Butterfly Weeds (26 page)

             
“Are you having fun?” he asked.

             
“Yeah…” My voice trailed off as I noticed a round object on the hood of Rachel’s car.

             
“Babe,” he said, noticing my short leave of absence.

             
“I’m here, I’m sorry. Yeah, I’m having fun. It’s good to be back,” I recovered, making my way to the car. “How was your day?”

             
I listened to him talk about his classes and something about his friend not showing up in time for something. I was too distracted by the object to give him my undivided attention.

             
“That sounds awful, Honey. What happened to him?” I asked half-heartedly, still trying to remain, at the very least, a part of the conversation.

             
As I reached the car, I easily recognized that the round object was a volleyball. It looked old. Its seams were a deep brown, and it had taken on a yellowish tint. Carefully, I rolled it closer to me with one hand, while the other hand still held the phone to my ear. And within moments, I could faintly see that it had something written on it. I squinted and took a closer look, using the light from the phone to illuminate the ball’s surface.

             
With my makeshift light source, I could just barely see that in a black, permanent marker was my name and my old volleyball number. My fingers retraced the faded letters and number as I remembered back to the day I had written them on the ball years ago. It was in high school. This was my ball. I had loved this ball. I had bought it with my summer babysitting money. But it had been years since I had last seen it.

             
I finished retracing the hand-written words, but as soon as I had, my eyes went to a set of unfamiliar letters below my original script. The new letters didn’t look old and faded like the ones I had written those years ago now had. The new letters looked fresher and sharper – and they weren’t in my handwritin
g.

             
I tilted the phone’s screen a little closer to the ball, just far enough away from my ear that I could still hear Brady’s voice, continually fading into the background. My curiosity grew as my eyes feverishly darted to the new letters. I had just barely noticed that the ball had engulfed most of my attention when I felt a smile fighting its way to my face. The all-knowing grin had started in my stomach and had found its final resting place at the ends of my lips, and now, it made me beam with a silly, childlike joy as my eyes slowly followed over each word:

             
Now, we’re even.

             
“J
ules, could you come here?” Brady called to me from inside his small, apartment kitchen.

             
His request made me stop short.

             
I had left
San Diego
eight hours earlier that day, and I was exhausted and in desperate need of a shower and some food, but nevertheless, I was excited to finally spend time with my fiancé again. It had been almost two months since our proposal and a month since we had last seen each other.

             
Brady lived in a small, older home in south
Columbia
, with a friend he had met in medical school. The place was kept fairly well, and in the end, the fact that it was clean, for the most part, was really what mattered, I had concluded a long time ago. Because, truth be told, one could easily tell that two, college guys lived there. There were no pictures or photos on the walls. An oversized flag with the school’s mascot plastered across its face hung above a worn-in, brown leather couch and was quite possibly the only effort at any kind of decorating. Well, that’s if you didn’t count the fake plant in the corner of the living room that I’m pretty sure also doubled as an end table. In fact, currently, the plant held a plastic cup from a familiar pizza joint in its fake potting soil and the remote in one of its branches. My face fell into a puzzled state as I stared bemused at the plant for a moment – until I heard Brady’s voice again.

             
Slightly jolted, I set my carry-on bag down onto an aged, tan chair in Brady’s living room and made my way to the kitchen where he stood.

             
“What did you call me?” I asked, as Brady came into view.

             
“Umm,” he paused, seemingly to remember the last words that had just come out of his mouth. “Jules. Why?”

             
“Oh, it’s nothing. I had just never heard you call me that before,” I said, trying to sound unfazed by his reference.

             
Brady had always called me Julia. In fact, I hadn’t been called anything different by a guy since Will. And for some reason, the name sounded odd and unsettling coming from Brady’s lips. Of course, nothing had been exactly the same between us since the day after our engagement. Everything seemed a little more forced and a little less natural since then. We hadn’t talked any more about when or where we were going to have the wedding, much less where we were going to live after we did get married. I suspected, however, that that was because Brady thought that in time I might change my mind. He had his heart set on
New York
, and I knew it. I could tell by the way he had pushed his home state on me those weeks ago, and because of that, I hadn’t brought up the topic either. Though, I knew the more and more I avoided it, the more and more other subjects became untouchable as well – like my plans after law school or even down to where we would spend the holidays. In fact, a part of me worried that maybe the two of us had become so wrapped up in our own, individual lives in the last few years that we hadn’t paused to see if we could even coexist together in our futures. I mean, it wasn’t that I feared that in the midst of all the hours apart and mounds of paperwork between us that we had lost each other, but instead, that we had never really found each other to begin with. Is that even possible for two people who had been together for years? Could I really not have taken the time to get to know him? Did he know me?

