Parker Avenue

There was no reason for him to continue living in the garage.

It was one thing to stay together during a pandemic, but the restrictions had long since eased, and they had recently surpassed the awkward milestone of having been broken up longer than they’d been together. Whitney justified Dan’s pervasive presence in her life with a bevy of excuses that made her throat itch.

She didn’t have a car so why not put the garage to good use.

It was impossible to afford a house or even an apartment these days.

Dan had grown to love the island, and it would be cruel to ask him to leave.

She felt more secure having a man around.

That last point never went over well, because Whitney had been teaching Krav Maga for nearly eight years, and Dan screamed if a bug was spotted in the same room as him. Even if the roles were reversed, the island was a perfectly safe place to live. That was why Whitney had purchased a house there at the end of 2019. It’s why Dan had been extended what was meant to be a holiday trip when he became enchanted with the small-but-bustling town of Newport. He had no family of his own other than a brother he never spoke to, and very few friends aside from his pub trivia in Chicago. Every year, he would plan a trip somewhere and spend Christmas and New Year’s eating cheap pizza in expensive hotels while watching endless episodes of Forensic Files. Sightseeing was usually limited to the local liquor store and a few photo spots so he could upload pictures onto his social media of the fun solo adventure he was having. That way nobody would send him pitying text messages or offer to host him the following year at their house. Dan believed most people were totally capable of being on their own for as long as they had to be, and that loneliness was something given to you by people whose number one fear was being lonely. He looked at it like some kind of communicable disease, and he curated these little trips to be something of a preventative measure. He knew people thought he was sad and isolated and dreary, but he also knew that people mostly believed what they saw while scrolling, so he made it a point to exude joy and contentment several times a year just to keep everybody off his back.

It was while taking a photo of the towering Christmas tree in one of the mansions that Dan noticed Whitney. She was standing next to a couple and two children. Dan knew right away neither of the children belonged to her, because they were small, and Whitney didn’t appear to be tired. She had major aunt energy, and while he would normally never approach a woman back in Chicago, he decided if he saw her distance herself from her group at any point, he would strike up a conversation.

That ended up not being necessary since Whitney had already noticed him, and told her sister, Liza, that she was going to pretend to take a closer look at the Christmas tree in the hopes that the man taking photos the wrong way with his camera would introduce himself. Her sister thought Dan looked unpleasant, and she would remind Whitney of this for the next five years whenever Whitney complained about wanting to end her relationship.

“If you had listened to me,” Liza said, “None of this would have ever happened.”

Whitney didn’t just take that to mean winding up with an ex-boyfriend in her garage. She thought of it in broader terms. After all, the butterfly effect was real, wasn’t it? What if Whitney had single-handedly started the pandemic just by pretending to sneeze near Dan so he could say “Gesundheit” (Who says “Gesundheit,” she thought to herself, another red flag, so what if you’re not religious, “Bless you” is what you say when someone sneezes), and the two of them could have their little meet-cute. They ended up touring the rest of the mansion by themselves after Whitney’s three-year-old niece had a meltdown when her parents wouldn’t let her touch the antique dollhouse in one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

“It’s kind of ridiculous if you think about it,” Dan said, “She’s a kid. How is she supposed to understand that a dollhouse can’t be played with? She doesn’t get the concept of an antique.”

Whitney thought this was very understanding of him, and that boded well for him when it came to children and, also, not taking life too seriously. Relaying the story later to her sister, Liza’s response was more tepid.

“That means,” she said, “If you two have kids, you’ll have to be the disciplinarian.”

That night Dan and Whitney had what felt like a magical, almost Hallmark-movie-style evening on the town. They walked down Thames Street bundled up in thick coats and scarves. They stopped into several bars where live music was playing. The days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve always felt like bonus time to Whitney. It was as if nothing you did mattered, because a fresh twelve months was arriving to clear your slate again.

Reasoning like that was what caused Dan to essentially move into Whitney’s new house after what could have just been a one-night stand. Both of them gave into the fantasy of a quick romance that would inevitably fall apart once reality demanded attention. The dalliance might also have come about, because Whitney was used to living with four roommates up in Portsmouth while she saved up to buy her own place, and now that she had it, she thought it was only logical to want to have someone stay with her. The house wasn’t very big, but all houses feel too big for one person. Dan checked out of his hotel three days into their whirlwind affair, and the two of them almost immediately began playing house. The word “playing” was what stopped either of them from worrying that this was all too much too fast. It would end organically, surely, when Dan had to return home.

The trouble was…there wasn’t any obvious event that would cause Dan to go back to Chicago. He worked from home coding for a startup. He always did a little work even while on vacation, but when he’d been at Whitney’s place for a week, he resumed normal work hours. They didn’t have an immediate discussion about any kind of timeline, and, in retrospect, Whitney could see that was a mistake. Once a routine’s descended upon two people, it’s hard to remove. Comparatively, a relationship is far easier to dismantle. Whitney and Dan were in a routine long before they were in a relationship, and Whitney would have given more thought to putting a stop to it if it weren’t for the thought of long winter nights alone and a Valentine’s Day spent watching Netflix and eating takeout by herself. It wasn’t until early March when she gave serious consideration to buying Dan a plane ticket back to the Midwest, and by then, the world had other plans.

