned out to be big ugly lumps? I didn't want Kevin's and my relationship to have lumpy balls! (Okay, that came out wrong, but you know what I mean.)

So almost a week went by, and pretty much nothing happened except work, sleep, and the occasional Xbox game. I knew life wasn't like
Pretty Woman
, where you just have to wish hard enough for a hot guy in a white limousine to come and solve all your problems (at least if you're pretty, which, let's face it, is basically the message of that movie). No, real life is like Vernie's alternate, un-filmed version of
Pretty Woman
, where nothing changes in your life until
you
change it.

But then came a day I was working at Bake again.

"I can't believe you let this happen," Amanda was saying to Jake. "You
knew
the ad was running this week."

"Why is it my responsibility?" Jake said. "You knew the ad was running too."

Bake had placed its first-ever ad in the
Northwest Asian Weekly
, which is a local newspaper for the Asian community. We'd even started to get a few new customers too, which made sense since it was a community that (a) had a lot of money and (b) sometimes bought into weird, pop-culture-y trends like custom-baking your own loaf of bread. (Or is that racist? Seriously, you can tell me. I want to know.)

Problem is, we'd quickly run out of dried lychees. It wasn't a popular "integrant" in the first place—I could only remember three people ever wanting it in their bread. But Jake and Amanda were freaking out that Asian people were going to come into the store, see that we had no dried lychees, and run away screaming.

"I'll just go," Jake was saying. "I'll be right back."

"You
won't
be right back," Amanda said. "Uwajimaya is all the way on the other side of town!" This is Seattle's biggest (and best) Asian supermarket, located in the International District, and it was a pretty crazy drive, especially with the afternoon rush hour looming. "We'll go tonight after we close."

"
You'll
go tonight after work. I have to see my dad."

"You just saw your dad last weekend."

"For ten minutes," Jake said. "Besides, he needs a phone installed in his bathroom."

"He doesn't need a phone in the bathroom."

"Yes, he does. It's a safety thing. If he knocks the phone off the cradle, the switch board immediately calls the emergency crew."

"I'll go," I said.

"Why does he need a phone?" Amanda said to Jake, ignoring me. "He wears that button-thing around his neck."

"Which he always forgets in the bedroom. Which is why I'm installing the phone in the
bathroom
."

"I'll go!" I said, louder.

Jack and Amanda both looked at me.

"To Uwajimaya," I said. "I mean, if you need someone to go, I don't mind. I'd just need to borrow your car."

In the end, they decided that, yes, having me go was best, even if it meant another fifteen-minute fight between Jake and Amanda over whether or not I was covered by their insurance.

*   *   *

Uwajimaya is just fantastic. If you take a quick scan, it mostly looks just like any other American supermarket—big and bright and colorful. But if you look closer, you realize that everything is actually different. Some things are
very
different. For example, the seafood section has a big tank full of live octopi. And there are fish heads, and massive geoduck clams, and a zillion different kinds of live crab. Elsewhere in the store, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but dried noodles. And they must stock forty different kinds of soy sauce, and at least twenty kinds of nori.

Best of all, most of the food is shipped directly from Asia, so the labels don't bother with English at all. Want to know what's in your miso soup mix and you don't read Japanese? Then you're in the wrong store. And if you're grossed out by things like boiled silkworm larvae, well, you really need to get out more.

I'd been to Uwajimaya a million times, so it didn't take me long to find the dried lychee nuts. But Jake and Amanda didn't know that, so I took my own sweet time.

I explored the produce. With a name like dragon fruit, it had to be good, right?

I examined the electric tea pots. It reminded me how Min was always saying her parents are total snobs about tea, even though she's a total tea snob herself. Snobbery, like beauty, is totally in the eye of the beholder.

Finally, I considered going upstairs to check out the cookbooks, despite the fact that none of them are written in English.

And then, standing in the middle of the massive fresh sushi section, I saw Kevin.

I literally caught my breath. I'd never done that before, so I didn't even know what it felt like (a cross between a gulp and a choke).

He wasn't riding in a white limousine like Richard Gere in
Pretty Woman
, but it didn't matter. I was flooded with feelings of affection—I was drowning in a whole goddamn lake of them.

I was watching him, but he didn't see me, just like before. But this time he was barely ten feet away, and there was no crowd for him to get lost into. In other words, there was no chance of him getting away.

Do I even have time to talk to him?
I actually had to think about that. With iPhone technology constantly changing, I had to seriously consider: were there any possible apps that Jake and Amanda could use to track me and realize I was goofing off?

More importantly, do I
want
to talk to him?
Once we talked, I'd have to accept whatever came next. Like, if his reappearance in my life didn't make everything wonderful again.

Truthfully, that kind of nonsense was a lot easier to accept when Kevin was mostly in the abstract, not when he was standing right in front of me with his neatly trimmed black beard. That was something new—he hadn't had a beard before. He filled out his shirt more now, and his pants too, but both in very good ways. And he hadn't worn glasses before either.

But even so, I couldn't make myself walk over to him. My pulse was pounding, but the blood didn't seem to be going anywhere. The warm feeling suddenly turned cold. I was remembering our break-up, how petty it was, what a dick I'd been. Would he remember that? Would he hold it against me?

I turned to leave.

At the same time, he turned toward me.

"Russel?" he said.

I looked back.

His face was warm and friendly and open. He was drowning in all the same feelings I'd been having only a few seconds earlier—I could just tell. He hadn't remembered why or how we'd broken up, what a dick I'd been. Or maybe he did, but it paled compared to everything else he felt about me.

"Kevin?" I said, acting surprised, like I hadn't just been watching him for three minutes straight.

"How
are
you?"

He really
was
happy to see me. His face was blossoming like a flower.

"I'm good," I said.

He stepped toward me, and I stepped toward him. We hugged, loosely, a little awkwardly. He had absolutely filled out, and it was definitely in a good way. I think he was wearing cologne, but I didn't get a good sense of it, or of his own scent, over all the crazy smells of the store.