Jackets | Courtney Justus

My mother asked me if I wanted the jacket. Bleached denim with silver studs at the collar and faux leather sleeves. It reminded me of the jackets Adrian liked to wear: burgundy corduroy, milky brown leather, denim with sheep-like lining. Back when my mother lived in Charlotte and I was in college a few hours away, I’d get a lot of texts like these: a picture of an item of clothing, followed by four words: Do you want this? Gauzy dresses and crisp blouses of hers that I pined for as a teenager, the occasional overcoat, a blazer with striped cuffs. I’d pick the items up when I went to visit her over the holidays. “We’re lucky to have nice things,” she’d say.

It’s nice, I wrote. Gracias.

I’ll bring it to you when I visit. Ricardo is trying to get cheap tickets through work.

When my mother moved back to Málaga, I wondered if maybe she just wanted to get rid of stuff so she didn’t have to put anything in storage. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t all fit in her ex-now-boyfriend-again Ricardo’s beachfront apartment, where she spent most nights alone. Ricardo was an Iberia pilot. After their first breakup, my mother told me to never date a pilot but got back together with Ricardo anyway because mejor malo conocido que bueno por conocer, and all the men in Charlotte bored her, so why swipe right on disappointing strangers when you could date someone who traveled the world? I never understood that. If I’d stuck to what I knew, I would never have come to Azalea Grove, North Carolina, college town and home of my alma mater, where I now had friends and space for all my things, where the most my friends ever had to drink in a night was two beers, where I didn’t have to wait up for anyone except for my roommate, Callie, when she went on dates, because I just wanted her to make it home safe.

I was born in Málaga but remember little about it: cobblestone streets with tiny supermarkets, a colorful Rubik’s cube-type structure near the Paseo Marítimo, flowers everywhere. Mom once said she’d never go back, but here we were: me living in Azalea Grove, and her in the city of my birth. Adrian is the only person I know here who has been to Málaga, but he was little and said he doesn’t remember much, only how hot and blue everything was.

I found Adrian on a dating app right before the start of the pandemic. Or rather, Adrian found me. At twenty-three, I figured I’d reached an appropriate age to start swiping left and right. I’d gone on a few dates in college, to the restaurants strewn around campus in a fractured ring, each one walking distance from the next. In my mind, I could chart out each date like drawing lines and X’s on a map. Here, the Tex-Mex spot where the Business major asked if my people made food as good as the Mexicans. There, the Western-themed joint where the former tennis star said I seemed like one of those good girls who studies, then didn’t text me back. Here, the neon blue diner where they burned my burger and my stomach churned as I counted the minutes until it was socially appropriate to leave. My date, a friend of my old roommate’s boyfriend, didn’t even know where Spain was on a map.

I didn’t love the idea of going on dates again, not because I disliked dates, but because I thought they seemed more likely to end in disaster than not; after all, they’d gone that way before. My mother said American men were chatos, flat and unappealing as a cardboard wedge, but what did she know? And she had genetics on her side: curly but tame hair the color of an oil spill, naturally straight teeth, a laugh that made strangers in restaurants and bars turn heads. I’d inherited the dark hair but not the teeth or tameness; my semi-wavy strands hung limp and tangled easily. It took braces and a palate expander to get my teeth in proper shape, and even afterwards, I still had a crossbite. My hazel eyes squinted when I smiled, picture after picture. I’d seen the profiles of some of my work and college friends: the bodycon dresses, gold-tinted selfies, bios full of cute quips I could never muster myself. 

“Maybe you’re not ready to date again,” Callie suggested one night while I made us beef fajitas for dinner. Callie refused to go on the apps, but she met guys easily. People sat down in front of her at bars and told their life stories. She had the kind of face that does that: open and soft, sometimes serious but never stern.

“Maybe,” I said. I tried to focus on sauteing the bell peppers, though I couldn’t help but replay her words in my mind. Maybe Callie was right. Still, I liked the idea of an arm lingering around me, of a few cute photos manifesting into a real person, instead of the other way around: the distilling of a body into filtered selfies, pictures to show “We were here together!” rather than pictures for their own sake. Maybe I just needed to try.

