The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club by Jessica Morrison Page B

when I helped his mom and grandmother make an enormous Ukrainian feast. I was in that kitchen for six hours. After everyone fell asleep, we drove to the beach and made love on a blanket. Jeff said that he was proud of me, how I settled into his loud, funny family so easily, how I made them fall in love with me. All those Sunday mornings at Sammy’s Diner, sharing three kinds of eggs Benedict because we could never pick just one each, telling each other stories from our respective sections of the newspaper. Didn’t Jeff tell me once that he knew we were meant to be by the way we did the crossword? And the night he proposed. From the French champagne to the beautiful ring, it was exactly the way I’d always imagined it. He told me he knew it was time to get serious, that all the pieces of his life were coming together. How do you go from that to being too perfect? Am I really too perfect, or is he deeply flawed? Or scared? Maybe it was all bullshit.
    I shake my head. Morris looks up briefly and closes his eyes again. What am I doing? I’ve already been through all of this. I had all the late-night crying sessions with Sam and Trish. I spent countless hours over the last two weeks on the phone screaming at Jeff; I heard all of his weak excuses and even weaker apologies. I moved out of our apartment and into my parents’ house. I endured my mother’s dramatic silences—her only communication to me coming in the form of increasingly hostile Post-it missives, like the one I found on my toothbrush:
If you get maimed or disfigured in Argentina, what nice American boy will want you?
—and my stepfather’s sympathetic smiles. I removed myself from our joint checking account. I sold my beautiful engagement ring. And now I’m here. In a park full of cats. Period. End of story.
    But before I can stop it, my heart is off and running. Shortness of breath follows. The sounds in the park are mixing into a low-pitched yet unmistakable buzzing. I close my eyes and dig around for something happy to think about, something that instills a sense of calm. I need a mental reboot. This means pushing out all thoughts of Jeff, which, ironically, used to calm me more than anything. I need something to fill the space he’s left inside of me. I can feel my pulse in my neck and behind my knees. My left arm is tingling. Something happy. Something happy. Sam and Trish gossiping over drinks at Jimmy’s. No, that makes me miss them. I picture my stepdad, always so calm and reassuring, but that instantly makes me think about my mom—the look of horror on her face when she realized I was actually getting on the plane, her voice shrieking after me, the “what were you thinking” speech I’d be getting if she were here—which is the opposite of relaxing. Come on, Cassie. There’s got to be something good to think about. There is always something good. A few weeks ago this would have been easy. There was a list of a dozen things I could tick off to get through a low-level anxiety attack. Now I’m struggling to find one single solitary thing that doesn’t send me over the edge.
    Everything that made me happy is either thousands of miles away or gone for good.
    Just when I’m ready to give up and free-fall into a full-on panic here in the middle of this strange park in this strange city where I’ll probably die and be eaten by feral cats,
his
face pops into my head. Mateo. Not the Mateo smirking at me from my doorway. Not the Mateo dropping me on the floor. The Mateo in the photographs, with the smile that’s somehow happy and sad, that smile that makes me want to smile back and comfort him, that smile that for a moment makes me forget I am the one in need of comforting. He’s the last person I should be thinking about right now; well, the second-to-last person. But I don’t want to let go of that smile. It’s a small indulgence, harmless, doesn’t mean anything. And it works like a charm. Everything else clears away. I can breathe. I am not