Questionable Differences

A server sets a basket of bread between Luca and Harley, followed by a bowl containing four pats of butter wrapped in shiny gold paper. They drove to Antonio’s in their separate cars, both of them having left from work. When Harley got there, Luca was already waiting at their table. He stood and pulled the chair out for her. 

As he tears into a piece of bread, lips greasy from the butter that turns out to be margarine, he still can’t recall ever meeting Harley for dinner; he’s certainly never pulled a chair out for her. When high schoolers start dating, they don’t go out to dinner and movies and picnics for a few months. They don’t have an adult conversation to make things official. 

Hey, I like you.

I like you, too.

Will you be my girlfriend?

And she said yes. I will be your girlfriend. Even though we’ve never been on a proper date and our frontal lobes have at least ten more years of developing to do.

Luca and Harley have been together forever, but they never meet for dinner. They were so young when they started dating that only Luca could drive, so he always picked Harley up. Moving in together right out of high school meant that when they happened to have the money to go out to dinner, they drove to whatever restaurant they could afford together, in their only vehicle (a Pontiac Grand Prix that outlasted every other couple they’d graduated with).

Antonio’s is the closest thing to fine dining that one can find in their small town, a place surrounded by corn and identical to every other nondescript Midwest town. 

Luca sits across from Harley, chewing another bite of the oily bread and watching her mannerisms, searching for the comfortable familiarity he can always find within them. Candlelight illuminates the smudges on her glasses, which are coated in fingerprints from her nervous habit of adjusting their placement on her face. She taps her right foot when she is anxious and her left when she has to pee.

The bruschetta Luca ordered when he arrived is deposited on their white-clothed table and he transfers one to his appetizer plate. He doesn’t ask Harley if she wants one because she hates tomatoes.

Luca’s forehead is covered in a sheen of nervous sweat. He feels for the box in his pocket, its presence immediately sending a shock reverberating through his entire body. He takes a gulp of his Guinness to wash down the trembling but almost chokes on it.

“We haven’t been here in years, have we?” he asks, if only to send something through the tense, thick air and hopefully break through it. 

Harley shakes her head. “You haven’t been. Not since our fifth anniversary, I don’t think.”

Luca feels like he is going to vomit, so he picks up his bruschetta. A few of the tiny, oily chunks of tomato topple off the crusty slice of bread and land next to the shreds of basil.

“I came here for someone’s bridal shower a few years ago,” Harley continues. “I can’t even remember who. Isn’t that funny?” She chuckles but wears a straight face. 

“I thought it would be something different,” Luca says, Harley’s lack of emotion making him feel as though he must protect and defend his every action. 

Luca wonders if Harley is nervous, if perhaps she knows the reason for him asking her to dinner; the question he plans to ask. 

It’s been so long, surely she assumes it’s coming soon. Her mother and sister have been chomping at the bit, begging to plan her wedding, wielding Pinterest boards and venue brochures. 

Even Harley’s reaction to Luca’s invitation was strange. He called her at work, which he never did. 

“Meet me for dinner?”

“Meet you for dinner,” she repeated, scoffing. “Are we going to really shake things up and switch seats? That’ll be fun. You sit on the couch and I’ll take the recliner.”

“I’m serious.”

“Serious about what? The recliner?”

“Antonio’s. Tonight. 8?”

Silence. 

“Okay,” Harley finally said. He searched for the sound of a smile in her voice but couldn’t hear it. 

“Okay.”

Crackling silence. It gave him pause, made him look down at the most expensive thing he’d ever bought in his life and question if he should give it to her at all. He questioned if she’d even want it.

Eating bruschetta in a graceful, confident manner is difficult enough when one’s hands were not already shaking. As he chews that first bite, the nervousness taking all his energy and rendering the act of taking this bite completely exhausting, he glances back up at Harley. Her hair is a little frizzy and the black makeup on her lower lashes has smudged onto her undereyes.

He swallows his second bite of the bruschetta Harley still hasn’t touched, and he admires the woman he loves. He looks across at her and sees every version of her: the unsure girl sitting behind him in orchestra their freshman year, who found out he was struggling in Geometry and offered to help him; the girl who saved as much money as possible so they could get their first apartment together; the woman she’s grown into. 

She is the only person he’s ever known well enough to love.

He’s going to marry her.

He takes one last sip of Guinness and slips the ring box out of his pocket, holding it in his lap, keeping it out of Harley’s line of sight for just another moment. 

“Harley,” he begins, clearing his throat and reaching over to grasp her hand. Eyes wide and hand limp in his, she says nothing, only gapes at him. “I’ve loved you for so many years, and I still feel like it’ll never be enough.” He opens the ring box, still keeping it under the table.

