Do-Over With My Best Friend's Brother

Do-Over With My Best Friend's Brother Isla Wilder ASHWING PRESS Copyright Copyright 2023 by Isla Wilder - All rights reserved. In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. Dedication To the man who has always loved me, just as I am – this one's for you, babe. -IW Chapter 1 Anna “I heard he’s a woman and lives in San Francisco now.” I sputtered a note of surprised laughter, and the bite of crumbly chocolate cake I’d finally managed to balance on my spork tumbled back onto the CD-sized plate I held in my other hand. Sickly fluorescents threw a flickery light onto the folding pressboard table at the center of the room. It stood there on the drab carpet like a religious altar, though instead of an idol, it held a half-eaten birthday cake with two candles, a 3 and a 0. This was the third or fourth time I’d lost my piece of cake from my spork. I kept trying, balancing it ever more carefully, going ever more slowly—but time and again, my mouth closed only over tasteless plastic. If I was a poet, I’d probably have seen some kind of metaphor or symbolism in that. But I’ve never been a poet. I thought maybe I could be a painter—of art, not buildings—but, being honest, every time I even thought the word ‘painter,’ I felt like a poser. I hardly ever finished paintings, and I definitely never sold any. Lately, though, it was worse; I couldn’t even have told you where my art supplies were. I had my fingers crossed they hadn’t all vanished when Rob cleaned his stuff out of the house and finally moved out for good. I hadn’t seen any of my supplies since. It’s amazing how much goes missing when you and your ex-husband divide up your lives. Thank God we never had kids. Note that I didn’t say, ‘Thank God I never had kids.’ I wanted kids. I loved kids. Melissa’s little Archer was by far my favorite person in town. I was just feeling grateful, here at my sad little birthday party in this sad little break room of the Hockeytown Credit Union—HTCU to us locals—that I’d never have to be a mother to Rob’s kids. If he ever somehow managed to have any, which wasn’t looking likely. High school was a long time ago; even the other thirty-year-old women in this town, who remember what he was like at his peak, when he was Eveleth, Minnesota’s apex predator, don’t look at him quite the way they once did. Rob moved out of our—my—house maybe two weeks ago, and already everyone in town treats me differently. At least, I think so. Melissa swears I’m crazy... but Melissa is also a perfect angel-person who’s incapable of seeing the bad in anybody. And Melissa has Tucker. And she’s about to get married. She can afford not to worry. I, on the other hand—while I’m grateful there’s now no chance of Rob crashing this party, half-drunk and smelling like beer and the rec center locker room—can’t stop staring at those two candles on top of the cake. The ones announcing my age. What incredible irony, how my dreams of giving birth got dimmer with each passing birthday. I didn’t want any cake. I was grateful for my shitty ineffectual spork. That cake would just taste like failure, like a divorce that everybody in town blamed me for... like growing old alone. I guess if I was a woman living in San Francisco right now, none of this would be a big deal. But this was Eveleth, Minnesota—not coastal California. In Eveleth, thirty years old is what they called too late. “Ya got that all wrong, Marge,” Ruth said. I looked up from my tiny plate of failure-cake and over to the other side of the room at Ruth and Marge. Knobby-knuckled and white-haired, both of a height, Ruth and Marge could almost have been mistaken for twins, and definitely at least for sisters. They’d been ‘friends’ since high school, had both buried their husbands, and lived in houses that were next door to each other. But for as long as anyone could remember, no one had ever heard Ruth and Marge agree on anything. The official town opinion was that the two of them had bickered their husbands into early graves—and indeed, both had died young, and both had seemed to grow old long before their time. “He’s not in San Francisco,” Ruth went on, taking off the cat-eye glasses she kept on a gold chain around her neck. “I hear he’s down in Mexico, hidin’ out there from the federal government!” It’s hard to imagine anyone with that distinct Minnesooota accent saying anything mean. But I was pretty sure I’d heard Ruth and Marge manage it. I found myself moving towards their little debate. It was a heckuva lot better than sitting there in a staring contest with the candles on my birthday cake. As I edged closer to the two old women, pausing to set my cake down on the folding table, I noted that I was not the only one leaning in for a closer listen. The table was covered in little white paper discs, all supporting mostly untouched pieces of birthday cake. Yeah, you see, my brain said as I set down my cake, nobody likes the taste of ‘thirty and newly divorced’ any more than you do. “Now where’d you hear a darn fool thing like that?” Marge smirked, one hand on her hip, the other supporting her paper plate with her untouched cake, gesticulating with it like it was a teacup. “Who are you two talking about?”