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cdyssey · 2 years ago

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Apology Gifts

Summary: Though they've already reconciled, Melissa and Barbara also exchange apology gifts. [Post-2.18]

CW: Alcohol/Drunkenness Mention

AO3 Link

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They exchange pitch perfect apology gifts that next morning.

Melissa raps on the window of Barbara’s sedan with reddened knuckles, holding up a small box of donuts and a crooked smile that is stretched across her lips like a sagging clothesline. And Barbara, noticing the strain—(how can she not?)—gamely forces herself to chuckle in reply, ignoring the sharp twinge of guilt just behind her navel long enough to elegantly gesture to her cupholders, where there are two coffees waiting.

Just the way they like them.

One black (Melissa’s) and the other so sugary that it might as well be a cavity in a cup (her own).

They didn’t text each other beforehand, didn’t call, didn’t so much as hint yesterday, as they were walking to their cars—their forearms sometimes brushing in reconciliatory relief—that this should be a thing.

They just know each other so well after nearly two decades of friendship, she supposes, that they anticipate one another. They wordlessly understand. For both of them, saying sorry in the teacher’s lounge was not enough; it was a bandaid; the wounds they exacted were devastating bullet holes.

Because, of course, that is the flip side to their total intimacy. Maybe if they hadn’t known each other so perfectly, they would have hurt each other far less.

Melissa walks around to the other side of the car and all but throws herself into the passenger seat, her cheeks rosy, her hair whipped from the wind, and together, they take communion, breaking bread and drinking something nearly as beloved as their favorite wine. They talk about nothing that really matters for the first few minutes. They canvas everything except for the one subject that they should probably be adults about and maturely unpack, smoothing past the initial awkwardness with traded anecdotes about what they had for dinner yesterday and how they felt about the most recent episode of Masterchef.

“Mm, this weather is nasty, isn’t it?”

“Pssh,” Melissa snorts, her nose still chafed from the cold. “You’re not kidding.”

The second-grade teacher tells her about how she got drunk off her ass the other night, and by the other night, they’re both deeply aware that she surely means the evening after they fought, even though neither of them has the guts to say it aloud. The metonymy keeps them safe, provides the illusion of distance from their most recent schism.

But realistically, it’s only been what?

Less than forty hours since Barbara had languished in her recliner until midnight? Worrying her hands together in the suffocating dark of the living room? Replaying the hurtful words that she and Melissa had so easily exchanged over their round table over and over again? (Yes, their round table—their safe space, their chosen sanctuary, their two-decades-and-counting home away from home. Naturally, it, too, is a metonymy, a convenient shorthand for something else entirely.)

(Something deeply and utterly unspeakable.)

Melissa had started it.

She had hit Barbara where it hurts, and what hurts is the vague insecurity—that becomes more defined with each passing year—that her necessity at Abbott is just another lie that she tells herself to go to sleep at night.

I’m perfectly content with my life.

She has a wonderful husband to come home to every night. She goes to church every Sunday and punctually attends Bible Club on the subsequent Wednesdays. Her daughters call her a few times a week. She and her loved ones are healthy, praise God. So many other people cannot fortunately say the same. What more can one woman ask for in this lifetime?

I don’t love her like that.

Melissa.

Her dearest and most beloved friend.

Who daily inspires an ungodly heat smoldering somewhere in the raw pit of her belly—despite the wonderful husband, despite the professional churchgoing, despite the perfect nuclearity of her family.

(She dutifully ignores this pain, though; she carries it with her to her personal Golgotha and crucifies it nightly as something to be atoned for in her prayers until the next morning when she begins her journey of self-martyrdom all over again.)

Friends set each other on fire, she rationalizes.

Friendship is about making the other burn.

I am still needed as a schoolteacher.

She is far from ready to retire yet.

Moreover, she absolutely can’t, even though her age is starting to suggest that she probably could. She is a staunch pillar at Abbott Elementary, long-established, intertwined in its storied matrix in a thousand different ways. If she retires now, who will educate the next generation of children? Who will teach them their shapes and sing silly songs about the alphabet with them? Who will assist them with their numbers? Who will help them finger paint rainbows for their loved ones?