             
Despite the hope and excitement that I had initially put into my weekend with Brady, the next couple of days proved trying. My resolve started deteriorating early on. Each time Brady said something that hinted at our complicated future, my lighthearted walls crumbled a little bit more. Something that I couldn’t explain began eating away at me so much so that I began to feel increasingly uneasy about my imminent life with Brady. It was almost as if he had transformed into a different person before my eyes in only two, short months, and more importantly, in the last couple of days. He was still compassionate and successful and handsome. I could still see this. But something was different, and I had to figure out what it was.

             
What had changed? I wondered as I took a seat outside on Brady’s back porch swing, while Brady took a shower upstairs. Had anything changed or was it all still the same and I was just now realizing the reality of the situation?

             
I stared at my cell phone in my hand for a long minute, then resolved to go in search of answers – answers from the one person I thought might have them.

             
“Hey,” I said somberly when Rachel answered on the other end of the phone.

             
“Hey, what’s going on? Aren’t you in
Missouri
?” Rachel asked, excitedly.

             
“Yeah, I’m at Brady’s,” I answered, noticeably disheartened.

             
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked immediately.

             
Her voice sounded concerned.

             
I remained silent for an instant, gathering my words, until I could no longer hold it in.

             
“Rachel, why don’t I have butterflies when I see him – and after almost a month?” I anxiously questioned my friend.

             
“What?” Rachel asked. I could tell she was a little taken aback by my seemingly out-of-plac
e question – and rightfully so.

             
“I mean, I was excited to see him, but a different kind of excited. I was excited to get away from school for a couple of days and do something different, and I was excited because you should be excited to see your fiancé. And why
does it sound so strange when he calls me Jules?” I rattled off unconsciously.

             
“Jules, he’s Mr. Perfect, you know?” Rachel asked and stated.

             
“I know,” I conceded. “Why am I such a mess? I have Mr. Perfect’s huge ring on my finger, and for the first time in a long time, I’m miserable. I feel like I’m trapped in a life that’s not my own, and I keep waiting for a breakthrough – for a change, but it hasn’t come. Help me, Rachel. I need your words of wisdom. Just tell me I’m crazy. Tell me he’s the love of my life, and we’ll live happily ever after with our white, picket fence and two and a half kids.”

             
Rachel laughed, bu
t her laughter was short lived.

             
“Don’t stress, Jules,” s
he said in a more serious tone.

             
I could tell she was attempti
ng to calm me down.

             
“Getting engaged can sometimes be a scary thing, especially if you’re not completely prepared,” Rachel went on. “Immediately, people start asking questions, like: ‘How did he propose? When’s the big day? Where are you going to live?’ It can be pretty overwhelming, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to know that he’s the one. You’ve got to be able to know that you can be happy waking up every morning next this man. If he is the one, you should know or trust that you will know again once all of the dust has settled.”

             
Rachel paused and took a deep bre
ath and then slowly let it out.

             
“Jules,” she continued. “Do you believe that deep down inside somewhere that Brady is the one? Yes, he is Mr. Perfect, but is he your Mr. Perfect?”

             
I was without words. I sat pondering my friend’s questions for an anguishing, long, silent minute. I trusted Rachel, and I trusted that no matter how much Rachel felt one way about a particular subject or someone that she could always take herself out of the situation and become my objective voice of reason. Plus, I feared that I had already known the answer for which I was looking all along anyway, and when I finally spoke again, there we
re tears welling up in my eyes.

             
“I don’t know,” I softly said, “and that thought terrifies me.”

             
The words frantically stumbled off of my lips, as a warm sal
tiness streamed down my cheeks.

             
“He’s amazing, and he’s everything I ever wanted in a guy, and I don’t know why I don’t know, but I don’t,” I continued.