Untrue Love Page 6

  “Very much so,” Ellie agreed. “But I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with a dog.”

  Phipps laughed loudly, a big, booming sound that echoed down the hallway. “You don’t need to train him! Just put him on a leash and stand next to him for a while. The dog knows the rest.”

  Ellie could feel her resolve slipping, and sought desperately for a new reason to say no.

  “I’m so busy, though! What with classes, and my office hours…”

  “I promise you, this will be a few minutes a day at the most. Stop by on your way out the door, and then again when you get home. In no time at all, you’ll be sitting on your couch and watching TV.”

  “I don’t have a television,” Ellie muttered, but she knew the fight was lost. “This would only be for a few days, right?” she said suspiciously.

  “Absolutely!” Phipps insisted. “A week at the most.”

  “A week?” Ellie protested, but he was already thrusting a bundle of keys into her hands.

  “Thank you!” he yelled, beating a hasty retreat. “You’ve done a good deed today!”

  Ellie stared at the keys in her hand with a frown on her face. She would do the very least that she could get away with, and soon the week would be over.

  Even so, she expected that it would not be soon enough.

  17

  DONNA O'DONNELL SETTLED back onto her bed, arranged the pillow beneath her head, and flipped up the cover of her laptop. Through her closed bedroom door she could hear the music coming from the living room. Shaking her head at how loud her roommate could be, she focused on more pleasant matters.

  On her laptop, she opened her browser and navigated to Facebook. Eagerly she scanned the list of her friends’ names in the right column, and felt a quick thrill of excitement when she saw one name in green. He’s online.

  She double-clicked on the name. “Hey. What's up?” she typed.

  There was a pause before the reply came back. “not much. so bored.”

  Donna giggled. She imagined her friend Evan’s face, and could see him slouched in his chair, the weight of his boredom pressing him down. “How can you be in Chicago and bored? That’s a huge city.”

  “chicago sucks. everyone here sucks,” she saw in reply.

  “It can’t be that bad. Is your job OK?” she typed.

  “uggh. my boss is an asshat.”

  Donna felt a growing sense of disquiet. She knew that Evan had wonderful qualities, but he also had a history of trouble with authority. If he lost this job because of it, it wouldn’t be the first time. “What happened?” she typed.

  “business as usual,” he replied. “he doesn't listen to my ideas, even though the business is in the toilet.”

  “Well, you’re new there. He probably just needs to get to know you a little better.”

  “heh. you sound like my mom.”

  Donna’s mouth twisted unhappily. She didn't like the comparison. “Your Mom sounds like a very smart woman. Smart and stylishly dressed,” she added, trying to turn it into a joke.

  “lol. yeah, she’s a snappy dresser. you too.”

  That wasn’t the reply that Donna was hoping to get, but she forged on. She knew that Evan was a lot nicer than he seemed sometimes. “Can you believe that I’m in grad school and you’ve got a great job? It seems like it was only yesterday that we were studying together in the library.”

  “you were studying for both of us. i was usually eating pizza. for both of us.”

  Donna giggled. “You are so bad.”

  “i’m only bad because you let me be. i could have been a great student, but you made it so easy to be lazy. you’re an enabler.”

  Donna felt a twinge of guilt. It was true, she had let him cheat off of her work for years. She had even written a couple term papers for him. The bottom line, though, was that she would have done anything for him. For years, Evan had been the only thing she ever dreamed about. Even now, years later, the realization that they lived hundreds of miles apart was enough to send a sharp pain through her heart.

  “I miss you,” she typed.

  “yeah. i miss the old days. like when you had that blonde roommate. she was so hot.”

  This time Donna couldn’t manage a laugh. Sometimes Evan could be a jerk, but she never managed to hold it against him. “So I was thinking that maybe I could come up to Chicago in April, during spring break. Wouldn’t it be great to hang out again?”

  Her heart beat heavily while she waited for his response. It had taken her weeks to work up the courage to make the suggestion. She had been begging him to visit her for years, but he never came.

  “i’m pretty sure that I’ll be out of town. some of my bros are talking about making a road trip. maybe to nashville.”

  She let out a long sigh as her heart dropped into the vicinity of her stomach. “Oh that’s cool,” she typed at last. “You'll post pictures?”

  “for sure. gotta go, babe. ciao.” And then his name flipped from green to black and he was gone.

  Donna closed the cover of her laptop and stared at the wall. This was a bad day, but it was really no worse than what she had grown used to over the last six years. From the first day she saw Evan during freshman year, she was entranced. She made it her project to meet him, to get to know him, and to do anything she could to spend time with him, but she could never manage to get him to see her as anything more than a friend. Sometimes, when her mood was low, she felt more like his mascot than his friend, and there were times when she wondered if he tolerated her simply so that he could get her notes from the classes that he seemed to have so much trouble attending.

  But then she took a deep breath and released it in a rush. She would not think that way; she would not allow herself to think that way. She was his friend—he had accepted her Facebook friend request, hadn’t he?—and she was not willing to give up on the dream that someday they might be more than friends.

