“Or clam chowder either. Or lobsters. Hence, Fucksgiving.”

She smiles at me. By now she’s steered us into a little breakfast place, far, far away from Yolk. A waiter has brought us menus and coffees, asking if we want almond milk, soy milk, cream, half-and-half, skim, or regular milk. And after that question is answered, he’d like to know which kind of sweeteners to haul over: pink packets, blue ones, yellow, stevia, Truvia, regular sugar, regular raw sugar, or sugar syrup.

“I’m going to miss this about Brooklyn,” I tell her when we’ve sorted out our order. “It’s a place you can’t be indecisive. Even about coffee. In Jacksonville, it’s so not this way.”

She runs her fingers through her long hair, shakes out her waves, and stares off into space, her mouth a closed, straight line. She has the kind of hair that should ensure its owner’s perfect lifetime happiness. Too bad her hair is not in charge of negotiating her love life, because then nothing would ever go wrong.

“So, tell me where things stand,” I say. “Andrew’s out of the picture, I take it. Relegated back to divorced dad status, but I just want to say—”

“Well, no, actually,” she says, but I don’t take it in because I’m talking at the same time, and what I’m saying is, “want to say that I think that was really a stupid move, for the waitress, that woman to speak up like that, right in front of everyone, to say she was, you know, the one.”

Jessica is looking at me with her wide blue eyes. “I know, I know, but you know what else? It made me realize how I am not remotely well enough to love Andrew completely. Which I was in such denial about. I was all like, ‘Oh, our kid is so cute, writing that little poem, and he needs us, and why don’t we just forget the past and get back together?’ when that was not even realistic. First fight, and we’re done again. Right?”

“I guess . . .”

She leans forward. “So bad as this was, it got us to talking. Which was painful and excruciating, and I’m surprised you didn’t hear us. On Friday we took Sammy over to my mother’s house just so we could fight and yell and scream and get it all out. I don’t normally approve of yelling and screaming, but Andrew said we had to air everything, and if voices were raised—then that showed we cared enough to risk it. Or something. Anyway, we did. And at the end of it, hours and hours of talking and pacing and yelling, he said he wanted to keep trying. And I said I did, too. And so we are.”

“Wow.”

“Because what I realized is that I had something to do with the marriage falling apart, too. Here I was blaming him and everything, but I was really the one who checked out of the marriage first. I was bored and frustrated at my job, and I started criticizing him for everything, and getting so annoyed with him, and ignoring him and doing stuff elsewhere—and he just felt pushed out. Plain and simple. And then she was there—and nobody’s saying it was right—but I can see how somebody fun and interesting might be appealing when your wife is going to bed at eight o’clock just so she won’t have to talk to you.”

The waiter comes over with our eggs, and we make room at the table for our gigantic plates, filled with eggs and potatoes and whole-grain toast.

“So the bottom line is that we’ve decided we need to be in a different house, not his, not mine, which is convenient because mine is getting sold—”

“But not yet!” I protest. “You can stay. I’d like it if you stayed, in fact.”

She shakes her head sadly. “Nope. No can do. We need a fresh start, symbolically if not for anything else. We’ll stay in Brooklyn so that Sammy can continue to go to a school where kids are allowed to write poems about breakfast foods to embarrass their parents. I want to start my own business at some point, and Andrew wants us to spend every summer at his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires, now that they’re getting old. So . . . big changes.”

On the way home, I fill her in as best as I can on Noah taking Blix’s stuff so his parents can challenge the will, and William Sullivan not giving up on Lola. And Jeremy getting furious with me and believing that I’d somehow known all along I didn’t want to marry him.

She wrinkles her nose. “Well, I have to say that I’ve never been quite convinced of your supposed love for this guy.”

“My family is probably never going to speak to me again. They’re all so sure he’s the guy I’m supposed to be with.”

“Sorry. Nope, nope, nope. You couldn’t have settled for him. I wouldn’t have allowed it. And now—I don’t care what your family says—you’ve got other people looking out for you. We’re your posse now.”

“I have a posse?”

“Yes. And as a spokeswoman for the posse, I say you shouldn’t go back to Florida. There’s nothing for you there. You may have to face the fact that, despite all your best efforts, you actually do belong to Brooklyn.”

“But it’s dirty here, and cold, and there’s trash in the streets, and the subways don’t run on time, and you have to go grocery shopping every single day because nobody has a car . . .”

“Yeah,” she says, punching me in the arm. “We’re not perfect, by any means, but we’re your city. You might as well save yourself some trouble and accept it now.”

But Patrick, I think. I can’t tell her that part, that there’s a hole in my heart.

FORTY-FOUR

MARNIE

As soon as I unlock the front door and walk into the house, I nearly have four kinds of heart attacks. There’s Noah standing there in the entry hall, holding a cardboard box. I let out a blood-curdling scream, and he jumps in the air.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (That’s me.)

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (Not his most original moment.)

We stare at each other. Then he says, “I came to get the rest of my great-aunt’s possessions. Now if you’ll just move out of my way, I have to take these to Paco’s before the UPS guy comes.”

“Wait. Wait just a minute here. What makes you think it’s okay for you to do this?”

He sighs. “My mother wants Blix’s clothes.”

“Why? Why? What is she going to do with all this stuff? You’re just doing this to get back at me, is all. I did not talk your aunt into leaving me this building, I did not interfere with her will in any way, shape, or form—and why do you have to be instrumental in contesting a will that you know from Blix’s lawyer is legitimate—”

He sighs again. “Listen. My family is freaked out. Okay? They know that you asked her for a spell, and they think that was tampering with the will. Or something. I actually can’t bring myself to pay attention.”

“So what, I asked her for a spell? I missed you. I wanted you back. What does that prove?”

He looks confused for a moment. “Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe she felt sorry for you and mad at me, and so she changed her whole will.”

“That was her choice, not mine.”

“Well, my mother wants the building, and my father has called his attorneys, and now they want all the evidence they can find, and also the contents of the house.”

“No,” I say. “No. The contents of the house go with the house. You are not removing another thing.”

“Look,” he says. “This is weird, okay? I couldn’t give a crap about this house or the will or any of it. I don’t even care if my parents get it, or you get it, or it falls into the sea, frankly. But my mom is on her high horse. She—well, if we had all day, I could tell you the whole story, but it’s pointless and stupid, and—”

“I happen to have all day.”

He lets out one of his huge sighs again, and gives me one of his guilty-conscience looks, and we go into the kitchen. I get the feeling somehow that he wants to tell me the whole story, to get it off his chest.

He grabs a beer from the fridge and admires the shininess of the turkey-fat–sparkling floor, and he actually laughs about that a little. Ha ha—wasn’t that something—you and your fiancé, and the way the turkey skidded across the room just at the moment Jeremy realized you’d been living with me!

“Hilarious,” I say.