Free Pug Hill by Alison Pace

as I am making it out to be.
    “Thursday night is a big going-out night; it’d just be better if the class was a different night.” This is what he says, and any thoughts, any thoughts at all that I am being unfair, unkind, too hard, they just evaporate, vaporize. I look back at him and say nothing.
    “There’s not another night?” he asks and I shake my head no, to which he feels compelled to say, “Everything is replaceable, Hope.”
    Evan likes one-liners, he especially likes this one-liner, “Everything is replaceable.” He sprinkles it into conversation as often as possible. Once it had been around awhile, bandied about enough to clue me in to the fact that it was a favorite saying, it had struck me as a really sad outlook, and I hoped I’d never be the type of person to say things like “everything is replaceable.” Later I began to wonder if it, this saying, was maybe some kind of threat. Right now I only wonder if Evan simply spews one-liners all the time, one-liners that mean absolutely nothing just because he likes to hear himself speak.
    “That makes no sense,” I snap, and snapping, if you think about it, is better than the alternatives, better than, let’s say, standing up and screaming at the top of your lungs, or running, arms flailing, out into the street.
    “Everything is replaceable,” I mimic, and while mimicking is as ungracious as snapping, it too is better than other options. “It’s not in the right context,” I try to explain. “It’s just a dumb thing to say.”
    “No, Hope, it’s not,” he snaps back, leaning forward in his seat toward me. “I’m just saying that if you wanted to, you could do it another night.” I slide back an inch or two on the banquette, away from him.
    “And I’m just saying I can‘t, that is the only night.” I try to gather my thoughts, as much as they can, at present, possibly be gathered. “And, I’m not just saying that, I’m also saying that ‘everything is replaceable’ doesn’t fit. I’m saying that, too.”
    “What do you want me to say?” he says, tilting his glass back, another ice cube sliding to its unhappy end. I just wanted him to say, “Why?” That is what I wanted. Want ed , past tense, because I don’t want it anymore.
    “I just want you to say you think it will help,” I tell him, and lean back against a cushion.
    “I think it will help,” he says, and the fact that he says it, somehow only makes me feel worse.
    “Thanks,” I say. “Do you want to go home?”
    “I want to have another drink.” He signals a waitress and first orders a Scotch for himself, and then turns to look at me in a way that I am sure says, “Order something other than a white wine spritzer.”
    “A white wine spritzer,” I say and glare at him and we sit. There would be something to be said for letting this conversation end; this I know. But also, there might be something to be said for explaining how hard this is to Evan. I take another bracing breath and try to explain it to him.
    “It’s just,” I begin, “I’ve been so scared of it, of public speaking, so scared of it my whole life and now I have to do it, soon. See, my parents want me to make a speech at their anniversary party and I can’t say no, but I don’t know if for a thing like this, this big, if I can say yes and mean it, and I’m just really freaked out, and really scared.” I say it all at once, so quickly. He looks back at me, he cocks his head slightly, in a way that I think could be thoughtful. There is a small, tiny part of me that thinks, this is it, this is where Evan actually gets it, where everything that I thought was wrong about us turns out not to be such a big deal at all, because the most important thing is that he gets it.
    “I love public speaking,” he says. “I really excel at it.” And that small tiny part of me: it dies. I urge the parts of me that are still living to take a deep breath.
    “Really?” I say, telling myself that