I’m surprised at how glad I am to see Hector’s face peering around the giant potted palms that separate the foyer from the rest of the restaurant. Relieved. We’ve never gone so long without talking. I have wanted badly to call him, to confess to him, tell him about San Francisco, about this new version of my mother I’ve had to carry around in my head, that I’ve been shying away from—that she didn’t leave because she was too good for us. She left because she wasn’t good enough.
But I have been fighting the urge to call because I need to know that I am enough on my own. I can’t let him be my center support. I have never noticed before how much I had relied on him to see all of me and still love me and ratify who I am. It scares me.
It’s the busiest time of the Sunday rush though, the four-o’clock early-dinner crowd full of seniors and parents with kids they want to get into bed in a couple of hours. I lift my pitcher of water in a salute to him, and he smiles when he sees me. Dimples.
Water runs down my arm and on to Mr. Monroe’s bread plate, but he doesn’t notice because he’s focused on buttering another piece of sourdough. I am tired and my feet hurt and I’m trying to let the orders I need to remember crowd out everything else but that never works the way you want it to.
“Amy,” I say to the server at the next table over. “Amy,” I say again, and she startles and swings around.
“Hi. What,” she says. She looks like a mushroom to me, with a triangle of hair and a soft square face that never changes expression.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” I say. I try to hand her the water pitcher, but she just looks at it. “Can you take this?” I say. “I’m just going to be a second.”
“No,” she says, and turns back to her table full of sunburned tourists, all peeling and dressed like they’ve been standing on a boat letting the sea air blow through their clothes.
I know if I look at any of my tables someone is going to try and catch my eye so I keep my head down and sidle among all of them, dripping water all the way across the carpet. Hector is examining the leaves of the palm tree, pinching the ends as if he is trying to determine whether they’re real, and looking like he’s going to pull off one entirely.
“Don’t mess with the palm tree,” I say to him, but he doesn’t laugh at me. He is not even smiling anymore. His face is so still and serious that he looks like a bad photograph of himself. “What is it,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look sad. That’s what this expression is, and it catches me off guard.
“I was going to text you,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He swallows and his throat bobs. I want to touch the side of his neck where it meets his shoulder, that cord of muscle, but I am still holding a water pitcher.
“You mean what happened at lunch on Thursday? It’s fine. I haven’t been thinking about it.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sort of.”
I glance over my shoulder and I see Amy staring at me as she deals out the bread bowls for one of my tables. “Do you want to talk after work?” I say. I should be walking the dogs and cleaning the kitchen and finishing a paper for Literature, not wandering off again, but I shove that thought away.
“No,” he says. “I can’t wait that long. I went to your house but your grandmother said you were working and I had to talk to you.” He still hasn’t smiled and he’s not looking at me and he is the most transparent person I’ve ever known.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I say.
Relief like the dawning of the sun across his face, then sadness chasing after it. “You’re not happy,” he says, and I am silent. “You know, I just want you to be happy. But you aren’t and I don’t want to hang around making you more unhappy.”
I am still holding the water pitcher. He is looking at me very earnestly. He says, “Say something.”
“Okay,” I say. My grandmother’s voice in my head: Why are you surprised? He’s finally woken up. Isn’t this what I’ve been telling you all along? “What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything,” he says. “It wasn’t anything you did.”
“Okay,” I say. I am standing there in my apron and there is sweat in my cleavage and Hector is breaking up with me. It’s nothing I said. It was nothing I did. It’s me.
He’s shifting from foot to foot now, anxious.
“Are you going to get mad?” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this a ton, Ashley.”
“For how long?” I say.
“Well, you’ve been unhappy for a while,” he says. “But I didn’t realize it was me until Friday.”
“Thursday,” I correct him.
“No, when you weren’t in school on Friday and you didn’t text me at all to tell me where you were and I was going to text you and then—it was like an epiphany.”
“Okay,” I say.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and peers into my face. “Don’t you think this is a good idea?” he says.
Did I think it was a good idea that he was breaking up with me, instead of me breaking up with him? Because that’s how it’s supposed to go. He’d laugh like a monkey or say something stupid or just be Hector and not a person in the world would have faulted me for it. Everyone would have understood.
But now everyone will just assume they understand why he broke up with me. They’ll look at me and nod and say yes, of course. How could he look at her every day? And I am weak with this idea, the horrific exposed feeling of it, and all the words have blown out of my head.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. I can’t figure out anything else to say, so I say, “I’m going to go back to work.” I lift the pitcher, dripping with condensation, to show him that I was working. My hand is shaking and the ice is clinking against the sides.
“Okay,” he says. He reaches out, and then pulls his hand back, and then pats me on the shoulder.
He broke up with me, I think. I turn and hop back through the maze of tables with the pitcher dribbling down into the crook of my arm, and keep going, right into the dark pass-through so I don’t have to look at all the tables I’m supposed to be handling, and all those faces. Amy stomps over and says, “Done?” and I say, “Yes,” and surprise myself when I burst into tears.
She sighs disgustedly and grabs one of the rolled-up napkins from the top of the stack. It’s still got silverware in it when she hands it to me, and it all clatters to the rubber mat when I unroll it. She leaves me there to sniffle, but it was only a short burst. A summer thunderstorm, rattling the windows and making the house creak.
I don’t need him to remind me that I am fine the way I am, just fine. I don’t.
I should tell someone, I think, and pull my phone out of my pocket. But before I unlock it I realize I can’t. I can’t tell anyone that he broke up with me, left me behind feeling like I was floating in the middle of the ocean on an inner tube, my legs disappearing into the dark water below me.