I am sick. It seems like I always get sick when my body tells me to slooow down, but unfortunately for my body I can’t. However, I do have sick days, which I took two of this week, and my fever has gone down so I’m hoping that I’ll be back to work tomorrow. Work, then work at the Lob, then Christian’s wedding (yaay), then work at the Lob again. I’ve got a mortgage to pay, people! My dad says that someday the work will pay off, and I know that he’s right, but some days I feel like I’m pushing against a wall of debt that’s keeping me from making it on my own. Someday, if I have a daughter, I can tell her that she won’t need to rely on a man (ie Pete moving in to help me pay the mortgage), and she can make it on her own without one, because I did, and it sucks, but it will be over in a year.

So anyways. I wouldn’t make it through this without Denis Pete’s emotional support, or his chicken noodle soup. The first time Pete made chicken noodle soup for me was the summer after my freshman year of college. It followed an incident of him and Jared joking about something extremely inappropriate (who knows what it was), and him knocking on my door at U-Ho, walking in, and stumbling through an apology. For something that I didn’t feel needed an apology, but he ended up awkwardly watching Risky Business with Liz and I.

I get super sick about twice a year, when the weather really changes. Pete knew I was sick, and he brought me chicken soup he had made at the fraternity house. It freaked me out. It was so thoughtful, and so unexpected, and so something I never would have expected from a guy, that it freaked me out. I love my Dad, but he was never the “nurturing” type, and this was nurturing. I remember my roommate Heather having a long discussion with me after a night at Tonino’s about why it was weird that Pete brought me soup, and she knew he had to like me. I ended up telling Pete he was smothering me, and in a chain of retarded events, I said no when he asked me out that August, and the that fall he was taking chicken soup to some girl he worked with, which in my mind meant he liked her. They started dating shortly after that. And I started dating someone too. Neither relationship lasted long, and a year to the day that Pete asked me out, I asked him out, but that’s a whole other story.

Pete knew I was feeling crappy on Tuesday night. I heard him come in, and went downstairs to say hi after he didn’t come up. He had a chicken. And some rice. And some carrots, onions, and celery. He made me soup. When I woke up Wednesday morning with a fever, I didn’t have to worry about anything except deboning the chicken. I should have known all those years ago that a guy who makes you chicken soup when you’re sick is the type of guy who’s going to take good care of you forever. And I’m so lucky that he could look past my stupid 19 year old self to see the person I could become.