Chapter 13: Central Park and a New Routine
Andrew had never been a morning person. This was a documented fact about himself that he'd accepted somewhere around age sixteen and never seriously challenged.
But he was standing in his kitchen at eight-thirty in the morning, having already eaten breakfast, having already made a list, and now looking at his reflection in the dark microwave door with the specific expression of a man about to do something he would not enjoy.
Exercise.
He'd written it on the list. Consistent. No excuses. Those were his words. He was going to have to live with them.
He knocked on the bedroom door.
Christie opened it, already dressed, which told him she'd been up for a while.
"There are eggs and toast on the stove staying warm," he said, keeping his voice low. "When your mom gets up, tell her to eat something and stay here. I need to talk to her when I get back."
Christie looked at him for a moment, then nodded once. She glanced past him toward the couch — out of habit, he thought, the particular vigilance of a kid who always needed to know where her mother was — and then looked back at him.
"Okay," she said.
It was a small word. She said it like she meant it.
He grabbed his jacket and went downstairs.
Central Park was about ten minutes away at a jog, which meant Andrew arrived there winded and deeply reconsidering his life choices. He found a bench off the main path, sat down, and spent a moment collecting himself while a parade of actual runners went by looking infuriatingly comfortable.
He was twenty-six years old and a twelve-minute jog had left him breathing like he'd survived something.
This is fine, he thought. This is what starting from the beginning looks like.
He sat on the bench for a few minutes, watching the park wake up — dog walkers, cyclists, a guy doing push-ups against a park bench with the focused intensity of someone working through a personal crisis. The morning was cold but clear, that particular New York autumn clarity where the light came in sharp and the air actually smelled like something other than the city.
He felt, despite everything, okay.
He stood up, found a quieter stretch of grass away from the path, and started stretching. He'd taken a yoga class exactly twice in college, enough to remember that you were supposed to do this before exercising and approximately nothing about the correct way to do it. He improvised.
Then he started moving through a routine he'd cobbled together from memory — a slow, deliberate sequence of movements he'd picked up years ago from a fitness video his roommate had left behind and never reclaimed.
It wasn't anything formal. It was just movement: weight shifts, slow rotations, the kind of low-impact flow that looked almost meditative from the outside and felt, from the inside, like finally convincing a rusty hinge to work again.
He went through it once, lost his balance twice, and felt faintly ridiculous.
He went through it again. Better.
By the fourth time he was sweating through his jacket and something in his lower back had stopped complaining and started cooperating. His breathing, which had been ragged and uneven, settled into something resembling a rhythm.
He could feel his muscles waking up in sequence, the particular sensation of a body being asked to do something it hadn't been asked to do in a long time and cautiously agreeing.
He kept going.
He wasn't sure how long he was at it. Long enough that the dog walkers from earlier lapped him on the path twice. Long enough that the push-up guy finished his crisis and left. Long enough that when he finally stopped, legs aching and lungs burning and sweat cooling fast in the autumn air, he felt something he hadn't expected.
Good. He felt genuinely good.
Not I just won something good. Just the quiet, physical satisfaction of having asked his body to do a thing and having it do the thing. It was a very low bar. He was choosing to feel good about it anyway.
He was doing a final slow cooldown when he became aware that someone was watching him.
He looked up. An older man in a Mets cap was standing about ten feet away with his hands in his jacket pockets, observing Andrew with the politely undisguised interest of someone who had nowhere to be.
"You do that every morning?" the man asked.
"Starting today," Andrew said.
The man nodded approvingly, like this was the correct answer. "Good for you, son."
Andrew thanked him, grabbed his jacket off the bench, and headed back toward the apartment before anyone else could weigh in.
He smelled it before he opened the bathroom door.
He stopped in the hallway.
Oh no.
The bathroom was — not good. Bonnie had clearly been sick at some point in the night or early morning, and had clearly not done anything about it afterward, and Andrew stood in the doorway for a full thirty seconds running through his options.
He could knock on the bedroom door and ask Bonnie to deal with it. That was the reasonable, direct approach. That was what a person with healthy boundaries would do.
He looked at the bathroom.
He found the cleaning supplies under the sink.
This is the last time, he told himself, pulling on rubber gloves. After today there are going to be some very clear rules and she is going to follow them or this arrangement is over.
He spent twenty minutes on the bathroom, ran the exhaust fan, and emerged feeling he'd earned some kind of moral credit he didn't know how to spend.
He grabbed clean clothes and got back in the shower.
The hot water was good after the cold park air. He stood under it longer than necessary, letting his muscles unknot, and started going through his mental to-do list for the afternoon. Talk to Bonnie — that was first. Actual conversation, not a hint, not a suggestion, actual words with actual expectations attached.
Then maybe swing by the bar and check his schedule for the week. He'd been thinking about what Monica had said at dinner about the restaurant she used to work at having a pastry program, whether they ever brought in people for prep—
The bathroom door opened.
He went still.
"Bonnie." He kept his voice level. "I'm in the shower."
A pause.
"I know." Her voice was hoarse and slightly sheepish. "I just — I need to—"
"Bonnie."
"I'll be quick—"
"Out."
A longer pause.
"...The trash can is right there, I just need—"
"There is a second bathroom. Use it. We will talk when I'm done."
Silence. Then the door clicked shut.
Andrew stood under the hot water and stared at the tile and thought about how the list he'd made this morning had felt like a good, manageable plan for his life, and how it was not yet eleven o'clock.
He turned the water to cold for ten seconds, the way he'd read somewhere was supposed to be bracing and clarifying.
It was, in fact, both of those things.
He turned it back to hot. Then he finished his shower, got dressed, and went to have the conversation with Bonnie that he should have had yesterday.
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