***

On the app, Adrian “liked” my second photo: a selfie in front of my bookshelf, which was organized alphabetically and lined with glass bottles full of colorful pebbles, one of my few art projects that didn’t end in disaster. His first photo showed him grinning for the camera, sporting his favorite corduroy jacket, the one with a Decemberists pin on the pocket. In the second, he leaned against a seafoam green bike, a plaid button-down loose around his narrow shoulders, aviator sunglasses perched atop his head. The third photo, black and white, showed him onstage, one hand on the mic, eyes downcast.

Nice denim jacket! I wrote. Then I flung my phone across the bed, trying so hard not to think about the message I’d just sent that I just ended up thinking about it harder.

Through the covers, I felt my phone buzz. I waited before reaching for it.

Thank you! Are you really from Spain?

He’d guessed at my two truths and a lie and guessed right. Mi familia es del sur, I wrote back. We love our beaches. From the south of Spain to the southern United States, always seeking warmth and water. He responded with a bunch of Spanish flag emojis, then began writing to me in Spanglish. I did the same. He and his extended family were all from Galicia, a verdant place with amazing seafood. 

When he finally asked me out for coffee, I danced around my apartment. To celebrate my first real date in over a year, Callie bought us strawberry mochi. We ate it on her bed, snuggled up beneath one of her favorite blankets, and watched New Girl on her laptop. Callie leaned on my shoulder, her arm pressed close to mine. If someone who didn’t know her saw us, maybe they’d think something of it, but I knew Callie and I were just friends. 

***

I saw Adrian before he saw me. As I looked through the coffee shop windows, I found him sitting on one of the caramel-colored couches. Unlike in his pictures, his slicked-back dark hair had already begun to thin. He seemed even more solid in person, like the pictures had watered him down, faded parts of him. Here, in the gold light glinting dimly off his face, he was real.

As I walked over to greet Adrian, he stood up, his head tilted like I’d gotten him thinking about something.

“Marina. You’re here.”

We both got cappuccinos and huddled close on the same corner couch, our knees brushing. Our conversation sucked me into a vacuum, his voice the only sound besides the distant whistling and grinding of the machines behind me.

“Do you like Azalea Grove?” he asked.

There isn’t much to do in this city, which is barely a city. You’ve got a handful of bookstores scattered across it like marbles finding their paths. You have a few parks, museums, and art galleries. You’ve got salsa socials crowded with college students and beer gardens clustered with the same young couples, but I didn’t need more than that on a given weekend. My friends and I could make do with any place. My mother does not understand why I live here, but I do. I love walking from Chekhov’s Coffee Shop to the bookstore to the park all in one go. I love the pastel apartment complex where Callie and I live. I love that we have all the seasons, but that it never gets cold for very long.

“Yes,” I told him. “It feels like home here.”

Adrian half-smiled. “Yeah, I think so too.”

With each small sip of our coffees, we dug deeper into home: what it meant to us, how many we’d had. Like me, Adrian had moved several times growing up. After living with his mom in Savannah, he’d followed her to Azalea Grove, so they could be closer to his grandparents. I told him about my abuela Ludmila in Málaga, who makes the best paellas I’ve ever tasted.

“Would you go back?” he asked. 

“To visit, yes. But I don’t think I could live there again.”

With Adrian, I thought we could flip the old inside-out, make it new as we experienced it together, like a jacket with special fabric. The more we talked, the more I believed it. I began weaving the story when it had barely started. Adrian of the Jackets. Adrian who made the spaces we inhabited full and blurred, every figure a splotch of color or a pin for his denim jacket: collectible, memorable.

 A smile stretched across my face as I burst through my apartment door a couple hours later. “I’m home,” I called out. Because the brick-walled box I split with Callie had become more of a home than any house my mother and I ever shared.

