“Well, that can happen.”
“So you were right—I sprung it on her. So I’m going to baaaack up and take it sloooow, approach her another way. Today, if she’ll have me, I’m going to take her somewhere neutral. No big talks, no heavy scenes. Not even going to hold her hand. And that’s my plan. Just keep seeing her. Do what she wants. Never ask for more. No pushing. I’m going to wait it out. Woo her until she’s not scared anymore. Not make any big moves. No proposals.”
“Well, good luck to you. I wish you the best.”
“Yep. That’s the right thing. I’m launching a plan—I call it A Year of One Hundred Dates with Lola. We’ll go slow, drink a lot of coffee, see some shows, then maybe visit my house, to see my friends. Maybe we’ll take a little jaunt up to New Hampshire. Stay in separate hotel rooms, drinks by the fire, go dancing. That sort of thing. Whatever she wants, and at a pace she’s comfortable with. My goal is to give her something she can’t have in her house all by herself. Laughter. Companionship. Admiration.”
“What she says, though, is that she doesn’t want to be disloyal to Walter’s memory. That’s what you’re up against.” Uh-oh—here I go, being disloyal again. Working behind the scenes. Only somehow I can’t help myself. I love this old guy with his optimism!
He smiles widely. “But you know? I knew Walter, too, and I think he would have been glad for us. He’d like that she’s got someone to love her and look after her. We don’t have to shut down his memory.”
“Well,” I say. “Wow. This is amazing. I wish you the best of luck. I’m rooting for you hard. So you want the flowers to take to her, or do you want them delivered?”
He smiles. “The flowers are for you. Because of the first-rate magic you did.”
I stare at him. “The magic? You knew about the magic?”
“Lola told me that you and Blix are matchmakers, and that you work with magic to bring people together.”
“But the magic didn’t work. It was an epic fail.” So much so that I’m giving up on magic altogether.
“What? That’s what you think? Marnie. It’s still working. Don’t you see? It’s taking a new route, that’s all. When you’re as old as I am, you learn a couple of things about love. And one of the main things is that you can’t give up on people you love. When you really believe.”
I look into his rheumy old blue eyes, so lit up that they’re practically shooting sparks. “But what can you do if the other person has given up?” I say. It’s hard to talk through the lump in my throat.
He says, “Well, you just gotta keep trying. That’s what you do.”
“But what if you’re running out of time?”
“Honey, we’re all running out of time. And”—he lowers his voice like this is going to be momentous—“we also have all the time in the world.”
“Um, that doesn’t really make any sense.”
He laughs. “I know; it doesn’t. I thought I could make some wise pronouncement here, but I got nothing. Well, okay, except this. Here’s my bit of old-man wisdom for you: You gotta have faith in something, don’t you? And when you pick what that thing is going to be, you don’t give up on it. Just don’t. It fails, you try another way and then another.”
And he takes my hand and kisses it, like a courtly gentleman, and heads out of the store. Then he remembers something and comes back in and pays for the flowers. Once more I think if I ran over to the window, I’d see William Sullivan doing himself a little dance down the street, laughing and snapping his fingers, although nine people out of ten would know that he’s got no shot at his plan.
But what do nine out of ten people know?
You know what I miss?
I miss seeing those little sparkles, the ones that meant something good was about to happen. That there was love around. I don’t know why, but they’ve somehow vanished.
That’s all. I just miss that.
Natalie texts me the next day while I’m in the kitchen, washing down the turquoise refrigerator in preparation for painting it. The Internet says that a person can actually buy special appliance paint that makes old fridges look like they just came from the showroom. This one could look new again, according to some of the more gung-ho commenters.
And then this text sails in. Which I’ve been expecting. The big sister weighing in on the disaster that is my life. She Who Knows Best.
I dont trust myself 2 speak w/you. Trying 2 B on ur side, but WTF? U BROKE HIS HEART AGAIN?
I broke his heart again. Yes.
AND U R LIVING WITH YOUR EX-FREAKING-HUSBAND?
No, and stop yelling.
I AM NOT GOING TO STOP YELLING UNTIL U EXPLAIN WHAT U R DOING.
Here’s what I am doing: I am right now painting a fridge. Bye.
I CAN’T EVEN.
Then please don’t.
You know what I can’t even?
I can’t paint the refrigerator some cool, professional white. I walk to the hardware store and look at the special white paint, and I even go stand in the checkout line with a can of it, but then something happens in my brain. I try to picture Blix’s kitchen with a refrigerator trying to pass itself off as a normal fridge, and I can’t.
Anybody who wouldn’t buy Blix’s house because they have no feeling for her refrigerator—well, they simply shouldn’t be allowed to have it, that’s all.
I put it back on the shelf and leave.
Things that can’t be ordinary:
Me.
Patrick.
The refrigerator.
William Sullivan.
Sorry, that’s just how it is.
Sorry/not sorry.
And where are the sparkles?
FORTY-THREE
MARNIE
Monday morning is a regular school day, and Jessica and Sammy come banging against the door early, the way they always do. I’m sort of caught off guard, because in my own little mind, everything has changed completely, and nobody but Bedford and William Sullivan—and okay, Patrick—really likes me anymore, and Patrick doesn’t count because he’s leaving and I won’t ever see him again.
But there are the two of them: Sammy with his scooter, and Jessica all harried as usual with her bag over her shoulder and her coffee cup in her hand. As soon as I open the door, she gives me a big smile and starts apologizing for not checking in on me over the weekend.
“Here you had a head injury and everything, and I’m off sorting out my own little life, not even making sure you weren’t in the hospital or something,” she says. Then she laughs. “Well, I knew you weren’t in the hospital because that real estate lady on Friday said you were perfectly fine. And also I came to check on you in the middle of the night on Thursday, and found out you were with Patrick.” She narrows her eyes a little bit when she says his name, the girlfriend body language for so what was that about, and I shrug in reply, the body language of it wasn’t anything, believe me.
Sammy seems distracted, playing with the handle of his scooter and squirming around under his backpack. Every now and then he looks up at me like there’s something he wants to say. No doubt he has opinions about how badly our magic project turned out.
Join the club, my boy. Stand in line.
All of a sudden Jessica says, “Listen! I don’t really have to be in until noon today. I was just going to go get a haircut, but what if you and I got a little breakfast first? Maybe not at Yolk, of course.” She laughs and ruffles Sammy’s hair, and he does a comedic googly-eyed look right at me and mouths the word “Yikes” where she can’t see.
Marital situations can be so confusing for the little ones. Especially the ones who’ve tried to mastermind adult lives and found it horrifyingly difficult.
“Sure,” I tell her. “Breakfast it is!”
I’d forgotten the main thing about being with Jessica: how much fun it is to have a girlfriend who is also living some version of a possibly chaotic life. Most of the time, I have to say, I seem to be the person who can’t get it together, the one being left at the altar and then cutting up her wedding dress in the preschool, the one setting out for a strange city and failing at reinventing herself even there.
And yet here is Jessica, linking arms with me, walking down the street, and she’s actually laughing about the whole Thanksgiving catastrophe. She said she and Andrew keep referring to it as Fucksgiving. “Like, one thing went wrong, and then it just set off a whole cascade until absolutely everything was shit. Was that basically your take on it, too?”
“From what I can remember. I had a convenient head injury, remember.”
“Oh, yes. Although you coped masterfully even after that. As I recall, you took care of pretty much everyone, even through the yelling and screaming. And you solved two of your most pressing romantic problems—both Noah and Jeremy. It was actually kind of epic.”
“One of the only Thanksgivings I’ve had in which nobody ate any turkey.”