  She reached for her backpack and pulled out the book that she had to finish reading by the morning. Out in the living room, her roommate dialed up the volume on her stereo. Donna sighed and tried to concentrate.

  18

  ELLIE SIGHED AND impatiently swatted the side of her laptop screen. “Come on! Sheesh, my connection here is terrible. It takes forever for things to load.”

  “Is it a cable connection?” her sister’s voice asked from the direction of the coffee table. She had her phone on speaker so that her hands were free to type.

  “DSL. I only have one option for broadband, and so far the speeds are not impressing me. It’s probably OK for the cows. They don’t do a lot of browsing. Mostly they just download pictures of grass and hay. But whenever I try to load anything, it drives me crazy how slow it is.”

  Sarah snorted in amusement. “Now you have me thinking about cows obsessively pulling up pictures of grass on the Internet.”

  “On the sly, of course. When the other cows come by, they quickly close the window and pretend they were just typing an email.”

  “How would they type? They don’t have fingers.”

  “Unusually large keyboards, with hoof-sized keys.”

  “Got it. One more question: why pictures of grass? Why wouldn’t they be downloading pictures of sexy cows?”

  “They spend all day staring at big, square cow asses. You think they want to more of that in their spare time? Anyway, this travel site finally loaded, and it says I can book a week for two at an all-inclusive Cancun resort during Thanksgiving week for $300 per night. Which is more than I can afford right now, to be honest, but I think I might go insane if I don’t do it.”

  “Oh, honey. You’re really having a hard time, aren’t you?”

  For a moment Ellie choked up. “It’s just…nothing is the way I wanted it to be. I’m in the middle of nowhere. There are no shops here. You can’t get good Chinese food, and don’t even talk about Thai. My esteemed colleagues are either boring or incredibly rude. The students are students, which is to say when they’re not theatri
cally disengaged they’re needy and immature. I could never ask Jackson to live out here! He’d hate it.”

  “He’d have you, and vice versa. That’s got to be better than the alternative.”

  “I can’t, Sarah. I can’t drag him out here. It’s bad enough that I’m stuck here. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he has to go through the same thing just to make me happy.”

  “What are the alternatives?”

  Ellie closed the cover of her laptop. In a month full of bleak, discouraging moments, this was beginning to feeling like it was the worst so far. “He could find another position for me. Maybe that’s a possibility? Except the earliest that would happen is next Fall, and that seems like forever right now. Or, I could quit my job and just go back to California. I’m still young. I’m smart. I have a good sense of style. I could start over somewhere. Do something else with my life.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  Ellie stood from the couch and started walking slowly around the room. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I hate the idea of working as hard as I did to get here, and then just throwing it out the window and starting over somewhere, at the bottom.”

  “On the other hand, if you’re honestly unhappy where you are, then what are you trying to hold onto?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellie muttered, stopping at the window and staring out at the darkened streets. “I don’t know anything.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” her sister murmured. “I know how it feels to be where you are right now. I was like that not so long ago, and it sucks. It feels terrible, and I’m so sorry that you’re going through that.”

  “Thank you,” Ellie said. It felt good to hear a sympathetic voice.

  “Do you want my opinion, though?”

  “What?” Ellie asked dubiously.

  “Don’t quit your job. Yes, you could start over somewhere else, and I know you’d be brilliant at your next career no matter what it was, but you’d never forgive yourself for letting them chase you out of town. You may hate living in the country, but you hate losing even more.”

  “I know,” Ellie sighed reluctantly. “You’re right, damn you. I could never give them the satisfaction. And I’m not going to sit by the phone and wait for Jackson to call with good news, either, which means that there’s only one thing left.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Change the game,” Ellie said, and even as the words left her mouth she started to feel a little better. There were times when she forgot it, but she was always happiest when she had a plan. Even the barest glimpse of what she needed to do, and how she’d go about it, was enough to change her whole world around. “This place isn’t good enough for Jackson. So I’ll make it good enough.”

  Sarah laughed in delight. “I love it! I can hear my little sister again! What are you going to do?”

  “Many things, but the first is a conference. This school has been out of the limelight for so long that no one even remembers that it’s here. A nice, big conference would get the heavyweights to campus and get them thinking that maybe something real is happening here.”

  “Great! How are you going to do that?”

  “I have no idea!” Ellie proclaimed happily. The only thing she liked more than a good project was a big challenge, and the idea taking shape in her mind was a doozy. “I have no idea at all, but it will probably be some combination of calling in favors, bribes, and shameless lies. I’ll figure out what I need to do, and whatever that turns out to be, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Do it, Ellie. Make it happen. Build the world that you want to live in.”

  “I’ll make it happen,” Ellie breathed in response, and in her mind it was already on its way to completion.

  19

  WHEN THE DOORBELL rang Ellie was fully engrossed in the plan that was slowly taking shape on the screen of her laptop. She had chosen a topic for the conference, she had decided on a rough schedule, and now she was pencilling in a wish-list of conference speakers and attendees. She knew that she was aiming high; if she got half of the people on her list to actually attend, she would count it a big success.

