“Do you want to sit?” I tip my head, gesturing down at the stools that were just vacated by the Hayes brothers.
Jay gives a small nod before settling onto one of the seats.
“Want something to drink?” I ask.
He briefly glances at the bottles behind me before replying. “Sure. Scotch and soda, please.”
I grab a bottle of the better quality stuff from the back row, because it seems like the nice thing to do.
“You didn’t have to run off this morning,” he says as I fill the small glass from the soda nozzle.
“It was a shock.”
“Yes, yes it was,” he says. As soon as I place his drink on a coaster, Jay lifts it and takes a big gulp.
I watch his throat move as he swallows, and then my eye drifts down to the open neck of his tan button-down shirt. There’s a bright white t-shirt beneath it, providing a strong contrast to the suntanned color of his skin. A few dark hairs curl out from the collar of the shirt. He didn’t have much in the way of chest hair when we were together.
“I’m sorry that you found me with your friends.”
“Not your fault,” he says quickly. “You didn’t know.”
“We didn’t get to talking about last names,” I say, instantly regretting how it sounds.
He’d been looking down at his glass, but lifts his head abruptly. “You still go by Murphy?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
“I looked for you online a while back, but couldn’t find you. I assumed you’d gotten remarried.”
“No, never have. You?”
He shakes his head and takes another drink before saying, “I never had much faith in my ability to be a good husband.”
I don’t have a response for that. Jay and I didn’t part on good terms. There were a lot of tears and even more yelling during our short marriage, especially at the end. After all this time, the memories almost seem like they belong to someone else, but I can’t exactly sing his praises.
He was a good boyfriend. He invited me to prom our junior year and asked me to be his girlfriend shortly after. I was still a virgin, and he was sweetly patient. My mother and our church had raised me to wait until marriage before having sex. Jay and I made it halfway through our senior year before we gave in to the temptation, which was enormous by that point.
Once we crossed that threshold, we never looked back. Immediately after graduation, we moved in together, and shortly after that, I got pregnant.
Or, at least, I thought I did.
My period was late, so I did a home pregnancy test, which was positive. We had no immediate plans to start a family, and we weren’t even sure when or how it happened — some sort of birth control failure — so it was a huge surprise.
But despite our lack of planning and our complete unpreparedness for parenthood, we were excited. We weren’t sure how we’d manage it — I was a waitress and Jay was a bagger at Piggly Wiggly — but we knew we’d figure it out somehow.
We’d always talked about getting married someday, and the pregnancy suddenly made it seem important. Between the pregnancy test and my first appointment with an obstetrician, Jay brought home roses, made dinner for me, and asked me to marry him.
Two weeks later, after my doctor visit, I had to come home and tell him I was no longer pregnant. I thought the home test must have been faulty, but the doctor said I could have very briefly been pregnant and miscarried without any symptoms, since it was such early days.
Jay and I still went ahead and got married, and perhaps we were a little relieved about not having a baby so early in our lives, but things between us were never quite the same.
Movement catches my eye from the other end of the bar. Becca’s waving at me.
“I’ll be back,” I tell Jay.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Becca says when I reach her. “I got the drinks that I could, but someone ordered a Mai Tai. Can we make that?”
“What, do they think they’re on an island vacation?” I joke.