***

The following Saturday at the park, Adrian and I witnessed a wedding, the bride in a dress like a chapel dome, bridesmaids in turquoise gowns, their dark hair in neat twists. We laughed at the geese parading around like they were part of the photo shoot, too. 

A couple weeks later, we skimmed shelves at South Second Bookstore, reading each other passages we thought the other might like. That afternoon, he bought me coffee; I bought him beignets. I told him more about Málaga, how I only remembered summer there. Remembered standing on my abuela’s red-tiled balcony and begging to go to the ocean. As I drove home after the bookstore-beignet date, I realized he still hadn’t kissed me.

I still talked to other guys on the app, but only if they wrote to me first. Their messages laden with strings of heart-eyed emojis, red heart emojis, a single eggplant emoji. Eventually, I let all their messages sit in my inbox, like sand accumulating at the bottom of a bottle. I thought I still needed choices, like my mother once said she did. That I had to spread my interest out like some sort of romance smorgasbord. And though I didn’t really believe it, something kept me from deleting the app.

Then Adrian invited me to his friends’ concert at Purple Crow. Painted grapes still lined the back of the bar, a portrait of a vineyard splayed across the leftmost wall. It smelled like Ricardo after a few cocktails and a cigarette. Sometimes he smelled like that before leaving for the airport, but he never got fired.

The band called themselves indie punk, and played covers of The Decemberists, The Paper Kites, Musée Mecanique. Adrian and I swayed to the music, our hips brushing. When they launched into a rendition of “We Both Go Down Together,” blue lights flashed, and suddenly I thought of Málaga, the turquoise of the Paseo Marítimo; a street singer, crooning by his guitar, my mother and Ricardo arguing just behind me. I’d wanted to give him money and had just started reaching for my last euro coin when Ricardo tugged me by the arm, saying we needed to go. Then Adrian touched my shoulder and I blinked myself back to reality.

On our way out, the cold night air hit us immediately, a slap that just missed skin. Adrian clasped my hand without threading our fingers together. Like it was a plastic doll hand, unmovable and hollow.

“That was awesome,” he said.

When we reached my car, Adrian hugged me, enveloping me in denim. Sweat and a musky cologne filled my nose. I pressed my lips together, then willed myself to look up. By then, he was already stepping away.

“I’ll text you!” he called out, a little too loudly. I nodded once, then climbed into my car. Back at home, Callie made us chamomile tea, then put on New Girl. As her fingers wove through mine, nails painted grenadine like strawberry moons, I let myself laugh for the first time all night.

***

The weekend after the concert, an Argentinian bartender messaged me on the app. I hadn’t checked it in a couple weeks, and until his message, I’d almost forgotten I even had it. A dozen old notifications sat in my inbox, pictures of people whose voices I would never know, whose faces I would never see in real life. The bartender asked me to meet him for snow cones and a walk by the river. It was way too cold for snow cones, but I said yes anyway. Maybe you should be dating other people, a voice whispered. It sounded like my mother.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or who I’d be with. Callie had gone with a couple friends on an impromptu camping trip. The woods scared me, so I didn’t go. When I thought of texting Callie, my hands froze. Though I knew Callie would answer me, because she always answered me, I wanted to keep this to myself. Even the thought of her unabashed joy at my latest date didn’t drive me to text her.

The bartender looked exactly like his picture. Wide-set hazel eyes; curly, dark brown hair. We met by a pier near the snow cone stand. He wore a black peacoat that hung loose across his lanky frame. When he embraced me, I smelled something sickly sweet yet rotten. Behind him, a dead tree floated in the river, leaves flicking away water, branches bending beneath the current. Patches of derelict trees spread out across small islands like hands.

He paid for our snow cones: mine strawberry limeade, his lemon. I asked about his bartending job. He went on about it, rattling off stories about rude customers. I almost interjected a couple times, but he kept talking, meeting my eyes but still talking, talking. I nodded my head like any of what he said could ever be of importance to me. Somewhere out along the river, seagulls were roving for breadcrumbs, something they could grab firmly in their beaks. Maybe I could just watch the sky and sea and the creatures that roved them, and that would be enough. 

