“Noah. Don’t.”

“No funny business, no regrets. Just us.”

“Okay,” I say, and he does a fist pump in the air and then he comes over and kisses me, a chaste kiss on the cheek. But there’s a history behind that kiss, and we both know we could tumble right into our old story. He gives me a knowing glance and then picks up the tray with the dishes, and he takes his arrogance and his kisses and his magnetism and leaves, trailing a little whiff of possibility. I hear him walk up the stairs to the kitchen, hear him put the dishes in the sink, and only then do I exhale, and then collapse on the bed and find myself in tears.

I’m not sure what I’m crying for, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’m crying because there’s something in me that can’t seem to quit him, or maybe at last I’m crying for Blix who, despite how everybody talks about her in the present tense, really is dead. And I’m crying because the legacy she left me—this house, all these characters, this life—is something I would never have chosen and don’t intend to keep.

That’s it. I’m crying for Blix’s mistake. She was so wrong about me.

TWENTY-SEVEN

MARNIE

Later that day, when Noah has gone out, Lola brings over brownies, cookies, two pumpkins, and a pair of hand-knit socks with hearts on them. “The socks are because it’s going to get cold here, and the pumpkins are because I thought we should decorate them,” she says. “The brownies and cookies are self-explanatory.” She smiles at me, and I see that she has smiling gray eyes that crinkle up nicely, like they are nested in a crisscross of lines. Grandmotherly, sweet pink skin topped by a haze of gray cottony hair. “Blix and I always did pumpkins together,” she is saying. “Kids will come for Halloween, you know. And by kids, I mean hipsters and their kids. Very entertaining.”

I blink. Halloween is still weeks away! Why are we doing these now?

Lola smiles and heads past me, upstairs toward the kitchen. “So how are you settling in?” she calls over her shoulder. “It’s a fine place to live, isn’t it? So Blix!” She looks around, smiling brightly, like this house is an old friend she’s needed to see.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I say when we’re both in the kitchen, and Lola is taking off her gray cape that matches her eyes, and draping it over one of the kitchen chairs. The way she looks around the kitchen makes it obvious that it belongs much more to her than to me.

“Ah!” she says and holds her arms straight out, as if she could hug the whole room. “Wow, so she’s still here, isn’t she? I feel her everywhere around!”

“I’ll put some tea on,” I say.

“And then let’s get to work on these pumpkins. Want to?”

She’s the one who goes and gets the kettle out of the cabinet and fills it with water and sets it down on the back burner. “So tell me about Monday. I guess you got the news?”

“The news? Oh, you mean the three-months thing.”

She looks at me closely. “Yes, of course that. Were you surprised? Believe me, this three-months thing was not my idea. I told Blix that was crazy. I told her that you already have your own life somewhere else. And I said that when you give somebody a house, you either just give it to them or you don’t. You don’t try to give them a whole life in the bargain. But there wasn’t any reasoning with her. I guess you know that by now.” She opens a drawer and gets out what look to be some alarmingly sharp carving knives and brings them over to the table.

“Lola,” I say quietly. “You get that I didn’t really know Blix, right? I’ve had maybe three conversations with her in my whole life. And then she goes and does this. I don’t know what to think. Noah was positive the place should go to him and his family, and I can’t say I disagree with him.”

Her face darkens, and she picks up a knife and waves it around in the air. “No! Blix would not want to hear anything about that! She calls Noah an unevolved scoundrel—and trust me on this, she did not want him to end up with this place—and I’ve gotta tell you, somewhere, in whatever realm she’s in, she knows you’re letting him stay here now, and she’ll probably be all up in things trying to get you to change your mind. If there’s any way she can reach you from the afterlife, that is, and I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“Wait,” I say. “Is it because he wanted a divorce? Because—”

“No. It was all long-ago stuff—her entire family has always been so condescending, ever since her father died. He was her champion,” she says. “Blix was pure love, and they couldn’t see that. They treated her with such disrespect, and finally she got fed up with it. No way was she going to leave them her house!”

She hands me a knife. “Are you good at this? I’ve never done it without Blix, so I’m just faking it. But the main thing is, Blix says she knows you. She’s unexplainable, always doing the thing you’d least expect. I say to her, ‘Blix, nobody’s going to benefit when you go around trying to remake somebody’s whole life for them without their permission,’ and then she says, ‘I have my reasons for what I do.’ I feel like my whole thirty-something years with her has been and still is one big argument. In between the fun, of course.”

“Do you know you always talk about Blix in the present tense?”

“That’s because she’s right here with us. I know you feel it, too.”

I slice into one of the pumpkins, take off the stem, and lay it on the table. I haven’t done this since I was a kid, but I used to love cutting designs into the pumpkins. My mother was always telling me to cut out triangle eyes and mouths, but I liked doing spirals and curlicues.

“Know what I’m going to miss?” Lola says after a while. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the dinner parties. Blix and Houndy gave the best—”

“Houndy, the lobsterman? What happened to him?”

“He was her true love. They were together for over twenty years, but then in the summer, she was giving a party to say good-bye to everybody because she knew she was going to die soon, and Houndy died right at the party. Dropped dead just like that.” She takes off her glasses and wipes at her eyes with a napkin.

“Oh!”

“Yeah, it was quite a shock to her. To all of us. I think he just couldn’t face the idea of life without her, so he went first. They were something together. Only people I ever knew whose priority was just to be happy, no matter what. Most people don’t have the knack for that day in and day out, you know. But they did. They danced. They gave dinner parties. Oh my goodness, those parties! Blix was a marvelous cook, but she was even better at knowing who needed to be there to share it with her. She’d just meet people on the street and become fast friends. They had musicians and poets and homeless people and shopkeepers. People would come again and again.” Her eyes are shining with tears. She gets up to pour the tea into the cups and brings them over to the table.

“And they’d do just about anything,” she says. “That was the thing that struck me the most. Never thought of how old they were, or if they were sick. They had all the usual aches and pains, and Blix, as it turned out, had that tumor. And yet she’s out there in the ocean, skinny-dipping, even in her eighties! Traveling all over. Then there was the year she taught herself the harmonica and she’d go to bars and play it. To bars! Right there with the young people, the hipsters, like she was one of them. And it wasn’t like she was just pulling some cute old-lady routine. She fixed them up with their partners and gave them advice and dragged them home with her. Bought them presents. And Houndy—oh, that Houndy—he gave out lobsters like they were nothing more than old rocks he’d happened to find on the beach.”

“I’d love to be like that.”

She puts her hands in her lap and looks wistfully at me. “You know, when you watch people like that live, you start to realize that the rest of us are just counting off the days until we die. They were the experts at life.”

I slice a paisley shape into the center of my pumpkin. “She rescued me at Noah’s parents’ house at Christmas. I made kind of an idiot of myself, and she just swooped in and made everything all right for me. Got me laughing. Telling me outrageous stories, making me laugh.”

Lola’s face scrunches up while she works on the eyes for her pumpkin. She does standard-issue jack-o’-lantern triangle eyes. “Oh, yes! I heard all about that. She was so excited when she came back. She was just stunned to find you. She told me how you reminded her so much of herself at your age.” She tilts her head at me like she’s trying to see if I’m anything like Blix, which I know I’m not. “I think she came home full of ideas about you.”