Free The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen Page B

expand on her situation. Olive looked down. Two large pockets were sewn along the bottom of her scrub top. The left one was starting to sag and detach from the weight of the instruments she carried with her all day. A pocket-sized procedures and pharmaceutical guide, hemostats, bandages, ibuprofen (for her), the Motorola, pens. Her pocket would soon be hanging on by a thread.
    How could Sherry assert her own desire for privacy in one breath and then give Olive such a look—a look that demanded Olive’s life story? It seemed an unfair expectation. She felt reluctant to admit any of the secrets that might have helped to land her here.
    “We’d been dating for over three years and we broke up last February,” she finally said.
    “Ah,” Sherry said. She set her cup of tea on the coaster.
    “We had a big fight and then were on a kind of break, and I—” She couldn’t form the words. Unspoken, they tasted acidic on her tongue. The burning sensation spread to her sinuses, and without warning, she began to cry. It was wholly inappropriate. Sherry Witan was the last person on earth in front of whom she wanted to lose it. She grabbed for the tissue box on the end table, but it was empty. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why . . .”
    “For heaven’s sake,” Sherry said, but her voice was kind, motherly. She handed Olive a handkerchief that smelled of men’s cologne. “You’re doing all right. You’re handling this quite well, actually. My first January like this, I spent in bed. I didn’t shower, I didn’t dress, I barely ate. By the end of the month, I was getting out of bed, but only to bring back books from the library. I read books on Buddhism, Hinduism, existentialism. I read Hawking, McTaggart, Kant, Leibniz, the ancient Greeks. I read H. G. Wells’s goddamn
Time Machine
. And none of it helped. If anything, it made things worse, because I became confused, paralyzed, too scared to try anything. I went back to bed for another month, and I didn’t snap out of it until my husband started talking about Gene McGregor.”
    Olive felt humbled. A part of her had always secretly admired the complete abandon with which some people could break down and wallow in their misfortune. Whenever Kerrigan broke up with a boyfriend, she called in sick to work and camped out on the couch for several days watching the Soap Network and eating canned pineapple. But Olive liked to be clean and eat regular meals and keep busy. Moving forward as though nothing had happened was her preferred method of coping.
    The fact that it hadn’t occurred to her to look in a book for the answers made her feel dimwitted. She knew who Stephen Hawking was but couldn’t imagine wading through one of his scientific texts. The other names Sherry listed were only vaguely familiar to her.
    But what struck her the most was that Sherry had assumed she was weeping out of exhaustion and frustration from the overwhelming prospect of reliving the year, which had blissfully, fleetingly left Olive’s mind for a moment. She had been crying for Phil: the way she had hurt him and her disappointment over how things had turned out for them.
    “You’re doing all right,” Sherry repeated. “You’re already light-years ahead of where I was. You went to work today, right? That’s good.” She twisted the tassels of her shawl around her fingers. “So you had issues with your husband. What else went wrong last year?”
    “Boyfriend,” Olive corrected. “And I don’t really know. You’d think it would be obvious.”
    Sherry frowned. “Obvious to others, perhaps. It’s easy to point out someone else’s mistake, harder to recognize your own. Especially because most people—except the lucky few like ourselves—are forced to live with their mistakes. So they learn to justify their mistakes, build on them, until they can look back and convince themselves that their mistake was inevitable all along, a good choice, in fact. An unwed teenage mother can look back at