Some couples were able to weather the pandemic with only minor blips, but Whitney and Dan were not one of those couples. A week into quarantine revealed a number of red flags that appeared to be lurking just below the surface of their domestic roleplay. Whitney had never lived with anyone before, and she was not exactly neat and tidy. The way she saw it, it was her house, and she could keep it clean or dirty as she saw fit. Dan liked everything to be in its proper place. Despite the fact that not much in Whitney’s house was “his,” he still saw no reason for dishes to be left in a sink or bath towels left on the floor. He kept working from Whitney’s living room while she was learning how to work remotely. In addition to teaching Krav Maga on the weekends (her classes were indefinitely postponed), she had also started as a paralegal the previous autumn, and her closet had office outfits that still had the tags on them. Now, she was working from bed in her bathrobe. When she needed to be on camera for a Teams meeting, she’d throw on a halfway-decent looking top with pajama bottoms on and set her background to the hills of Ireland. In the other room, she’d hear Dan taking loud sips of coffee and banging away on his laptop’s keyboard. A woman on the Teams call with Whitney had somehow turned her face into an adorable bunny rabbit. One co-worker refused to go on camera, and Whitney thought she heard him crying as they were going over the firm’s projections. Dan had the television on and he was talking back to Anderson Cooper as though the silver-haired newsman was in the room with him.

Whitney made up her mind. He had to go.

Somehow a discussion about Dan moving back to Chicago morphed into an argument about why their make-believe romance had fizzled. They had it one night while watching protests turn violent. Early on, they discovered that they had exactly the same political views, and they thought that meant they’d never have anything to fight about, but it turned out, there are nuances within beliefs. Dan thought that destroying property was always wrong, and Whitney felt that the entire country needed to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch. This difference in opinion created an opening for Whitney to divulge that she thought a little time apart would be good for them.

“How do you expect me to travel,” Dan asked, even though there were ways, “It’s not safe.”

Whitney thought it would be more dangerous for them to go on living together. Dan admitted that they weren’t a good fit, but he didn’t want to leave Newport. The world had come to a stop, and some people were using the halt as a chance to reexamine their lives. Dan had decided he didn’t like his life back in Chicago, if there even was a life there. Finding a place to live in town was going to be impossible with so many outsiders buying up property to ride out the worldwide catastrophe in a cute little coastal town. One of Whitney’s neighbors was renting out her oversized shed for nearly two thousand a month to a children’s book author who had signed a lease without ever even seeing the property. She was an expat from Los Angeles. It seemed like nobody wanted to live in a city anymore.

Dan offered to live in Whitney’s garage until he could find a place of his own. He ordered an air mattress on Amazon, some pillows shaped like Pokemon characters, and a mini-fridge. They had planned on making sourdough together or learning the ukulele, but now he would just be a man in her garage. She wouldn’t let him pay her rent, because then it felt as though she had transitioned from girlfriend to landlord, and something about that was mortifying to her. She also didn’t know what would happen if he was a tenant and she ever needed to force him to leave. Would she have to evict him? In place of rent, she let him buy groceries even though he was terrified to go to the market. He’d give her his credit card, and she’d go and buy as much as she could like some kind of payback. That was how her cupboards wound up filled with expensive gluten-free crackers (neither one of them had a gluten allergy) and forty-dollar red wine vinegar.

One delusional routine transformed into a more transparent, but still gravely unhealthy one. Whitney now had an ex-boyfriend in her garage, and though it was hard to say whether or not the pandemic was ever really going to be over, her affection for Dan definitely was. How had years gone by already? Why had she ever wanted to make a sourdough? Why did she burst into tears when she lost her Wordle streak? Who was she now?

After four straight days of rain in one month, she opened up all the windows in her house to try and let some of the newly broken humidity out. In the garage, Dan was taking his second nap of the day. They had planned to go into town after work to have a drink and talk about how his apartment hunt was coming along even though she already knew he wasn’t really looking. She surmised correctly that he was hoping a new place to live would simply fall into his lap if he met enough people. That wasn’t out of the question in a friendly enough place, but that strategy also involved meeting people. Dan knew Whitney, Whitney’s family, and a few of her friends. None of them liked him nor would be of any help when it came to getting him out of Whitney’s house. She was wondering if she should cancel drinks with him, but how do you cancel on someone living a few hundred feet away from you?

Dan was in the garage not taking a nap. He was trying to plug a hole in his air mattress that had appeared in the middle of the night. There were already two other holes covered with duct tape, but soon, he’d have to purchase another air mattress, and the thought of wasting money on something like that was irritating to him. He thought about asking Whitney if he could sleep on the couch in the living room, but he could envision the face she’d make right before giving him a non-answer like, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

He had no idea how he found himself in this situation. Shortly before the world flipped upside down, he was what most people would consider to be successful. Oh sure, he wasn’t married, he had virtually no social life, and he failed to understand just about any kind of humor, but he had a place. He knew that he should call it quits and go back to Chicago. The irony was not lost on him that most people his age were fleeing cities to settle down in more cost effective environments, and here he was using a metropolis as a back-up plan.

The two of them met outside in the front lawn like two soldiers about to duel. The sun had come out, and it wouldn’t set until close to 8pm. For most, this was the time of Great Mental Health and Much Rejuvenation when you could go out for an early dinner, order a dessert, and still get home before dark. Everyone was living by the ocean and going for walks and talking about summer. Whitney and Dan were facing each other with nothing in between them but a path that led to either the front door or Parker Avenue.

One of them said they weren’t feeling well and that they should go back and rest.

The other said that was fine, and that they would go into town alone.

One took the path back towards the house.

The other headed towards the avenue.

Both considered turning around after so many paces.

To call out.

To call back.

To apologize.

To berate.

To plead.

To explain.

One turned around.

The other one didn’t.

And the one who did realized that unless both of you turn around, you may as well have kept right on going.