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Bizarrely, it wasn’t until after her roommate’s Friday evening breakup over text had progressed to a Friday night breakup over FaceTime, and from there progressed further still, to a Saturday morning breakup over about six feet, Tara unrelenting in the doorway and the newly minted ex near tears on the front lawn, that Naomi realized she could just, you know. Leave.
She called Travis.
“Man, what the—Naomi?” Travis’s older brother relied on him, heavily, for middle-of-the-night drunk-tank bailouts. Also, it was after two. There are times when nobody should be counted upon to fire on all cylinders, and this was one of them.
Yet here she was. Counting on him. “Sorry,” said Naomi. Never mind that shit, she thought.
“Never mind that shit,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Probably easier to explain in the frying pan than in the fire.”
“Huh?”
“Can we come over?”
“Can you come over, what the fuck, Naomi, get your ass over here. You guys need me to come? Need a ride?”
“You’re sweet. No. In no world do I need you behind the wheel of a car right now.” He sounded half-asleep, an observation that could’ve equally applied to Naomi, but at least she’d never been fully asleep to begin with. “I’ll drive, it’s fine. I—we need some peace and quiet.”
“Peace and quiet. That’s me. All peaceful, all quiet.”
“Indeed.” From outside her bedroom window, which faced the front lawn, she heard the kind of sound usually produced by, say, grabbing an ornamental planter off the porch and hurling it at a nearby windshield. This was followed by the wail of a car alarm, which itself was followed by an appalled and furious wail of male anguish.
“Indeed I am,” Travis said. “C’mon, lady. Come on over.”
She knocked. He answered right away. This was helpful—with one arm Naomi juggled her wallet, keys, backpack, and a tub of Aquaphor she’d snatched off the bathroom counter for reasons now unknown to her. With the other she held Sarah.
“Thanks again. Sorry.” Hustling inside, she dumped all that crap immediately to the floor, with the exception of her sleeping daughter. Sarah’s head lolled heavily on her shoulder while Naomi wondered why she kept apologizing. This wasn’t like her.
“I don’t know—” Travis yawned “—shit, sorry—don’t know what for. Hey, you know me, I’m not exactly the solitary type.”
“It’s three a.m.” Then again, Naomi had never been in what she’d call a similar situation. Tara’s perpetual whirlwind cycle of failed relationships was one thing, as was fleeing a crappy rental under cover of darkness, but Travis? A guy who cared, and who furthermore put up with occasional (or—why lie?—continuous) inconveniences not for his sake but her own? This was uncharted fucking territory; of course she wasn’t herself. Naomi had no idea where she was.
“Irregardless.” He yawned again.
“That’s not a word.”
“Excuse me?”
“You mean ‘regardless.’ ‘Irregardless’ isn’t a real word.”
“Great, right. You gonna keep telling me what I mean?”
“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
He looked at her. Working his lower lip between his teeth, smiling. Travis had a uniquely—perhaps remarkably—open face. Naomi had clocked it when they first met, everything in him just there and, intentionally or not, signaling out to her. As in, Huh. There’s a guy you can read like a book, which had been refreshing. Mike, who’d also seemed an easy read at first, had instead turned out to be simple, and his simplicity was the type to pretty often devolve into illegibility. So there was strike one against her judgment, and that was before Naomi had gotten pregnant.
“What do you mean, you’re gonna tell me you don’t know what I mean?”
“I have my guesses,” she said.
Despite strikes one, two, and so on, she’d trusted it—her judgment—when that night it had told her that Travis was an easy read, and easy in this case was far from simple. Easy was…clear. A distinction Naomi had felt more than she’d known, and—at the time—she certainly hadn’t understood.
“Guesses, shit,” he said. “You know, Naomi.”
She did.
Travis yawned a third time, nodded to Sarah. “Want me to take her? And just, look, all right, listen, whenever you need—"
“We could stay.”
She hadn’t thought this. Like earlier that night—earlier that year—it was a choice that came upon her not at all, then all at once, a clarity that wasn’t entirely connected to Travis but that Naomi hadn’t felt in herself until she’d felt it first in him. She hadn’t been trying to speak in hints and riddles, and she wasn’t, and she knew, like she’d always known, that she didn’t have to. Come morning—or, hell, come days later, even—she and Sarah would not be headed back to the rental.
So she said, “We could stay,” then, “Careful, she’s growing.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got her.” Travis boosted Sarah against his shoulder. “I made up the couch,” he said. “Uh, for us, that is. Sarah gets the bed.” He adjusted his stance (Sarah really was growing, taller and leggier and a bigger handful with each passing day.) and cleared his throat. “Naomi?”
“Travis?”
“You don’t have to convince me. I mean, yeah, as you know, I’m easy to convince, but, like, you know—I was convinced. From the beginning.”
“Auspicious as that was. I know. I’m not trying to convince you,” Naomi said. “I’m just…tired right now. I am really fucking tired, Travis.”
“Tara?”
“You have to ask?”
He shook his head, cupping the back of Sarah’s with one hand. “Stay. Shit, Naomi, yeah. Just stay.”
So she had no idea where she was. But that was in one sense. In another, entirely more concrete and therefore more trustworthy sense, she’d loaded Sarah and the rest of her life into the car and driven through the humid weight of Kansas summer darkness to get back to him, returning again and again since that first night; there was her compass. This might be uncharted territory, no map, but Naomi knew true north, she wasn’t that lost, and her feet were under her.
“Thank you,” she said. She stooped to collect her keys, the backpack, the tub of Aquaphor. “Oh, and you know, too. By the way. What do I have to be sorry for? Jesus, it’s three a.m.”
His smile was a quiet thing, quieter than hers. “Irregardless,” Travis said.