Laura Caldwell - A Clean Slate

“It’s true. I can’t remember my birthday or anything after that until today. But I feel okay.”

“Well, shouldn’t you go to a doctor or something? Get yourself checked out?”

I made a show of holding out my arms, looking down at my legs. “Everything else is intact, so…” I shrugged.

“I don’t know.” He fingered the dark-brown freckle on his right cheekbone. That freckle had always made him self-conscious, because it resembled a speck of dirt, and people were forever telling him he had something on his face. But I used to love that spot. I’d kiss it whenever he walked in my door.

“You do look good.” His eyes trailed over me again.

I wanted to make a snappy retort, something like Yes, I look damn good and you’re not getting any of it, but I kept quiet.

“So how’s Bartley Brothers?” I didn’t want to talk about us or my memory any longer, but wanted to occupy Ben for a while, just to piss off Therese. “How’s Attila?”

“Demoted. He’s pushing paper,” Ben said.

“No!”

Ben nodded. “Lots of people are getting moved around or let go.”

“Yeah, so I heard.”

“Well, obviously. You’d know that since you…”

“Got fired.”

“Right.”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So tell me what happened to Attila,” I said.

Ben launched into a story about Attila being investigated for insider information right around the time of the budget cuts. From there, our conversation was easy, catching up on all our co-workers—my ex-co-workers—Ben telling me stories about trades gone awry, and bringing me up-to-date on the market.

We were laughing about another Attila story when Therese sauntered up to us and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.

“Benji,” she said—and I couldn’t help it; I snorted. Benji was a nickname he hated, the name Ben’s brothers used to make fun of him. Both of his brothers were much bigger. They excelled at football and other bone-crunching sports, while Ben had been relegated to running and tennis.

Ben sent me a look as if to say, Shut up, please. I tried to quell the giggles.

“I’m ready to go,” Therese said, shooting me little knives with her eyes. “It’s getting way too uncomfortable in here.”

“How about one more and then we’ll head out?” Ben said.

Therese’s bottom lip dropped a little. I got the impression that she wasn’t used to Ben saying no to her. “I want to go now. We’ve got to be at my mother’s for brunch tomorrow, remember?” She sent me a look of triumph, clearly expecting me to be crushed by this news. Strangely, I wasn’t. In fact, I felt so much better now that Ben and I had had a normal conversation.

“Sure,” Ben said, “I was just updating Kelly on what’s going on at Bartley.”

“Great. Did you tell her that you made partner?”

Ben sent a quick, guilty look in my direction.

My good mood, my ease at talking to Ben, evaporated like steam. “What? When?”

“Last week,” Therese bragged.

I fought hard not to smack her.

“Is that true?” I said to Ben. I was the one who was supposed to make partner first. Me. Ben had started at Bartley two years after me. I was next in line. How had I gotten the ax while he was elected to goddamn partnership status? I felt my neck go red.

Ben nodded sheepishly.

“He deserves it,” Therese said. “He’s worked really hard and—”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you shut up for one minute?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she sent a glance at Ben as if to say, Are you going to let her talk to me like that?

“Kell,” he said. “Take it easy. It just happened. I didn’t even know it was coming.”

Something about the way he had said that, the way his words got incrementally softer at the end of the sentence and the way his mouth became tight, told me that he had damn well known it was coming. He probably knew back in May. For a horrified moment, I wondered if he’d known that I was going to be fired, too. I stood there, completely stumped for words, wishing my temper would take over and do something rash that I would later regret—something like head-butting Ben—but nothing came. Finally, Therese tugged on his sleeve.

He drained the rest of his beer. “I’m sorry, Kell. Good to see you.”

I searched my brain for a witty comeback, something that would erase the smirk from Therese’s face, but once again I came up blank. A pregnant quiet enveloped us.

“Ben, let’s go,” Therese said.

He hesitated, still standing before me as if he might say something else.

“Oh, please,” Therese said, before he got the chance. She clamped a hand on his arm and dragged him away.

When they reached the door, Therese disappeared through it, but Ben turned around and for the longest moment held my eyes.

My temper flared after Ben left, obviously the wrong time, but I was immune to a cure, and so I sat at the bar, boring poor Jess and Steve and Laney about the manipulative machinations of Bartley Brothers and the treachery of Ben, all the while trying to douse my anger with cocktails. Laney eventually wrenched the conversation away from me and back to Jess and Steve’s wedding, and they were happy to prattle on about place settings and invitations and the band vs. DJ debate until we got the “last call” shout from the bartender.

After Tarringtons closed, and Laney had convinced me that no convenience store in the city sold margarita mix, she and I lay snug in her king-size bed, gossiping maliciously about Therese, giggling about Ben not recognizing me, and rehashing—at least fifty times—my conversation with him. Although still pissed off about him being made partner ahead of me, about him possibly knowing that I would be fired, I felt much better now that I’d gotten my dose of rage. And oddly enough, I felt a tipsy contentment around me. It’d been eons since Laney and I had had a late-night chat like this, a fact that made me sad. It was Laney who’d been with me every step of the way though the traumas of high school, the newfound freedom of college and the often painful days of early adulthood, and yet it was Ben I’d ended up spending so much time with. Ben, who’d eventually decided that the time meant nothing.

“He is such a fucker,” I said, the margaritas making my tongue loose, causing me to repeat myself over and over.

Laney gave me a light smack on the arm. “Stop already. It’s unhealthy. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Name it.”

“Are you sure you’re all right with this no-memory thing? I mean, you’ve had a lot going on today, and it’s all right to fall apart.”

I turned on my side to face her. “I feel better than I ever have.”

“Well, don’t think that you have to put on a tough act. You can still fall apart if you want.”

“Nope. I’ve done enough of that.”

Laney was silent for a second, and I could hear the whoosh of cars passing by her building. “It’s just that something was definitely wrong. Something more than Ben and the job,” she said.

“It was obviously something that didn’t matter.”

“Maybe.”

Her tone made me feel a little chilly, and I buried myself deeper under her duvet. What was it that I hadn’t told anyone? Did it matter now? On one hand, if whatever it was could explain why I couldn’t remember this summer, I wanted to know it. For some reason, I truly wanted to learn why this odd memory loss had happened to me. But on the other hand, if I remembered those five months, wouldn’t I just slip back into that depression? I wanted the whys and the hows of the situation, but I feared the details. I felt as if my memory was a house of cards, wobbly and shaky and hollow inside. I was afraid that if I came too close to that emptiness, that missing time, everything would fall in on me.