Pivoting

I still didn’t know why I had come to the hotel. There was little I needed. Married women weren’t meant to sit in hotel lobbies flicking through out-of-date magazines. 

Waiting on men they weren’t married to.

However, the stories in those magazines reminded me of my youth. And of my predicament.

They too were stories out of their time. Stale and left aside. 

Told once and then never do we find what came of them.

I used to read my mother’s old issues. I’d sit in the kitchen under the table. She’d cook and talk with my aunts. Conversations not meant for children. 

I would listen. I would read the tales of romance and woe. Affairs, scandal and loss. and I’d write my own. My brain flooded with what if questions.

How could she do this? 

I’d ask.

How does she trust him?

I’d ask.  

And then I’d write stories from there.

I could write the same story a hundred ways. Soon a fling with a waiter would be so much more. Such was the beauty. I called these moments ‘pivot points’.

A place where the story branches and we make a choice on who we are going to be. Life is all about choices, but these were the defining ones. Those places in the story where everything would always echo with what if from that point on. They always felt so local to that moment and obvious, but now that I was watching Bobby pull into the car park I realised that they were anything but.    

They permeated and crept up over and over. Some choices you had to keep making.

High school was kind to me in some ways and cruel in others. I was popular, enough, and I had a boyfriend. So, I wasn’t lonely. Bobby Trent was the tough type. He was a bad boy in a leather jacket who smoked and rode a motorcycle. Yet, on a summer’s day he’d take me to the park. 

He put a flower in my hair and kissed me. Told me he could hear the giggles I tried to hide inside. And then when he kissed me again I heard them too.   

I left my hometown and Bobby at eighteen. I fled cross-country after fighting with my father. There was a great many topics, but Bobby was one. He would never accept that I loved this man. 

“He doesn’t even work, he wants nothing to do with college and he’s a lay-about-good-for-nothing…. A punk”.   

I never could look my father in the face and say, “But he makes the sun shine brighter on a rainy day. You don’t know the way he makes me feel when his hands caress the parts I hide and only lift so he can kiss and accept my flaws. And you don’t know what it is like to have all your insecurity lifted when you see in his eyes that he didn’t even know they were anything less than perfect”.        

But I still missed my home. Often wondering what if I’d stayed. Settled down with Bobby and watched my mom grow old.

The hotel we were meeting in was the Blue Valley, where he’d taken me so many years ago. It wasn’t luxury then and it wasn’t luxury now. But it didn’t have to be. No, like Momma’s cooking it was rich in those familiar tastes of nostalgia. The sweet indulgent flavours of memories.   

Bobby wasn’t long in the lobby. I watched his strut through the door. He Flashed me a smirk and his eyes appeared to signal something. Then I was in his arms. We giggled in the hall. And we spilt across the bed like wine. Everything flowing like music when the old band gets back together. And then the crescendo came.     

And in the aftermath I wrapped myself in sheets while he stood naked.

I sat and watched him smoke on the balcony. The smell was too real for dreams. The thing about my mother is that I love her, and she was never a good cook. 

The hotel had dirty mirrors and a light coat of rust and age everywhere you looked. The haze of nostalgia always cleared when I visited and tasted the food I’d missed.

Then my father got up on his pedestal to look down at me again. Reality crashed in like an alarm clock breaking the spell of the dream. 

It never tastes how you remember it. I stopped eating french toast when momma died, and now I realized it wasn’t cause no one else made it right. That is what I told people. It was because I missed her and it reminded me of how long she’d been gone.     

Time passes so fast and so slow all at once. Bobby aged before my eyes and soon I saw less of my rebel and more of the accountant. The motorcycle was gone. He drove a station wagon. And his bulletproof hair was thinned to the last.

I left the hotel before sleeping. The trip home was one of silence. I found myself in my small house. I stared down the hall at my fat husband. My husband. And I heard him say, “You okay princess? If you need to talk let's go out to the patio. I just got the little ones asleep.”   

The tears came. He didn’t know why, but he held me. And I cried harder than before. My father may have been wrong about Bobby all those years ago. But I was wrong this time.

The grass may well be greener elsewhere, but my grass was green enough.      

We took our tea out in the garden and I knew I’d tell him soon. I knew he’d leave. I knew I deserved it.  

My father didn’t understand how Bobby made me feel and I guess what I hate about my dad is how much alike we are. 

In the morning I’d tell him everything, but tonight I wanted to be held. I wanted to know, “what if I’d just been happy with what I had? What if I hadn’t thrown it all away?”