Maybe anyone could do it—(that’s what people who don't know a damn thing about the public school system seem to think anyway)—but precisely no one can do it like Barbara Howard.

She continually soothes herself with this assertion anyway, and so perhaps that’s why she had been so devastated to hear Melissa argue against it.

Call her crazy, but she had just automatically assumed that her best friend wholly believed in her too.

And so Barbara had struck right back with all the incision of a scalpel, the tip of the stainless blade against the younger woman’s pulse point, the quip dripping from her lips with sickening ease.

Yes, it had been easy, almost effortless even, to vivisect her friend on the spot.

She had been well-aware, even as she said it, that Melissa has spent parts of her adulthood constructing herself against the perpetual insinuation that she was less than. Kids had teased her about her reading difficulties, so she didn’t talk about them. Barbara hadn’t even known that she struggled until they were a little over a year into their friendship, and during a double date, she’d heard Joseph complaining about how long it took for his wife to skim menus, causing her to flush the same arresting shade as her hair.

She’d snapped back, “You know it takes me a minute to process stuff.”

And for the rest of dinner, she’d been incapable of fully looking either Barbara or Gerald in the eye, spearing her food on her fork like it personally offended her.

The kindergarten teacher had never particularly liked her friend’s husband, but after that, she had absolutely loathed the man; she kept insinuating that Melissa should divorce him at least once a month for the next fifteen years, nearly shouting alleluia in relief when her most fervent wish finally came to pass.

And knowing all of this, Barbara had still gone there anyway, had taken a dig at Melissa's grammar, had so perfectly twisted that knife into her friend’s gut, and the memory of that lapse in judgment makes her stomach clench all over again.

But far from wallowing—an adamant non-practitioner of the art—the other woman doesn’t allow the moment to stick to either of their ribs. For Melissa has already clearly turned their harrowing fight into a joke—as she does, as is her wont, her most obvious and reliable coping mechanism. With infectious zeal, she colorfully describes how she’d almost greeted the pizza delivery guy in nothing but an Eagles t-shirt.

“And so I was yellin’ at the sucker through the door, telling him to hold on ‘til I could find my pants,” she elaborates, talking with her hands, waving a donut about, “but I was three beers and a marg popsicle in, and trying to make it up my staircase without wanting to upchuck was harder than my nephrectomy.”

“Almighty God in Heaven, Melissa,” she laughs in spite of herself, hand loosely splayed at the base of her throat. “How is that you always find yourself in these pantless predicaments?”

“The common denominator’s usually booze,” comes a coy reply. “Lots ‘n lots of booze.”

And they both laugh and they laugh because Melissa’s so proficient at spinning their collected hurts into the most outrageously funny yarns, and they laugh. And Barbara temporarily forgets to be anguished about the freighted remembrance of the other night and how it apparently undid them both. And she blushes profusely at the striking image of her friend naked from the waist down, her mind spiraling to unaccounted for places. And she knobs the heat down in the car like that’s the crucial tension that she needs to clearly resolve.

If Melissa notices—(and it's Melissa, she probably does)—she doesn’t say anything, taking a hearty bite of her donut and subsequently smearing chocolate icing on the side of her maraschino-red mouth.

It’s a singularly endearing effect.

“Sweetheart,” she rumbles fondly, “you’re making an entire mess.”

“Nothing new,” Melissa snorts. “You got a napkin?”

“Oh, mmmm—let me see.” She briefly roots around her console and the side compartment to no avail. “No, goodness, I’m sorry. I think I used the last of mine to clean up a small drink mishap last week...”

“Ah, don’t be. I can just—“ And Melissa reaches upwards to clearly use the back of her hand, but Barbara abruptly jolts, emphatically shaking her head.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Just let me—“ And rather than ever complete the thought, Barbara unthinkingly makes quick work of wetting her thumb and reaching over to swipe the stain away. The spines of her knuckles scrape the outline of that strongly hewn jaw. The pad of her thumb sinks into that soft, creamy skin and lingers there—like a gentle kiss.