  She was so deep in thought at the first jingle of the doorbell that she didn’t completely notice it. The second ring caught her attention, though, and with a sigh Ellie set her laptop to the side and rose from the couch. She stretched her tired back and legs, then hobbled on half-asleep feet to the intercom by her front door.

  She pushed the button that opened a connection to the speaker at the building’s entrance. “Hello?” she asked.

  There was no answer. Ellie was just about to return to the couch when a loud knock sounded on her door, causing her to jump in surprise. She opened the door a crack, ready to slam it shut in case she found criminals on the other side.

  What she saw there was much worse. “Dad?” she said, hardly believing her own eyes.

  Carrying a suitcase, he shouldered his way through the half-open door. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, pausing briefly to kiss her on the cheek before he continued farther into the apartment. “Someone let me in the front door downstairs, so I came straight up.”

  “Dad. What are you doing here?” Ellie asked in a dangerous voice.

  “I thought you needed a visit! You sounded so sad on the phone. Everyone needs company every now and then, particularly when you’re getting used to a new home. So I jumped on a plane and here I am.”

  “Dad! No. You don’t do this. You don’t just show up unannounced!”

  “Oh, come on. We’re family. Family can be spontaneous with one another.” He shrugged out of his coat and handed it to her, then took a look around her apartment. “Wow! I like the place. You’ve got a lot of room. Much more than that closet you were living in before.”

  “Yeah, well, we paid a lot of money for that closet, it was in a beautiful neighborhood, and I miss it terribly,” Ellie muttered, carrying his coat to the closet and hanging it there.

  “See? That’s what I was talking about. You need some cheering up, kiddo.”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “We’ll see about that. Do you have anything to eat?”

  “There’s half a sandwich in the refrigerator. Dad, you can’t stay here!”

  “Why not?” he asked, slipping off his shoes and walking on stocking feet into the kitchen, where he swung open the refrigerator and meditated quietly on its contents.

  “Because I don’t have a guest bed!”

  “I’ll be fine on the couch.” Her father had claimed the paper-wrapped sandwich and was munching on it idly while he poked at a portion of her wall where the plaster was beginning to flake off. “You should get your building guy to get a seal on this. Once water gets inside the wall it’s game over.”

  “Thanks for the tip. The couch is much too small for you, Dad.”

  “It will be fine,” he said, coming up with the sandwich in his hand to take her into a one-armed hug. “It’s great to see you, pumpkin. You’re just as beautiful as ever.”

  “Thank you,” Ellie muttered, feeling excessively pleased despite herself at the compliment. She had spent most of her childhood years fighting with Sarah for her father’s attention and approval, and even today whenever she got it a part of her wanted to jump up and down in excitement.

  “You’re awfully skinny, though. And you have circles under your eyes. That’s why I had to come. You don’t have anyone to take care of you.”

  She sighed. “I’m a grown woman, Dad. I take care of myself.”

  He had continued with his sandwich to the couch, where he now relaxed with his feet propped on her coffee table. The threadbare toes of his socks were illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen. “You don’t do a very good job of it, sweetheart, and you shouldn’t have to. You’re a princess, and a princess deserves to have someone who takes care of her.”

  Ellie tried to scowl, but it didn’t come out right. “We’re agreed that I deserve better than I’ve been getting lately, but we were talki
ng about you staying here. Namely, that you can’t.”

  “It will only be for a few days, pumpkin. I promise.”

  “Dad, why are you really here?”

  He looked up at her, his face the very image of innocence. “Can’t a father want to check in on his younger daughter?”

  “Of course! But you show up out of nowhere, with no warning. There’s a knock on my door, and suddenly there you are. With a suitcase.”

  “If I had called and said I wanted to visit you here, would you have said yes?”

  Ellie pursed her lips. “Probably not.”

  “Well, there you go. I wanted to see you, and I knew that you could use some company. So I came. You would have done the same thing for me.”

  Ellie rolled her eyes. Inwardly she thought: I probably wouldn’t have known that you were having a hard time in the first place, because you and I don’t talk about things like that. Sometimes weeks go by without me thinking about you at all. That seemed cruel, though—far too cruel to say out loud. “You know I’m always happy to see you,” she fibbed. “I just wish you’d given me some warning. I didn’t even have a chance to clean.”

  “What?” he asked, looking around the room. “It’s spotless.”

  “Well,” Ellie said, sitting next to him on the couch, “I may not have as much time for you as you were hoping. I have classes, and right now I’m really busy with some plans I’m drawing up for a conference.”

  He put his arm around her. “No worries, sweetheart. I just want some face time, is all. Whatever you can give me here and there, between your job and whatever else you have going on, that will be plenty.”

  She looked at him in resignation. It was clear to her now that she was not going to be able to chase him out of her apartment, and so she was resigned to making the most of it. “Do you want a beer?” she asked at last.