Chapter Text
I laid in bed awake for most of that night.
I should have been sleeping, especially given that I finally had my own bed again and wasn’t sandwiched in between Alex and Luke like I had been every night in New York. Yes, it was hard to sleep with Alex’s snoring and Luke’s blaring phone brightness, but something about it kept me from being present. It distracted me.
I didn’t think about Andy while we were in New York.
I didn’t think about him, at least until we were in arrivals in LA and a young mother was standing proudly at the bottom of an escalator with two beaming children, both holding glittering signs that sparkled with love reading, “Welcome home, Daddy!” I wasn’t sure why that made me think of him, but it hurt my stomach when I tried to figure it out.
Then, again, at dinner, when Luke snitched on us to Mom and Dad for staying in New York well past the day we were supposed to go home… and they snitched on themselves for doing the exact same thing we did. I was pretty pissed at Luke that he let us down like that, but looking back, it was honestly our fault for trusting him to keep something secret from Dad. The two of them had a bond so close that they would do anything for each other, no matter how stupid it was. They’d always support each other’s stupid ideas, too, even hide them from Mom together. It made me think about the way Dad and Andy used to turn our living room into a film studio almost every weekend to “film a movie.” No one ever told them it took more than just one day’s work to film an entire movie— and at least some hair and makeup. Every week though, without fail, there was a new brilliant idea I had to watch and give my thoughts on. Andy would think this whole situation was hilarious. If he was there, he’d laugh so hard he’d have to excuse himself from the table. Maybe he’d even ask Dad to turn it into their next movie. My stomach lurched again.
The rest of the evening happened on autopilot. Occasionally, I’d check in to the conversation and hear some crazy story that would snap me out of my misery for just long enough to laugh. Then I’d remember the person that I wanted to share that laugh with wasn’t here, and my eyes would glaze over again, and I’d start over replaying memories like cut-out scenes from a TV show. Then Gloria excused herself to go put Joe to bed, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I followed her upstairs, there would be a boy with the brightest smile on Earth waiting there to take him from her arms and rock him to sleep. I knew it wasn’t true, though, because she came back downstairs empty-handed a little while later, and no one followed her down, no matter how long I waited.
So, after we all ate Grandpa’s crazy buzzfeed quiz sausages and said our long and drawn-out goodbyes, exchanged “Happy Father’s day!”s and hugged each other like we didn’t do this every week, we got in the car and drove home. I was a ghost from Grandpa’s doorstep to ours, to my makeup wipes, to my bed, and that was the first time I let myself cry since I got back in my car at the airport.
Three hours in and my entire water bottle downed, my headache caught up to me and I had no tears left. Somehow, that was worse. When the crying finally stopped, the pain moved from my wobbling jaw to my ribs, and it suddenly got very hard to breathe, very quickly. I wanted to scream, scream so loud that he could hear me all the way in Utah, “I LOVE YOU. COME BACK!” Maybe I would have if I wasn’t so winded. Instead, all I could do was lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if I would ever be okay again.
…
For the next few days after Father’s Day, my little brother annoyed me way more than usual, so much that I almost started wondering if my already bitter mood was somehow amplifying the Luke Dunphy craziness. It definitely didn’t make me any more patient to his antics when I got fired for being “consistently late.” You’d think literal fashion designers would know a thing or two about being fashionably late. Especially since it wasn’t easy picking an outfit that wouldn’t get me picked apart the second I walked through those stupid glass doors. Especially when I had just publicly called out my coworker for being an outfit repeater.
So, yes, perhaps I was a little bit irritable. Who could blame me, though, when every part of my life that felt stable, that had given me purpose since I got kicked out of college, that had made me feel like my life was finally moving forward had been stripped from me and the one person I wanted to talk to about it was miles away and my ex? I had to play it cool, though, had to shove it all down, because my family already watched me fall apart over him once, and I couldn’t let them see how destroyed I was this second time I had to let him go.
I was trying to find something to watch that was the farthest thing from romance (an impossible feat with my house’s recorded shows) when my phone rang. I had half a mind to ignore it, until I saw the photo and the first letter of the name at the top of the screen and I dove across the couch for it.
“Hey!” I tried to make my voice sound less depressed, “are you okay? What’s up?”
“Oh! Hey, Haley!” he sounded surprised to hear my voice. He sniffled loudly and his next words came through somewhat nasally and raspy, and I didn’t want to hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, he had been crying, too. "My hand slipped, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call.”
My heart sank. “Oh, um, that’s okay. Are you okay?”
“Oh, Yeah! Tip top! Just, you know, watching all those cat videos you sent me back in February. Little Mittens is just sooooo cute,” he responded a little too quickly to be convincing.
“Oh, okay, well, it’s really nice to hear from you, Andy,” I said under my breath, just hoping that Luke wouldn’t hear.
“Yeah, you too, Haley,” he trailed off for a moment, then cleared his throat and spoke again, more clearly this time, “but I’m really sorry, I have to go, Evan’s calling me.”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to you later, maybe.” I tried to force a smile even as my voice broke.
“Yeah. I’ll talk to you later, Haley.” He hung up, and silence flooded the room.
I didn’t want to think about that conversation right away, in broad daylight, with my little brother around. The walls felt like they were closing in around me, and I needed desperately to get out of that house. I didn’t think twice about the next person I called. The phone rang twice before she picked up.
“Hey, Alex! I know you just got back to school and you need to catch up or whatever but I was thinking that you should really take a break and come save from Luke because he’s been terrorizing me ever since you went back and I desperately need more girl energy in my life right now so we should totally go get our nails done because I just found this new place and the girls there are so nice and you should see the flowers she drew on my nails last time I—“ I was interrupted by Alex’s voice croaking a greeting.
“Hey, Haley.” She could barely get the words out, and I got the sinking feeling that she wouldn’t be so down to go get our nails done. Even though I wanted to curl into a ball and just let her watch me cry, I sucked in a breath and stepped up to play big sister.
“Alex, you don’t sound good.” She coughed. She wasn’t arguing, for once. “I think you need to come home.”
“I think you need to shut—“ Alex began, launching herself into a five minute long coughing fit. I held the phone away from my face and waited for her to finish.
“I’ll come pick you up,” I sighed, “but you have to sit in the back. Be ready in an hour.”