“Have you ever been?” he asked, jolting me from my reverie.

“Where?”

He rolled his eyes but smiled. “To the bar. My bar.”

“Oh. Yeah. A couple times.”

“Really? I’ve never seen you there.”

“Maybe you did. You just didn’t know me.”

As the sun moved toward the boneyard forests and derelict sailboats, the bartender put his lemon-coated lips on mine. I opened my mouth and tasted more bourbon than lemon. I pulled away.

“You don’t like me,” he said, his face pulled into a smirk.

“I do,” I replied. “I’m just tired. And cold.”

We walked back toward the street in silence. Behind us, a cluster of children asked for snow cones: blue raspberry, cherry, lime. A little girl, maybe five or six, stared at me with wide brown eyes, chewing on the sleeve of her bubblegum pink sweater.

“Do you need me to walk you to your car?” the bartender asked.

“No, I’m good. Thanks.” I pulled my coat tighter, breathing in the briny smell of the shore. A layer of tiny, wilting honeysuckle flowers had fallen across my windshield like dirty confetti.

It was already dark when I pulled into my apartment parking lot, the sky a velvety purple. Callie had texted me. 

Did you hear about the coronavirus???

I pulled up Google and punched coronavirus into the search bar. A flurry of news articles filled my screen. Then I remembered my mom. 

Are you okay? I wrote to her on WhatsApp, forwarding the first article I found. It was ten p.m. in Spain: dinner time. Hours later, she called me.

“You’re still awake,” I said. Outside, a fire engine wailed.

“I barely sleep anymore.” Her voice sounded muffled, like she was talking into a pillow. “Is there a fire?”

“No, not here.” I toyed with a loose thread in my seafoam green blanket. “So you saw the news?”

“Of course. Ricardo told me. They’re grounding his flights because of it, so he’ll be spending more time at home.”

“Home. Right.” Home, where she didn’t even have her own paintings decorating the bedroom. Home where I had to sleep on the couch when I visited, in the living room where you could hear all the drunk tourists at night in summer, the ocean an urgent hiss just steps away, and light came in early because the curtains were too thin and she and Ricardo never bothered putting up thicker ones. Home like the house where drunk Ricardo walked in on me while I was in the shower, saying he didn’t know I was in there, and could I please hurry up.

“So how are you, Marina? Are the azaleas starting to come out?”

As much as my mother didn’t love Azalea Grove, she did like the abundance of pink blooms bursting from park bushes and green areas off the main roads. Even if she kept comparing them to the flowers in Estepona, I appreciated her enthusiasm for some aspect of this town.

“Not yet. But I went to the river today. Had a snow cone, like when you came here last–”

“Don’t get sick,” she said. “Who knows what this puto virus could do to us.”

“I won’t. I promise,” I said, wondering how I could possibly make that promise when there was so much we still didn’t know. 

“Ricardo says we’ll have to start wearing masks everywhere. Can you imagine?”

I knew the kind: light blue surgical masks, or even cloth ones, like people were wearing in the articles I’d scrolled through. I pictured Adrian pulling down his mask to sip coffee; Adrian wearing a dark blue mask to match his denim jacket; Adrian removing his mask to kiss a girl. When I tried to see the scene through my own eyes, his face looming towards mine, I saw us from the outside: his lips half-parted, my head bowed like I was scared or ashamed. 

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said, though I didn’t believe myself. I just wanted my mother not to worry and stop talking about Ricardo. “Maybe, I don’t know…”

“Me voy a dormir,” she mumbled. “I’m falling asleep again.”

My phone beeped with a familiar sound. Once again, she’d hung up first. I stared at the screen, then put the phone down on my bed. I didn’t know how I would have finished the story about the bartender, but I’d wanted to. 

Just before I fell asleep, Adrian texted me. Can we meet for coffee?

