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Relying On Ben and Jerry: After All This Time

Quinton tugged on my hand, smiling back at me. “You’re not afraid, are you?” he teased, my favorite dimpled smile spreading over his face, his eyes laughing. I pursed my lips, narrowing my eyes at him.

“Don’t you go and dare me now,” I cautioned him, trying to sound menacing and probably failing. “I’m getting too old for some of them. Colonel dared me to jump on the hood of a parked car the other day, and I fell off and nearly broke my hip. I’m old enough to be worrying about the state of my hips, Quinton.”

“Hip-breakage is a sign of getting older, Lena,” he told me gravely.

I turned my nose up at him haughtily. “You calling me old, Lancaster?” I demanded, not being able to help but to feel a little self-conscious that he really did think I was kind of old now. Like he knew what I was thinking, he smiled down at me warmly, gathering me tighter in his arms. I breathed a content sigh and relaxed into him, his breath blowing against the top of my head and making my scalp all tingly.

“You’re not old, cutie,” he promised me. “But I definitely am. Twenty-five . . . It’s like a Kline-style fingernail to the heart.”

I laughed, but now my thoughts had been shifted into a new direction, like a kid with ADD who had spotted a bunch of flashing lights. “Hey, have you talking to Kline lately?” I asked, my eyebrows pulling together, trying to remember if he mentioned it or not, knowing that he would have.

He poked me in the ribs, making me automatically squeal, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yeah, Lena, you were kind of there. Remember?”

“Right,” I affirmed, smiling sheepishly. “Was that the first time you had seen her since . . .?”

“Since her and Mathieu broke up?” he finished for me, nodding slowly with this thoughtful expression on his face. “Yeah, it was, actually.”

We had all seen the breakup coming, but that didn’t make it any less explosive. Mathieu and Kline had been rather ill-suited from the start—he was always so busy with school, she was always so busy being Kline—and they clashed over things so easily that they were always balancing on the tip of a knife. They kept fighting more, and more, and more, until one day Kline showed up at Norma and Colonel’s place in Waltham with a U-Haul, begging for a place to stay for a couple of days. When I had asked her what had made her leave him, she had simply told me that they were never meant to be and changed the subject. So I asked Mathieu instead.

It didn’t make things awkward for any of the parties involved—no one blamed the other. Kline and Mathieu had reached a point where they had to move on. Kline called it her big epiphany. The rest of us called it their closure.

So Kline found an apartment on the edge of Waltham for the time being, until she can solidly get back on her feet, always wearing a smile even though I knew that this all might have been seen coming from a mile away, but it still had to hurt so much. But she always had a smile, a laugh, a joke, and it didn’t take much for me to realize that Kline might have always been the strongest of us all.

Quinton looked out into the Boston Harbor, his arms tightening around me.

“We won’t end like that,” he told me sternly, but there was a slight shaking uncertainty underneath of his voice, like he thought it was just a nature of his family to fall out of love; I knew it was something that haunted him, and what happened with Mathieu didn’t make him feel any better about it. He stared out into the darkening night sky, his eyes strained. “I won’t let that happen, I promise.”

“You’ll have to pry your heart from my cold dead hands,” I told him honestly.

A small smirk tipped up a corner of his mouth. “Well that’s a revitalizing mental image.”