Chapter Thirty-Four
Penny
“So did you finally kiss and make up?” asked Nic as I stood in the kitchen making breakfast the next morning. “After the fight, I really thought this might be The End.”
“Not yet.” I turned over the pancakes with a spatula; once again, they were slightly burnt on the bottom, and they hadn’t formed the perfect circle I wanted. “I think he understands that I had just gone through a very painful experience and I wasn’t handling it well.”
Nic was sitting at the wooden table in the dining room in a t-shirt and blue velour track shorts, peeling an orange. She hadn’t offered to help with breakfast, but for once I didn’t mind; I was glad just to have her in the house. Without her, it would have been unbearably lonely.
“Ever since you and Darren started dating,” she said, “I’ve had a good feeling about you.”
I froze in the middle of reaching for the butter. “Oh yeah? Why?”
Nic shrugged. “Because you’re so loyal, and because once a person has earned your devotion, you never let go. Also—and I think this is a big part of it—you’re the sort of girl who was always holding out for the right person. Look at me, for example: I’ve dated three or four boys just in the past year. I once told Dickie I thought there was a very good chance you would marry the first boy you ever dated.”
“Oh, Dickie.” I dropped the butter into the skillet and stirred with a melancholy feeling. “He always wanted to be that boy, didn’t he?”
“He did.” She set the peel of her orange on the edge of a paper towel. “Once or twice, I tried to get him to go out with me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize he only had eyes for one woman.”
“Sometimes I think, maybe if he had been a bit less interested in me—” I shook my head. “But then I think, no. There’s no universe in which Dickie and I end up together.”
“It’s never a good idea to go out with someone who dotes on you that much,” said Nic.
“Except now I feel bad because he’s in a coma, and I sort of wish I had treated him better.”
“Don’t. You did the right thing by not getting his hopes up. You and Darren being together will be good for him in the end, I think, because he’ll realize he has to move on with his life.”
“I just hope he gets the chance. Today the doctors are taking him out of his coma. Darren is still over there keeping vigil. He asked me to bring him breakfast.”
Nic took a sip of her lingonberry juice. “He’s been there, what, three days now? I hope he hasn’t tried to kiss you.”
I turned my face away so she couldn’t see how hard I was blushing. “I didn’t mind too much,” I said quietly.
After our talk the morning before, I had returned in the afternoon with a homemade pizza—cheese and veggies unevenly distributed—and a couple board games. We spent most of the day there at Dickie’s bedside playing the Harry Potter version of Clue and talking about nothing in particular. He still maintained that Star Wars was better than Lord of the Rings, a statement that might have been a deal breaker a month ago, but now I didn’t mind so much.
“He’s not the sort of boy I ever imagined myself with,” I told Nic. “Growing up I always thought I was going to marry a pastor’s kid or a missionary. He would be clean-cut, neatly dressed, carrying a guitar in one hand and a Bible in the other. But life hasn’t worked out that way. There are days when I still wonder if that man is out there, somewhere.”
“Maybe,” Nic said with a shrug. “But I think maybe you’re not seeing the extent to which you and Darren are good for each other.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you both share a certain sensitivity and love of imagination. Darren is one of the most sensitive men I’ve ever met, and you—well, you once cried because you read in a book that a baby had been abandoned by her parents.”
“It was a baby!” I exclaimed. “Good parents don’t abandon their own children.”
“See? And you’re both playful and love to pretend, and when you’re together, you tend to retreat into your own world that probably only makes sense to the two of you. Do you remember when you were in high school and you started your own lunch club?”
“Yeah, the Cook Lunch Clan. We would make our own lunches and share stories and poems we’d written.”
“I think you’ve always wanted to create this space where imagination could flourish without any restraints. And that’s what you have with Darren. I used to worry that anyone you dated would discourage your love of play and try to mold you into being a more conventional person, but he encourages you like no other.”
“It’s true,” I said shyly. “I could do a lot worse than marry Darren.”
“He couldn’t do any better than you,” said Nic. “So if you end up together, it will be—” she bit into the last of her orange “—ideal.”
I took the finished pancakes and set them down in the center of the table. They were lumpy and misshapen, but Nic didn’t seem to mind. I sat down across from her and reached for the syrup, thinking over what she had said about Darren.
“Sorry,” she said after a short pause. “Is it okay that we’re talking about this?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because I know your dad just died, and I feel bad talking about something so lighthearted.”
“It’s a relief, honestly.” I closed the lid on the syrup and handed it to her. “I’m just glad you’re not one of those people who feels we have to be talking about it all the time. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘You poor, poor thing!’ And they make such a fuss about it that you go away feeling worse than you did before.”
“Well, at least you won’t have to go to work today.” We had jointly decided to shut down the shop for one day in Dad’s honor. “And yesterday while you were with Darren, I made a large sign explaining that he had died and when the funeral will be held. I need to run by the store and set it up after breakfast.”
“Mmmm, good idea. I have a framed picture of him in my room; you’re welcome to use it. Would you mind running past the hospital on your way over?”
“Of course not.”
I nodded solemnly. I didn’t feel remotely prepared for the funeral, despite the fact that I had spent much of the past year mentally preparing myself for his death. “I’ve never in my life lost someone this close to me,” I said.
“Well, you had better get used to it.” Nic reached for the pitcher and poured herself a second glass of lingonberry juice. “If you end up getting married, one of you will have to bury the other someday. And that’s in the best-case scenario.”