Just then, her doorbell rang. She stood up automatically to go get her delivery. It was only when her hand was on the doorknob she realized she hadn’t ordered delivery.
Who the hell could be knocking at her door?
Her heart jumped. Could it be Max? Maybe he’d come back to say how much she mattered to him. How much he wanted her back. How he’d do anything.
She stood on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. Jamila, not Max. Of course, not Max. He was in DC, remember? On TV? Granted, she’d recorded the show, it had been filmed hours before, but that wasn’t enough time for him to get from DC to L.A.
She took a step back and opened the door.
“I was wondering if you were going to let me in,” Jamila said. She strode past Olivia into the house.
“Oh, I didn’t . . . did we have plans?” Jamila had a bag of food in her hand and walked straight toward the kitchen with a determined look. Maybe she’d texted Olivia about dinner and Olivia had texted back without remembering it? That was unlike her, but the past few weeks had been unlike her, too.
Jamila set the bag down on the counter and took a bunch of food cartons out of it.
“Sure, we had plans. If by ‘plans’ you mean you haven’t shown up for the Wednesday volunteer night in three weeks, and that I haven’t heard from you since I walked you to your car when you ran out of the community center except for that curt text that you and Max broke up, and you’ve ignored all of my texts, and I was worried about you. That’s definitely what ‘plans’ mean to me—that’s also what friends mean to me, by the way—but you might have a different definition.”
Olivia felt guilty and touched, all at once. She hadn’t wanted to show up to the food pantry, because everyone there had met Max, and they all knew the two of them were dating, and she didn’t want to deal with their kindness right now. She knew it would take only one question and she’d throw herself into the arms of one of the sympathetic older ladies there and sob for hours. So she just hadn’t shown up. But she should have texted Jamila to say she couldn’t come. And it made her weirdly happy Jamila had worried about her like this.
“I’m sorry. I’m not doing . . . great about all of this, and I didn’t want to have to answer questions about Max or listen to people talking about him or wonder if anyone was talking about me . . . I couldn’t deal with any of that. So I just stayed away.” She put her hand on Jamila’s shoulder. “But I’m really sorry for ignoring you these past few weeks. Thanks for being a friend. I appreciate it. I really don’t know what I would have done without you that night. Or for these past six months, really.”
The stern look on Jamila’s face softened. She took plates down from the cabinet and scooped food onto both of them. Olivia just stood back and let her do it.
“Okay. And me, too. No one was talking about you, and no one knew,” she said, “but I understand how you felt. Do you want to talk about what happened? And how you’re doing? Or do you want to watch Housewives?”
Ooh. Thai food and Housewives seemed like a much better idea for a Wednesday night than MSNBC and the crackers from the back of her cabinet.
“That second thing, please. I’ll get the drinks.”
A few minutes later, she followed Jamila into the living room, holding their glasses in each hand. It wasn’t until she saw Jamila stop cold as soon as she walked into the room that Olivia remembered what was paused on the TV.
Jamila looked from Max’s face, frozen on the screen, to Olivia, and back.
“Okay, change of plans. When you said you weren’t doing great, I thought maybe you meant you were ‘doing too much online shopping’ not great. I didn’t realize you were ‘watching your ex-boyfriend on TV just so you could get a glimpse of him’ not great! I assumed you were far too together for that!”
Olivia sat down on the couch.
“Yeah. I’m good at seeming together. But I . . . we . . .” She sighed. “I broke up with him, but I still love him so much, and I don’t know how to handle it. So yes, I’ve been watching him on TV to get a glimpse of him. But he just now did something that really confused me, and I still don’t know what to think about it.”
Jamila sat down next to her and handed her a plate.
“Just now as in he called you, or as in TV Max did something?”
Olivia picked up a spring roll and dipped it in peanut sauce.
“TV Max, but—so one of the reasons we broke up was because he would always jump into things without thinking about what would happen, or about how other people would react. You saw that, a little bit, at the community center.”
Jamila nodded.
“Right,” Olivia said. “Well . . . okay, I’m going to show this to you.”
Olivia rewound the clip and pressed play. Afterward, she pressed pause again.
“Well, he looks like hell, if that’s what your point was,” Jamila said. “Thin and miserable, and even his always perfect hair is all wrong. He’s missing you. Bad.”
“Really, you think so?” Olivia asked. She looked at the TV again. His hair really was all wrong; way too long, far too much gel. She shook her head. “No, that wasn’t my point, and while that’s nice of you to say, that’s not what I was asking for.”
Jamila shrugged.
“Whether you were asking for it or not, it’s true. That’s a depressed man trying to pretend he’s fine if I’ve ever seen one, and I’ve seen lots of them.”
Olivia bit her lip. Was Jamila just saying that? She sounded serious, but she could just be trying to make Olivia feel better. And was it true?
“Okay, we can talk about that later. And maybe I’m making too much of this. But I was absolutely certain he’d yell back at that jerk that yes, he would walk to work, and he would become a vegan, and so would his whole staff. Because that’s how Max is—he talks first, and thinks afterward, or not at all. And it’s worked out for him for the most part, so he’s never thought he needed to change things. But this time, he didn’t do that.”
Jamila waved a chicken satay skewer at her.
“You got to him. He’s trying to win you back, by coded messages on MSNBC.”
Olivia laughed out loud.
“Okay, when you put it like that, I sound ridiculous.”
Jamila picked up her fork and pulled the chicken off the skewer.
“I’m not kidding! He was also wearing that same tie he wore when he came to the food pantry.”
Olivia put her fork down.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, he definitely was,” Jamila said. “I’m sorry if it sounds creepy that I remember that, but I always remember clothes. It’s a message to you, I tell you. That man loves the hell out of you, Olivia.”
It felt great to hear that, and it hurt so much, all at the same time.
“Maybe he did. But he’ll be better off with someone who can be a political wife in the way I can’t be. Who is friendly to reporters and can wave and smile all the time and looks perfect at a moment’s notice and doesn’t have anything scandalous in her background, or any radical opinions people can get mad about.”
Jamila tossed a pillow at her.
“Or maybe he’d be better off with you than with that imaginary boring-ass person. And maybe you’d be better off with him than with whatever dull, perfect guy you could conjure, one exactly like you in all ways and therefore will bore you to tears. I’m not saying the two of you didn’t have real problems—what relationship doesn’t? And I’m definitely not saying he didn’t deserve everything you threw at him—he sure as hell did. But I am saying he is absolutely so in love with you that he’d try to show you and everyone who knows you he’s trying to become a better man, just for you.”