***

Saturday, 2 pm at Chekhov’s Coffee House. Same as our first date. I shared my location with Callie, even though I knew, at least, that Adrian was not an axe murderer. Force of habit, I told myself, but maybe I just needed to tell someone these things. To let them know I was going somewhere.

Chekhov’s remained as pristine as ever: white tile floors wiped spotless, spice jars behind the counter organized by color, monstera plants perched quietly on the counter and in each corner. No sign of Adrian. I ordered a black coffee, then sat down on one of the plush couches by the window. If you angled your head right, you could see the main avenue, jammed with traffic, that intersected with the backroad on which Chekhov’s sat. 

Twenty minutes later, Adrian walked in. The collar of his denim jacket was upturned on one side. One sleeve had been rolled up further than the other, scrunched and wrinkled like he’d put it on in a hurry. I stood up to greet him.

“I am so sorry, Marina. I had to pick up some things from work.”

He sat down all the way on the other side of the couch, leaning away from me. As I cradled my cup, he rubbed both knees with his hands.

“So, this virus…” he began.

“Yeah. Crazy, right?” I suddenly hated the words. 

Adrian’s knee brushed mine. For a second, I thought he might kiss me. All I could do was clutch my cup tighter.

“I just think we all need to be careful right now.”

Careful. Overnight, we’d become hazards to each other, merely by way of our other relationships. I knew then what I’d always suspected: that Adrian would never kiss me. That being with him wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities for a girl like me. 

“Maybe we can find a way. Other people are still seeing each other.” I thought of the articles I’d read about couples who’d decided to quarantine together. One woman in Baton Rouge had moved into her partner’s apartment across town, even though they’d only been dating for two months.

“I know. But maybe we should just wait it out.”

Wait it out. Like we were talking about a cold, or even a bad traffic jam. How long was this virus even supposed to last?

 “Why haven’t you kissed me, Adrian?” The words slipped out of my mouth without a thought.

Adrian ran one hand through his hair. It looked thinner since the last time I saw him.

“There’s a deadly virus going around, and you’re asking me to kiss you?”

I stared at him. “No. I’m asking why you haven’t…”

“I know what you’re asking.”

“¿Entonces?” I threw my hand up, the other still clutching my near-empty coffee cup.

Adrian sighed and rubbed his face. He tugged down the sleeve of his jacket, then fidgeted with the cuff. The silence pooled between us, punctuated only with the bell of the front door and whirr of the espresso machine. We came together only to ricochet away, like billiard balls cracking against one another. As Adrian hunched over without looking at me, I realized he’d never asked me about my family, aside from the first time we learned we were both Spanish. He knew what books I liked, but only because I’d told him about them at the bookshop. If he’d taken some other girl to the concert, maybe it would’ve felt the same to him. One girl replaced by another, like a new jacket replacing an old one.

I stood up. “I should go,” I said. “My roommate and I need to buy groceries.” 

When I got home, I brewed myself another cup of coffee just to keep my hands busy. I didn’t have to buy groceries; Callie and I had gone the afternoon before. After taking one last, grainy sip of my coffee, I picked up my phone and deleted the dating app.

***

My mother brought me the jacket a year and four months after the pandemic started. Spain had just opened up to international travel again. Most of Azalea Grove had lifted the mask mandate. When I picked my mother up from the airport, she complained about her three flights: the delays, the snippy blonde flight attendant, how the baby in front of her cried incessantly for most of the third leg.

“You cried the whole way to the States, back when we first moved. Did I ever tell you that?”

“I don’t think so.” I remembered cloud forests outside my window, lukewarm orange juice, and my plush, lavender pony Caballito in my lap. As I tried to recall myself crying, a black pickup truck blared its horn, zigzagging past us on the narrow stretch of Main Street leading to my apartment.

“Que bestia,” Mom muttered. Beast. It did sound better in Spanish.