Like a tender bruise.

She suddenly remembers, in the same maddening instant, that there are surely baby wipes in her purse. (She’s a kindergarten teacher; they’re a staple and an absolute necessity.) She doesn’t volunteer that information for some reason, though, her shuttered breath caught in the column of her throat as Melissa’s dark eyes visibly dilate, unblinking at the intimate contact.

Whatever there had once been of laughter and mirth slumps in the barest space between them, limp, all its falsities exposed.

They can laugh about the other night all they want.

That doesn't mean it didn't hurt to have lived through it.

“I’m sorry, Barb,” Melissa whispers, her mouth barely moving, clearly conscious of the geometry of their bodies in relationship to each other. Every dendritic nerve in Barbara's fingertips shivers in quiet anticipation.

“What for, silly?” Barbara tries to joke, stealing a leaf out of the other teacher’s book, but the effort is rather pathetic, undermined by the fact that she's still cupping the other's cheek. “It’s just chocolate.”

But, of course—

“It isn’t, though,” Melissa insists, the first to withdraw from the touch. She turns her head away, her fiery hair whirling wildly over her shoulder, and Barbara’s hand—where it had been touching, grasping, thumbing, holding—hangs in the air for a microsecond longer than it should. “I hurt your feelings the other day, and that was crappy of me. What you do is so important, hon, and I’m really sorry if I made ya think otherwise.”

A pause then, long and vulnerable, filled only with the telltale shuffling of their breaths.

Barbara doesn’t exactly know what to do with what is being offered to her: complete and total accountability. She demands it of herself, of course—each and every blessed day—and yet, receiving it from another is somehow too much.

Undeserved even.

(It’s lost on her why she believes that she merits any of her accumulated injuries. She has longed to hear these words; upon receiving them, she only knows how to neatly discard them on the doorstep.)

“And I hurt your feelings back,” she eventually returns, reaching out again, but this time placing her hand on Melissa’s forearm, fingers curling over her leather-clad wrist.

The touch has its intended effect. It brings the younger woman back to her with a slight sniff and a shy, almost girlish tilt of the head.

“I swung even lower than Janine’s height,” she continues softly, holding on to her, clinging even. “That makes us two of a kind, sweetheart.”

Even though she doesn't know how to accept an apology, she sure as hell knows how to give one back; accountability is a two-way street, and she's long been familiar with its well-worn path. She traverses it every day, always finding something or another to vaguely feel guilty about in the end, for accountability is her personal Golgotha is her own martyrdom is her Sisyphean hell is her daily and lived-in reality.

“God, you’d make a good priest, Barb,” Melissa grins at this, shaking her head fondly.

“Pardon me?” Barbara can’t help but chuckle at the apparent non-sequitur.

“Always absolvin’ me of my sins,” Melissa chortles in reply, though the expression in her eyes is still complicated, tinged with a quiet and clearly practiced melancholy. Barbara slowly drags her thumb up and down her friend’s sleeve, feeling the resistance of the fabric and continuing anyway, idly pushing and pulling, back and forth and back again…

“Oh, well, I certainly don’t have that right,” she shrugs softly. “I just… very much prefer it when you and I are on the same page, Melissa.”

And she meaningfully tips her free hand towards the coffee cups still between them and the box of mostly eaten donuts on the sun-weathered dash.

“We just work, don’t we?”

It’s a highly rhetorical question, of course, as she gestures to these tangible gestures and tokens of their love, as she grips Melissa’s arm, as she stares at her like she’s the only person in this cold and lonely world.

They work—the two of them. They always have. It's their shared presumption that they always will.

Melissa decides to say the quiet part aloud.

Jokingly, of course.

It always has to turn into a joke with her.

“Hah, maybe more than we probably should.”

#work wives #reginianwrites #s: abbott elementary #I love sad and tender conversations between women tm

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