When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Jaclyn Goldis

  Reading group guide copyright © 2021 by Jaclyn Goldis and Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Daniela Medina.

  Cover photographs © Getty Images.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Trade Paperback Edition: February 2021

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946453

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1929-9 (trade paperback); 978-1-5387-1930-5 (ebook)

  E3-20210126-DA-PC-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: Joey

  Chapter Two: Joey

  Chapter Three: Joey

  Chapter Four: Sarah

  Chapter Five: Sarah

  Chapter Six: Joey

  Chapter Seven: Joey

  Chapter Eight: Joey

  Chapter Nine: Joey

  Chapter Ten: Sarah

  Chapter Eleven: Joey

  Chapter Twelve: Joey

  Chapter Thirteen: Sarah

  Chapter Fourteen: Joey

  Chapter Fifteen: Joey

  Chapter Sixteen: Joey

  Chapter Seventeen: Joey

  Chapter Eighteen: Joey

  Chapter Nineteen: Sarah

  Chapter Twenty: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-One: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Joey

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Sarah

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Sarah

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Joey

  Chapter Thirty: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-One: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Sarah

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Sarah

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Joey

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Sarah

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Joey

  Chapter Forty: Joey

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two: Joey

  Chapter Forty-Three: Sarah

  Chapter Forty-Four: Joey

  Chapter Forty-Five: Joey

  Chapter Forty-Six: Joey

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Joey

  Reading Group Guide Letter to Readers

  Discussion Questions

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  To my grandmothers, Libby Newman and Khana Vinarskaya

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  All language is a longing for home.

  —Rumi

  Chapter One

  Joey

  Corfu

  2004

  It was all because they went to the fancy Taverna Salto for the one-year anniversary of their first date.

  They nearly opted for something more casual, a picnic in their meadow by the Old Fortress. Why didn’t Joey just insist on the picnic?

  But nope, she and Leo set off to celebrate at Taverna Salto, with its distant location from the apartment building by the sea where both their families lived. Corfu Town was awash with its rusty, evening glow when, about halfway to the taverna, Joey paused by an arched stone Venetian colonnade.

  “My feet are killing me,” she admitted, gazing down at her new espadrilles that were imprisoning her toes.

  “Didn’t someone tell you to wear comfy shoes?” Leo’s green eyes had a laugh inside them.

  “I wanted to wear my new ones. But you were right. Next anniversary, you pick my shoes.”

  “Just a little farther, Jonesey.”

  “FYI, another mile is not just a little farther. I think I’ll go barefoot.”

  Leo’s mouth feigned a pucker, like she’d said she was going to lick the floor of an airplane bathroom. He wore flip-flops even in nice hotel rooms. But he knew Joey hated wearing shoes, especially, somehow, on Corfu. Corfu was for flitting barefoot down cobblestone streets.

  “If you must, I’ll be on glass patrol.”

  “You’re good to me, Winn.”

  Joey kicked off her espadrilles. She felt tipsy from their earlier aperitifs, and she also felt very happy, that sometimes elusive sense of finding a home in her own skin. She’d always felt that home-ness with Leo though, ever since they were ten and their families met in the stairwell of their common apartment building. Over successive summers vacationing on Corfu, their separate families had intertwined like one. Joey and Leo were nineteen now, but she’d loved him from the first moment they’d met.

  Leo smiled at Joey, a smile that said I like being good to you and I like all the weird things about you.

  At Taverna Salto, the maître d’ greeted them each with a handshake. He led them to a table at the edge of a terrace bordered in lush trellises. Beneath a grass-green awning, a local string quartet was playing a set with emotive violin work. Leo pulled out Joey’s chair. Joey felt very grown-up arranging her napkin on her lap as Leo circled the table to his seat—and that was when his eyes took on a strange, startled look.

  “We have to go! Now!” Leo practically leaped back to Joey’s side. He yanked on her arm, pulling her up with such force that it shot pain through her shoulder socket.

  “Wha…huh?” Joey’s feet tripped over each other to balance. Her napkin slipped to the ground. She twisted to gaze back, but Leo whipped her around. “Leo? What the hell?”

  On Leo’s warpath toward the entrance, they nearly barreled into a waiter. He thrust his water pitcher over his head, sending some of it sloshing out onto Joey’s shirt.

  “Leo? Leo!”

  The maître d’ scurried after them, calling, “Sir? Madam?”

  But Leo didn’t speak, just kept his tight grip on Joey’s arm, propelling her along. She glanced behind uncertainly at one point, only catching a blurred sliver of an awning before Leo jerked her forward. Joey’s veins went Popsicle-cold. Her feet shuffled along robotically, the shock of it all churning in her head.

