I Erased Our Marriage Timeline novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Last Time

I stepped into the elevator.

Curtis let go of the door.

"Merry Christmas, kiddo," he said, loud again, for the room.

The doors closed on his smile.

I rode down three floors with my back against the brass rail.

Last time.

Maybe he meant the last time I'd stood in that office, at nineteen, delivering Esteban's forgotten lunch.

Maybe he meant nothing.

Or maybe he'd watched that first night go exactly the way he wanted, once, in a life only I remembered.

I didn't call Jocelyn.

She had chemo and a wedding and a fiancé who thought I'd lost my mind.

I didn't call Abel.

I'd have to tell him about El Cajon, and I couldn't.

I drove home and drew stairs in a sketchbook until it got dark.

Abel called on the twenty-second.

"My mom wants to know if you have Christmas plans."

"I have a frozen lasagna and a jacaranda tree."

"She says that's a no." A pause. "She also says I'm not allowed to come home unless I bring the girl Jocelyn won't stop talking about at the office party."

"Does your mom know I'm fake?"

"I told her you were real." His voice went small. "I'm a bad liar, Marisol. I'm not a fast one. She asked if I liked you and I said yes before I could think."

I held the phone a little tighter.

"Okay," I said. "But I'm bringing tamales."

I'd learned them in a foster home in Chula Vista, the only good one.

The woman there let me spread the masa when I was nine.

I made four dozen on Christmas Eve in my closet kitchen.

Abel's mother lived in a little yellow house in Escondido with a lemon tree in the back and a porch light shaped like a lantern.

She opened the door before we knocked.

She was small and white-haired, in a sweater with a reindeer on it, and she took the foil tray right out of my hands.

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