Wallflower In Bloom by Claire Cook

me her yeah, right look. I ignored it. Colleen was the thinnest girl in the family and completely superior about it. She’d been trying to get me to walk with her for years. I had a vague plan that I’d start training secretly first, then once I was sure I could kick her butt I’d ask her if she wanted to run a road race with me.
    As soon as she left, I locked the front door, as if everyone in a half-mile radius didn’t have a key to Tag’s house. In one of the lower cabinets, I found a pile of the unbleached cotton bags with Tag’s logo printed on them that Joanie used for grocery shopping. I filled them with enough provisions from the kitchen to last at least a few days, maybe more, and then I lugged everything out to the garage, along with my suitcase, and loaded up Tag’s golf cart.
    He always left the key in the ignition, so I just fired up the cart, opened the garage door, and started putt-putting my way toward my place: home sweet sheep shed.
    Just before I turned onto a dirt path that was a shortcut, a car pulled down the long driveway heading in my direction. For a quickcrazy second I thought it might be Steve Moretti. As if he’d changed his own plans, booked a flight, rented a car, and knew where to find me. As if Tag might have given him the address. As if Steve might ever want to see me again.
    Then I recognized the car. It was Mitchell.
    He pulled over and climbed out. When I rode slowly up to him, he pretended to jump out of the way of the golf cart. Until then, I hadn’t even considered bothering to run him over, which was probably a sign of my growing maturity about our situation.
    I put the golf cart into park but kept the engine running. “No, I don’t want to give it another try.”
    Mitchell grinned. When I met him, he had limp, stringy blondish hair that he wore long enough to make it look limper and stringier. He played the drums in a band on weekends, which was his justification for the fact that he also had it dyed every four weeks. Once he began going bald, he’d started shaving his head, as if he could make it look like he was doing it on purpose. Somehow he couldn’t quite pull it off; it made him look like a just-hatched Tweety Bird.
    “Hey,” he said.
    For ten years, this is how it went with Mitchell and me: We’d go out, he’d treat me like gold, I’d fall in love, he’d move in, he’d get lazy, I’d want more, he wouldn’t, I’d kick him out, we’d take a break and see other people. Then we’d do it all over again. And again. And again.
    After a while the breakups started to blur, and at this moment I couldn’t even remember why we’d called things off the last time. As Mitchell stood in front of me, I did a quick calculation and realized we’d been apart for six months. This was the danger zone, when enough time had passed that all the bad stuff started to slip away and a kind of wistful longing crept in to take its place. I mean, we had so many shared memories. Did it really matter that Mitchell didn’t believe in marriage, that he didn’t want kids, that he’d always held on to his apartment even when we were living together at my place?
    “Leave,” I said. “Now.”
    Mitchell rubbed one hand back and forth across the stubble on his scalp, as if he were his own lucky charm. “I’m glad I caught you. I kind of wanted to talk to you for a minute. Just so, you know, you didn’t hear it from someone else.”
    My heart did a funny thing that made me think of a flounder flopping around on a fishing dock.
    Mitchell glanced over at his car and then turned back to me.
    “I met someone,” he said. “She’s pregnant. We’re getting married.”
    We looked at each other. A decade flashed before my eyes.
    “Liar,” I said.
    The golf cart engine revved. My foot must have made it happen, but I felt totally disconnected from the movement. I wished Tag had left some golf clubs in it. I could pretend I was Tiger Woods’s wife, Elin, and whack the shit out of