  After Leo pulled them around a corner, Joey finally shook herself from his grip. Shook herself back to life. “Leo, seriously! What are you doing?”

  Everything quieted, but
it was a loud quiet—roaring in Joey’s ears. Night had cloaked the island and sent most of its inhabitants to sleep, leaving behind the pristine aura of a deserted movie set. Leo rubbed his forehead, his eyes unreadable.

  “Leo, talk to me. What was that?”

  “Nothing.” But his gaze bounced from the fuchsia bougainvillea adorning a balcony to a cat lolling at the mouth of a moonlit garden—anywhere but at her.

  “Seriously, Leo?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted, and she staggered back. He’d never yelled at her before. Never treated her with anything but care.

  “I just didn’t like the menu,” he said, softer. “Leave it, okay, Joey?” He never called her Joey either. Only Jonesey or Jones or sometimes J.

  “Leo, come on. Please tell me the truth. Don’t invent something about the menu.”

  “I have a headache. That’s all. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Can we just be quiet for a bit? Go home?”

  After some time, Joey heard herself say in a weird, foreign voice, “Okay.” Then Leo took her hand, and Joey let him squeeze away her questions.

  The next morning, he broke up with her. Broke her heart. Broke her.

  And she never saw him again.

  Chapter Two

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  “Thanks for coming, darling! The clickey thingie keeps getting lost.” Joey’s grandmother ushered her into her glacial foyer, a startling contrast to the thick heat endemic to August in South Florida.

  “Joey, have a look at my new orchids. Can you believe they’re fake? They look expensive, don’t they?”

  G walked toward the orchid pots, her rose chiffon dress twirling around her calves clad in pantyhose, her auburn wig laced with faint raspberry highlights in a fresh fluff around her tiny head.

  “Wow, they really do.” Joey glanced at her phone, half expecting to see a text from Leo saying Just kidding, I’m not coming to Delray to see you after all.

  But nope. Only her David Hockney screensaver stared back at her. Joey’s eyes blurred with the blues of the iconic swimming pool. So apparently Leo Winn was still coming to town. It was unbelievably surreal.

  Mere minutes prior, Joey had been driving over to her grandmother’s condo along the highway that straddled the ocean, completely carefree, or as carefree as a bride can be twelve days before her wedding. Her phone had rung, identifying an unknown number. Joey never answered calls from unknown numbers—the introvert in her required time to prepare. But maybe it had been the wind whipping her hair, the contentment she’d felt. At thirty-four, life had finally slotted into place. She’d been happy, and apparently happy people answered unknown numbers. Joey had nearly swerved off A1A when she’d heard Leo’s unmistakable voice.

  Leo, who’d broken up with Joey out of the blue the morning after their botched one-year anniversary dinner on Corfu. They hadn’t spoken to or seen each other in the fifteen years since. But now he’d heard about Joey’s wedding from his parents, and he was flying over from Europe with something important to tell her beforehand that, no, he couldn’t just say over the phone.

  “You look beautiful, G. How was your birthday dinner with your friends?” Joey kissed G’s cheek—soft, with wrinkles in a swirl like a cyclone.

  “Oh, it was nice, darling. I had the salmon. It was a little dry, but they did it with some nice mushrooms, and Doris had dolphin. Can you imagine? Dolphin, they’re serving now at the clubhouse.”

  “That can’t be right. Dolphin’s an endangered species.”

  “Do you think I’d make it up? Dolphin—right there on the plate.”

  “Of course I don’t think you’d make it up. Dolphin! Who knew?”

  The TV in the living room blared with an outburst from a Hallmark movie, the volume its usual senior-citizen high. Joey was struck by a melancholic image of G in her house all alone, watching other people get saccharine happy endings. And somehow that made Joey think of herself, in the months after Leo broke up with her, sitting on that sad brown couch in her off-campus apartment, watching Sex and the City reruns. Leo’s mom used to watch them on a loop in their Corfu apartment, and it had made Joey feel pathetically closer to him to adopt the habit.

  While she’d watched, she’d eaten Cinnamon Toast Crunch from the sole bowl she owned, that received the tiniest rinse between cereal meals, meaning the same crusted-up pieces adhered eternally to its sides. She’d dyed her hair dark then, an almost blue-black that in hindsight only served to enhance her deepening under-eye circles. In the throes of her Dark Ages, Joey had hardly ever answered her phone. She’d certainly not gotten beneath anyone to get over Leo, as her girlfriends had advocated. She’d basically only left the apartment to go to an occasional class or to the supermarket, to stock up on her three essentials: cereal, milk, and cookie dough.

  The memory vacuumed up Joey’s breath. “I can’t stay long, G, so let me help you with your mouse.”

  G frowned. “My mouse?”

  “The clickey thingie. It’s called a mouse. Remember?”

  “I thought it was a moose.”

  “It’s a mouse.”

  G pulled out her phone in its pink glitter case and jabbed at her screen. “I’ll make a note of that. Okay, darling, let me just dash to the bathroom, and then you’ll help me find that mouse. Maybe the darn thing will answer to cheese. I have cheddar.”

  As G laughed her melodious laugh and slipped into the powder room, Joey’s heart thumped in unison with the tock from the grandfather clock.

  I need to see you, Jonesey.

  That’s not a good idea, Leo. I’m getting married in twelve days.

  What he’d responded kept cycling around her head.

  I know. That’s why I’m coming. Please, Jonesey, you need to hear this. I have to tell you why I really broke up with you.

  Taverna Salto. Leo’s eyes shading over, like he’d seen something. But what? For years, Joey had relived the way he’d pulled her from the taverna, analyzing it so exhaustively that the CIA would have been impressed. She’d conjured secret lovers and fanciful conspiracies before shifting focus to herself, trying to figure out which part or parts of her hadn’t been good enough to make Leo stay with her. Finally, Joey’s best friend of twenty years, Siya, who’d occupied a front-row seat to Joey’s breakdown, laid down some harsh truth. Jo, you need to let go of the restaurant. Leo’s a textbook commitment-phobe, and you deserve someone who sees your amazingness.

  Joey considered spilling all to Siya as soon as she left G’s. But Siya had married her first boyfriend, whom she’d met at age thirteen. She’d never so much as poked a toe into twenty-first-century dating. And she adored Joey’s fiancé; Siya had captained Team Grant from the start. Bottom line: If Joey were to call her best friend like she now longed to, there was little chance Siya would say, Sure, meet Leo, it will be harmless closure.

  But Joey needed to confide in someone about Leo’s call. She should tell Grant. Of course she should. But she couldn’t yet fathom it. Not because she was about to embark on some affair or had lingering feelings for Leo—that was laughably off base. She adored Grant. Period, end of story. Only, Grant knew that Leo was her Big Ex, and Joey suspected he’d be more than a little wary at her agreeing to meet Leo right before their wedding.

  It’s just, wouldn’t most people grab an ex-boyfriend’s attempt at closure, however long after the relationship it came? Everyone stalked their exes a little. That was basically the whole point of social media.

  Joey thumbed to her Facebook app, typed in L, and immediately the search box filled him in. Leo Winn. God, Leo fucking Winn. Joey clicked on his latest picture, from three years prior. She stared at the picture as if for the first time, although it was not her first look over the years, or second, or if she was being honest, even hundredth.

  It was Leo sitting on a boat with an easy smile, like the world was his, like a natural magnet for good things. His hair still hovered between blond and brown but it had that hipster
vibe, the top middle flicked up, the sides shorn. His biceps were bulkier, and his face had more freckles these days. Joey peered closer, trying to deduce things in his eyes. Are you actually coming? Do I even want you to?

  Oh, to hell with the lies she liked to tell herself.

  I want you to come. I only wish that I didn’t.

  * * *

  “Okay, Joey, let’s trap the mouse!”

  Joey followed G to her office, past cupboards teeming with old doilies and handkerchiefs, items that meant various things to various people seventy or eighty years ago. G was from the Holocaust equivalent of the Depression era; all overflow got boxed up and relegated to a closet overrun with a lifetime of forgotten semi-treasures. The office was no different, tchotchkes on all surfaces, with an antique secretary’s desk against the wall, framed by bay windows overlooking the neighboring condo. Tricycles and playhouses now littered its overgrown lawn, but once Joey’s father had lived next door. There he’d fallen in love with Joey’s then-teenage mother, who was always twirling in roller skates.

  “See.” G indicated the mouse on its pad. “Where did the clickey thingie go?”

  The screen was on Facebook. How had her grandmother figured out Facebook? And why? But Joey didn’t have the energy to pry. She jiggled the mouse. “The mouse is right here.”

  “But I want to find something on the Facebook. And every time I go to that box, the clickamajig disappears.”

  “You mean the arrow?” Joey hovered the arrow over the search box and clicked.

  “That’s all? You did it?”

  “Sometimes the arrow drifts off screen so you can’t see it. You just have to jiggle.”

  “Jiggle it. I see.” Her grandmother wrote it in her notes. “You’re just brilliant, darling. Oh, this has helped me out so much.”

  “Of course, G. I’m still really impressed you’ve joined the computer age.” G wasn’t just her grandmother but also one of Joey’s main confidantes—the reason, in fact, why Joey had moved back to Florida. As she waded further into her as yet single, childless, career-floundering thirties, it was strangely harder to endure her grandmother’s ascension through her nineties.