IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, Cassie saw Mark only at the Willow Gardens practices, where he didn’t mention her having jilted him and she didn’t say a thing, either. She wondered at first if everyone knew and was just trying to play it cool. After a couple of weeks it became clear no one knew but the two of them—and, she guessed, Jenna, who they wouldn’t see unless they went to Superfine again. They had a wedding gig to play up in Connecticut, so they needed to learn a whole slew of new songs. Months passed during which Mark didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything until the summer came back around with its blazing heat seeping into the city’s asphalt, which seemed to retain daytime heat like the memory of recent scorn, and convection-heated subway stations. One afternoon Mark texted her to see if she’d have lunch with him. It was Brooklyn, so instead they had brunch, they met early, which seemed the safest way. They met at Tom’s Diner—Mark had moved to a place on Adelphi, above a coffee shop that had opened there just the week before he moved in, but people were hanging out in Crown Heights now, so he was, too. She still wondered where he’d gotten the money to live alone.
“So listen, I have to tell you something,” Mark said after they’d sopped up all the excess hollandaise from their eggs Benedict.
“Me too,” Cassie said. She could see in the light that flickered in his watery eyes that he wanted to go first, but she went first instead. “I know I shouldn’t have just cut out like that, but I just wasn’t ready to talk marriage and I never had been. I never even could talk about it. I mean even that first time you took me to the Diamond District, I was like in shock—we hadn’t even discussed it. I mean I guess I should’ve said something, but with you all into it how could I? I just couldn’t. Didn’t. I don’t know how we got our signals crossed so bad—”
“Well, you did go on that trip up to the Diamond District to look at stones with me,” he said. “I’m not sure how mixed a message it could’ve been. Least not on my end. I thought it was a romantic surprise, not some shock. But that’s not why I wanted to meet.”
Cassie dragged one last piece of English muffin across the viscous yolk-and-hollandaise mess on her plate. She didn’t have the energy to argue, to say she didn’t even know they were going to the Diamond District that day, and by the time she realized what they were doing, there was no way to tell him.
“I’m moving back home to my parents’ place,” he said.
She was shocked.
“After you just moved?” she said. He told her that he’d used the money from selling her ring back after she’d stormed out. Blew $2,500 of it on a broker’s fee. Then he’d received a bill from the IRS for the sale of all that Disney stock—apparently you were supposed to calculate the difference between the basis points on the stock from its purchase date against the historical value—or was it the current value?—“Jesus, fuck,” Mark said, “I still don’t even get it—but I owe the IRS thousands of bucks I don’t have, and you can’t just sit on it like you can a credit card.” He was out of money, out of prospects, there was nothing left in magazines these days, and the chance to go back on the academic job market and maybe by some deus ex machina be saved was still months away. He figured a move down to Baltimore, where it was cheaper and where he would reassess, would do him some good. Also his parents said he had to. He could get some shit job and figure out what was next.
So Mark left the city. It was as if Cassie were allowed to romp as free as the mind of god. For the first time in years she could go out with Natalia when the Pollys were back in town and not worry about one of Mark’s friends seeing them, or running into him at a bar. She went down to Superfine one night and after closing just went ahead and told Jenna she’d always wanted to fuck her. She did. She even picked up her Epiphone again—one of the bands Natalia was touring with needed a bassist to fill in on a leg of a Midwestern seven-city tour, and while Cassie didn’t get the gig, it was only because the band’s regular bassist ended up being able to make it after all. Mark would still be coming up to the city every month or so for gigs with the Willow Gardens, but it was as if Cassie was a fourteenth-century bound Chinese foot who had suddenly been set free of her binding. She only hoped the damage the years of constriction had done to her wasn’t irreparable.