Harley’s mouth moves like she’s trying to say something. Words come out, but they’re too soft to make it across the table to him. He wants to ask her to repeat herself, but if he stops talking he’ll lose his nerve. 

“I have no way of knowing how many years I’ll be blessed with your presence in my life.”

Harley’s gaze drops into her lap. He can’t be sure, but he thinks he sees her shaking her head. She mutters something again. Luca’s head spins.

“And if I can’t know how long we have,” he brings the ring box up, “I suppose I’ll have to spend every day reminding myself how lucky I am—”

“It’s over, Luca.”

Her voice is ice: clear and glacial as it sluices across her tongue and rushes across the table, becoming shards that bury themselves in Luca’s chest. 

He questioned if she’d even want it.

“So you… you don’t…” Speech fails him. Of course in the past he has questioned her interest in getting married, even considering that maybe she was unhappy, but Harley’s words are shocking. He can’t believe he’s just witnessed them leaving her mouth. He is bleeding, all he wants to do is scream, but Harley must think that he hasn’t heard her because she just keeps repeating herself.

“It’s over.”

Blood drips from his chest and onto the floor along with the ringbox that has descended from his grasp. 

“I’m sorry.”

He thinks he hears the ring clanking on the hard floor as it’s freed from its velvet prison.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” Harley says. She isn’t even crying. Luca thinks it would hurt less if she was crying.

“Over? I don’t even know… You can’t say that it’s over, Harley. I mean… it’s us? It’s? It’s Luca and Harley and you can’t—”

“I can,” Harley says, crossing her arms in front of her. “What I can’t do, Luca, is take another decade of this. Of us. Of Luca and Harley.”

“I thought—”

“I don’t want to marry you.” She flings her arms in the air, her voice raised and a crazed look pasted to her face. A few of Anotonio’s other patrons look up from their parmesan-encrusted salmon and baked ziti to gape at the raucous couple now arguing at table 28.

“You have to be so cruel about it?” Luca says, not caring that he’s raising his voice too. He should be crawling around looking for the ring: the most expensive thing he’s ever bought in all his life which he is now going to have to return.

“I have tried. I have tried to make this work but I can’t,” she says. If even a sliver of remorse or apology was braided into the devastating words that left her mouth, perhaps Luca wouldn’t feel the painful pulse of his broken heart beating around the shards of her ice-coldness still penetrating his chest. 

It’s over, Luca.

“I just can’t,” she says as if he needed to hear it again. Her words are still devoid of sadness and instead filled with anger.

“Am I that terrible?”

Harley doesn’t hear him, her eyes are wide like someone having an epiphany as she shakes her head, unbelieving and almost manic. “I just have absolutely no idea who I am. I have no identity outside of you. I don’t even know what I like to do for fun.”

“You like pickle-ball. You like visiting my Papa at the nursing home and you love to bake and you read—”

“Romance. I only read romance.” She finally meets his gaze again. “None of it reminds me of us. I read it to escape us. I play pickleball because your friends’ wives play pickleball. I visit your Papa in the nursing home because no one else does, and I bake because your mom would never approve of me if I didn’t.”

Luca is shocked into motionlessness. He can barely manage to breathe. The server must overhear the direction of their conversation because she cancels the celebratory chocolate lava cake Luca pre-ordered and brings the check instead. She boxes up the remaining bruschetta as Luca pulls out his wallet. Luca cannot look away from Harley, and he isn’t even sure which credit card he puts down.

He was to memorize her. He is afraid that when he looks away she will be gone. More than anything, he’s afraid that she’ll cease to exist, that he’ll discover that she was never real in the first place. 

He doesn’t hold the door open for her as they leave. They drive away from the restaurant in the separate cars they arrived in. They pull up, separately, to the home they will now have to sell or split. And instead of walking through the front door as a newly engaged couple, happier than pigs rolling in mud and laughing like teenagers, they walk inside, hang their respective keys on their respective hooks, and, without looking at each other, part ways.

Harley takes a shower. Luca gathers what he can from their bedroom and sets up on the guest room futon. They go about their usual nightly routines, only separately. At midnight, still unable to sleep, Luca stress-eats the remaining bruschetta, now soggy and falling apart. 

He hears Harley snoring from behind the closed door of their bedroom. The next day, her things will be boxed up and they will begin separating the lives they’ve spent a decade weaving together.

Tonight, with the deep burden of not loving him finally cleared from her conscience, Harley sleeps better than she has in years.