Chapter 9: Starting Over

The math wasn’t complicated, which somehow made it worse. Evan sat at his kitchen table the third night in his new apartment with a legal pad and a pen that was almost out of ink, writing numbers down in a column like that would make them behave better than they had in his head. Savings: eleven thousand four hundred dollars, most of it meant for a honeymoon they were never going to take. Rent on the new place: six-fifty a month, which had sounded reasonable until he did the math on what was left after that, after groceries, after gas, after the health insurance he’d have to buy himself now that he wasn’t on a company plan. Three months. Maybe four, if he didn’t let himself buy the good coffee, if he ate a lot of rice and beans and pretended that was a lifestyle choice instead of a symptom.

He stood in the cereal aisle of the grocery store on his second Saturday alone and found himself doing math out loud, quietly, under his breath, comparing the per-ounce price on the store brand against the name brand he’d bought without thinking twice about it his entire life, and it took him a full minute of standing there before he registered what he was doing and felt a hot, humiliating flush crawl up the back of his neck. A woman with a cart full of kids’ snacks glanced over at him, not unkindly, just the ordinary glance of someone noticing another person exists, and Evan put the name brand back on the shelf and took the store brand instead and told himself it tasted exactly the same, which it mostly did, and which had nothing to do with why his hands were shaking slightly when he set it in his cart.

The wedding deposits were the worst of it, worse even than the number itself, because each one came with its own small, specific grief attached. The venue — an old restored barn out past the county line that Claire had fallen in love with the first time they walked through it, holding his hand so tight it left marks — kept eighteen hundred dollars per their contract, nonrefundable, and the woman on the phone had been so kind about it, so genuinely sorry, that Evan almost couldn’t stand it. “I really am sorry, hon,” she said, and he could hear her covering the receiver to tell somebody something in the background, and he thanked her and hung up and sat there a while before he could pick up the phone again. The caterer kept another twelve hundred. The band — four guys from two towns over who did a note-for-note cover of the song that had been playing at homecoming the night he and Claire first kissed, which she’d specifically requested for their first dance — kept their deposit too, and when Evan called to cancel, the guy who answered said, “Ah, hell, man, I’m sorry to hear that,” in a voice that sounded like he meant it, and somehow that was worse than if he hadn’t.

He spent two full days doing nothing but making those calls, sitting on the floor of the empty apartment with his back against the wall because he hadn’t bought furniture yet, working his way down a list in Claire’s handwriting that he’d taken off the refrigerator before he left, venue and caterer and florist and photographer and DJ and rental company, crossing each one off as he went, a strange, methodical undoing of eight months of planning in the space of forty-eight hours. The florist’s assistant asked if everything was all right, and Evan, exhausted and raw and unable to summon the energy to lie, told her the truth — that they’d decided not to get married — and she said she was so sorry to hear that, and asked if there was anything else she could help him with today, and he said no, and thanked her, and sat there afterward holding the phone in his lap for a long time before he could make himself call the next number on the list. By the time he got to the photographer, a woman who’d shot Natalie’s wedding two years earlier and remembered Evan by name, he’d run out of any real feeling left to spend on it and just told her flatly, and she was quiet a second and then said, “You take care of yourself, okay? I mean that,” and it was such a small, ordinary kindness that it nearly undid him more than the venue call had.

The apartment itself he found on his fourth day of looking, above a hardware store on the north side of town that smelled permanently of sawdust and 3-in-1 oil no matter what hour you walked past it. One bedroom, a kitchen small enough that he could touch both counters at once if he stretched his arms out, a bathroom with a rust stain in the tub shaped, if you squinted, vaguely like the state of Florida. A window unit instead of central air, already humming in the bedroom window when he walked through, left behind by whoever lived there before him. The landlord, a heavyset man named Pruitt who ran the hardware store downstairs, didn’t ask him a single question beyond whether he had first month and deposit, which Evan appreciated more than almost anything else that week. He signed the lease standing at the counter of the hardware store, between a rack of furnace filters and a display of grill lighters, and Pruitt handed him a key on a plain ring and said, “Toilet runs a little, you’ll get used to the sound of it,” and that was the entire orientation.

He moved in with what fit in his car — clothes in one duffel bag and two boxes, a laptop, a couple of framed photos he’d grabbed on his way out that first night without thinking too hard about which ones, the coffee maker Claire had bought him for his birthday two years earlier, which he almost left behind out of some petty instinct and then packed anyway because buying a new one felt like an expense he couldn’t justify. The apartment had no furniture in it at all his first week. He slept on a mattress on the floor that he bought off a guy from a classifieds app for sixty dollars, cash, meeting him in a gas station parking lot like they were exchanging something illegal instead of a queen mattress with one small stain on the corner that the guy pointed out unprompted, which Evan respected. He bought two mismatched chairs and a card table from a church rummage sale for eleven dollars total, and felt, carrying them up the narrow stairwell one at a time, like he was assembling a life out of other people’s leftovers, which, he supposed, he was.