The jacket had lost a couple of rhinestones, but the inner stitching looked sturdy. I slipped my arms through the sleeves and turned around in front of the full-length mirror Callie had bought me at Salvation Army. Before me stood the same long-haired girl, but a little more suave. The jacket sort of went with my white blouse, one I’d thought made my short neck curve softer like a swan’s. Callie said it made me look like a cute office lady, but with this jacket, I could be more aloof. The kind of girl who didn’t go on bad dates. The kind of girl who could hold a boy or a girl by the hand and smile all the same.

“You could wear it with a dress. It would make a good date outfit.” Mom raised her eyebrows. 

“Yeah, I think so.”

That night, she took me to a seafood restaurant with frayed wooden tables and sticky menus. While she tried to get a Wi-Fi signal to call Ricardo, I stared out at the river and thought of Adrian. I imagined my mom would’ve liked Adrian. That in some alternate universe, we could’ve all had dinner together. But my mom still eats dinner in front of her computer, in the single bedroom of Ricardo’s apartment. She hasn’t asked me about boys in years. 

***

The day after my mother left, I went to Pomegranate Moon, the beer garden my work friends and I liked to frequent, for the first time since the pandemic. We’d all just gotten vaccinated and managed to avoid catching the virus, though not without a few close calls. As Callie and I wove through a small crowd to get to the patio, I caught sight of a man in a red jacket, almost exactly like the one my mother used to wear to dinner dates when we first moved to the States. Next to him, a dark-haired girl laughed.

Adrian had let his hair grow longer, almost shoulder-length. Traces of dark stubble made a crescent moon along his jaw. My feet carried me past him, to the table where Callie now sat with our friends. She caught my eye, then made room for me on the bench. As Callie laughed, her knee brushed mine, our fingers less than an inch from each other. I let myself be there, next to her warmth, and made myself look away from Adrian and the other girl.

The following afternoon, my phone buzzed.

Hey Marina! Hope you’re good. Did I see you at Pomegranate Moon the other day?

My cheeks flushed. So he had seen me too. I remembered the concert, how the two of us started jumping when the band played that Decemberists cover. My love, my love, we both go down together… Then I remembered King Street, how he’d paused in front of my car, like he was trying to remember something. And how I’d stood there for a second longer than I needed to before turning away. 

I could never just be with him, not the way I thought I could, not the way I was with Callie. Even if I’d had the choice, I wouldn’t have quarantined with anybody else.

***

When I picture Adrian now, I can only imagine him in two places: in a recording booth, head bowed in front of the microphone like it’s an oracle, or behind a desk, where I imagine he still spends most days, signing people up for renter’s insurance. It’s the kind of job I know I could never have, because every sales job I ever took ended in disaster. Adrian always had that slightly amused yet serious look, lip upturned in an almost-smile even when it wasn’t on purpose. He had the kind of face his job demands, a face that people smile at before they know they’re smiling. I haven’t seen that face since the night at Pomegranate Moon.

I’m back on the dating app, with a new bio and reshuffled set of pictures. In one, Callie and I pose against the fence at Pomegranate Moon. She is looking up at the sky and laughing, brown hair falling down her shoulders; I’m smiling so wide, my eyes scrunch up. One of our friends took it the night I saw Adrian. 

I never did answer Adrian’s last text. I could’ve asked him to get coffee at Chekhov’s again, where we could sit on their tiled patio. I could’ve found a concert he might like, something outdoors where people could spread out. I thought of all these things when I got his text, then turned my phone off and headed out to buy a birthday present for Callie. 

About the Author:

Courtney Justus is a Texan-Argentinian writer living in Chicago. Her adolescence spent in Buenos Aires, and her Argentinian heritage frequently inform her work across genres. She is a 2022 Tin House YA Workshop alumna, a Best of the Net nominee and a recipient of residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) and Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work appears in Thin Air Magazine, Barzakh: A Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Jet Fuel Review and elsewhere. You can visit her at courtneyjustuswriter.wordpress.com. Insta: @courtneyjustuswriter

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay