Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  “Was her food that good?”

  “Her food was fucking amazing. But it wasn’t the food that got me first. It was more … I’m not sure. There was this completeness to the way she cooked. The food, the view from the house and the kitchen, the way her hands moved. This wooden thing she had to roll the pasta, like a big skinny rolling pin without handles. It all made sense to me. It felt right. Watching her, and eating that food.”

  “So what did she teach you to make?”

  “Oh, everything, eventually. This thing called a panada, which is like a pasta pie stuffed with eels and—Don’t make that face. You would die if I fed it to you, it’s so good.”

  May imagined Ben feeding her an eel pie that was so good she wanted to die. Oddly, it wasn’t difficult.

  “At first, though, she wouldn’t trust me to do anything. Not even make the pasta. I had to watch. Then I progressed to cleaning vegetables. It took for-fucking-ever to get her to let me do the pasta.”

  “That sounds really neat.”

  “It was. But after a while, I got a job at a restaurant in town, and my girlfriend and I broke up.”

  “Did you see Bibiana anymore?”

  His eyes skated over the top of her head, past her. Far away. “She wasn’t thrilled about the restaurant job. I think she must have been hurt, but I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She just cut me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “As if we were in the Old World. I came in the kitchen, she turned her back. Like I wasn’t even there.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what did you say to her?”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t say anything. I left.”

  May turned her face away so he wouldn’t see her surprise.

  “The restaurant wasn’t even any good,” he continued. “So I started traveling again, and I got a job in Glasgow washing dishes in this gastro pub that was kind of up-and-coming. I spent four or five months there, then moved on to another restaurant. I did that for three years—Spain, France, Germany, then London, the Netherlands, and one spring with a butcher in Italy. I finally got a job in a French kitchen with three stars, and I stayed there the last year. I was the lowliest of the lowly guys, but I learned a ton. Stop here.”

  There weren’t so many people near them now, and he spun her around and slung his arm over her shoulder. “Okay, now I play tour guide. Over there’s the Manhattan Bridge. That’s Manhattan.”

  “I know that.”

  “There might be a quiz later—just wanted to make sure you were listening.”

  “Tell me something tour-guidey. When was this bridge built?”

  “No idea.”

  “How does a suspension bridge work?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’m a beekeeper.”

  “Well, what else do you know?”

  “It goes from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It’s pretty on top. I like it.”

  May smiled. “Good enough for me.”

  “All right, then.” He turned, and they started walking again. He left his arm slung over her shoulder, his hip bumping familiarly against hers now and then.

  After a while, they came down off the suspended part of the bridge onto what amounted to an ordinary concrete walkway between two sides of a four-lane divided road. The sun was more intense here, the landscape blandly urban and unappealing.

  Ben didn’t continue his story, and she didn’t push him. She knew the gist of it. More restaurants, more responsibility. A wife found and lost. Enough pain to turn him bitter when he thought about it.

  She didn’t want to sink their day into melancholy a second time if she could help it.

  When they reached a crosswalk where a map of Brooklyn suggested various tourist destinations, she asked, “Where to next?”

  He smiled. “You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “This place looks like Wisconsin.”

  “You think?”

  They’d walked for a while, then hopped on the subway to Prospect Park.

  “Well, if I squint and ignore the people, and the fence keeping us out of the actual woods, and the fact that I can hear traffic, yes. It’s not so different from the woods around Manitowoc.”

  Ben tried it. He’d never been to Manitowoc, but it did remind him a little bit of home. “It’s my favorite park,” he admitted.

  “How come?”

  “It feels like the real outdoors to me, more so than Central Park. Have you been there yet?”

  “Sure. It’s pretty. I liked the rambly bit.”

  “The Ramble.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get lost, though.” She sounded disappointed.

  “Were you hoping to?”

  May ducked her head and looked away, a gesture that was getting to be familiar. She did it when she wasn’t embarrassed but thought she should be. If he teased her at the right moment, she’d glance over at him sideways and give him one of those coy little May smiles that made him want to wrestle her to the ground and kiss her breathless.

  Stop. Stop with that.

  He’d been trying all morning. So far, no luck.

  “I don’t usually know where I’m going in Manhattan, but I always know where I am,” she said. “It’s impossible not to keep track of which way north is when you’re living in a place so tiny. I thought it would be fun to go somewhere I could get completely disoriented.”

  “No dice?”

  “Sadly, no. I just had to stand still for a minute, and I could hear cars.”

  “Shattered the whole illusion, I bet.”

  “It did. My illusions are easily shattered.”

  They passed a family with a stroller, then a couple holding hands.

  “Most of the time it’s not this busy,” Ben said. “This is holiday-weekend busy.”

  “I guess everywhere’s going to be like that today.”

  “Yep.”

  She pulled a few steps ahead, interested by something around a bend. Her hair changed colors as she moved in and out of patches of sunlight. Dull wheat in the shade, but shiny and bright when the sun hit it, falling around her shoulders. The wind had made a mess of it on the bridge. She’d tried to put it right with her fingers, but it still looked disorganized.

  He liked it that way. He liked how adaptable she was, how comfortable in this park, with him, even though she’d lost all her stuff and all her plans, and even though New York hadn’t lived up to her expectations. If he were in her shoes, he’d be sullen and pissed off, trying to find somewhere to hole up, but May was rushing around corners, pointing out a neat building or a great view.

  She was delightful.

  “Did you see this?” she said as he came around the bend. “It’s huge!”

  It was a big rock. He checked for leprechauns, statuary—anything to make sense of her excitement—but he found nothing but more rock.

  “I’ve seen bigger,” he said.

  She made an exasperated face. “Men. You’ll say that about anything. My family went to the Grand Canyon once, and my dad had tears in his eyes. He wouldn’t admit it, but I saw them. And by the time he got home and our neighbor asked him about it, he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty deep. So did you get that lawnmower blade sharpened?’ ”

  Ben smiled. “What’s your dad do?”

  “He’s an engineer at the nuclear power plant. He used to do something extremely boring related to safety measures, and now he does something extremely boring involving the decommissioning.”

  “Whereas your job was so exciting.”

  She laughed. “You have a point. But I liked it.”

  “How’d you get into it to begin with? Is that what you wanted to do?”

  “No, I wanted to illustrate children’s books.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s your …” He couldn’t think of the word for what kind of paints or whatever she used. “What kind of art?”

  “My medium,” she said. “Pastels, mostly. Some watercolors. I draw a lot of cartoony people
, little bunnies, fat squirrels. Happy stuff.”

  “You should draw me something.”

  “What, right now? Like with a stick in the dirt?”

  “Later. On a napkin.”

  She smiled, testing a foothold with her toe. “Okay. I’ll sign it and everything, and then you can keep it in your junk drawer forever.”

  He probably would.

  “So did you ever do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Illustrate?”

  “Just a little bit. In college. Mostly stuff I wrote myself, which doesn’t count.” She gave the boulder a pat and started walking again.

  “Why not?”

  “Why doesn’t it count, you mean?”

  “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “You know how families are. My mom thought the art was nice for a hobby, but she wanted me to figure out how to make a living. There was a lot of talk about health benefits and insurance, and I believe the phrases life-altering catastrophe and major strain on the family were used. So I switched from fine arts to graphic design. I thought I could maybe illustrate greeting cards. When I graduated, I wanted to move to Chicago, but Green Bay had the job listed, and who could turn down a job with the Packers?”

  “So then you met Dan, and the rest is history?”

  “Complete with shrimp fork.”

  “How’d that happen, though?”

  “The shrimp fork?”

  “No, you and Thor.”

  He knew how the shrimp fork had happened. He’d found the video on the Internet after she went to sleep last night. Listening to Dan’s proposal had made him so tense, he’d just about strained a muscle in his neck snapping the laptop closed.

  He’d thought the video went viral because of what May did at the end, but it was Thor and his numb-nuts proposal. The lamest declaration of love in history.

  Ben no longer wondered why she’d forked him. He wondered how she’d endured a relationship with such a douche for four years.

  She shrugged. “I met him through work. He asked me out. I said yes.”

  “That’s the whole story?”

  “No, not really. But you know. More or less.” The path emerged into open space, and she stopped short. “Wow, what’s this?”

  “Long Meadow.” They came out of the woods into a broad, undulating lawn that stretched in both directions, surrounded by trees and sky. Kids ran wild, moms sat on blankets in the grass, a group of shirtless men played Frisbee.

  Ben steered May away from the shirtless men.

  “This is great,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “Where’d the city go?”

  He pointed to the right. “That way. See, there’s one building, fucking up the view.”

  “Oh. Bummer.”

  “Yeah. The meadow was designed so you wouldn’t be able to see anything but outdoors, but some zoning moron gave that one the green light.”

  “I can’t stand those people.” She didn’t sound like she meant it, though. Her face was full of light when she spun toward him. “You know, those people who are like, ‘Amazing mountain. I think I’ll stick my house right in the middle of this ridge and ruin the view for everybody else’?”

  “You hate rich people?”

  “No, only the annoying ones. And honestly, if I met them, I’d probably be like, ‘Oh, you have a lovely house.’ ”

  That made him crack a smile. “I thought you were one of those people, about to get hitched to Einarsson and all. Don’t the Jets’ wives all live in big piles of granite in some rich Jersey suburb?”

  She made a jokey, disgusted face. “I did. For a few weeks.”

  “Did you hate yourself for it?”

  The wrong thing to say. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

  “Ah, hell. I was kidding.”

  “I know.”

  He couldn’t think what to tell her, so he held out his hand and said, “Come on, let’s walk.”

  May meshed her fingers with his and leaned into him. After a while, she cheered up again. She smiled at a kid, then pointed to a little dog that looked like a rat. Its owner was pushing it in a stroller, which Ben didn’t find quite as strange as she did. She said this proved her theory that all New Yorkers were at least a little bit crazy.

  He felt brighter just being next to her. Like she could transmit all that enjoyment to him by touching him. Inoculate him against every dark obsession, every bad memory.

  They passed a group on blankets, a mom with an infant in one of those sling things, another dangling a toy in front of a baby barely old enough to sit up. Some bigger kids were playing a few feet away, trying to get a kite to fly. May couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  “What is it?” he asked when they’d passed.

  “I hadn’t realized,” she said. “I thought babies in New York … You know, you see them on the street in Manhattan in their strollers, or on the subway, and you feel so sorry for them. Getting carted around, bumped into. All the dirt.”

  “What, you thought they were all working in garrets and getting black lung?”

  She punched his arm. “No. But I hadn’t imagined this. It’s nice. I can see how it would work now, kind of. Having a family here.”

  They walked toward the far end of the meadow.

  “You want a family?”

  Even as he asked it, he wondered what he was doing. It was a question you asked a woman you wanted to be with. Testing the waters, trying to find out if getting in over your head with her was a good idea.

  It wasn’t a question he had any reason to ask May.

  “I do, sure. I had one all planned out.”

  She sounded wistful, but not sad, so he pushed a little more. “What was your imaginary family like?”

  “Two kids, a boy and a girl. Dan was not consulted, mind you.”

  “Didn’t he want kids?”

  “Someday, sure. But I wouldn’t have even considered it while he was still playing football. The NFL sounds glamorous, but it’s an awful job. The hours are endless, the work’s a grind, there’s no job security, and it seems like they’re always in PT for one injury or another. I’d have been a single parent, basically. And there wasn’t any way to guess how long he’d be playing or where we’d live or anything, really. That’s one reason we waited so long to move in together. The first couple years we were dating, he thought he might be released, and I was afraid to get too attached. Then he had a great season right as his contract was ending, and he got the offer from New York. I wanted to go with him, but he said maybe we should wait and see how the Jets panned out, first.”

  “That’s a lot of uncertainty to put up with.”

  “I didn’t think of it that way, like I was putting up with him. I thought it was just what you did, when you loved somebody.”

  “You don’t sound so sure now.”

  “I’m not.”

  “That you should have put up with it, or that it was love?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  Ben took her lowered eyes and quiet voice as his cue to steer them into the more comfortable territory of sarcasm. “The money’s good, though.”

  “There is that.”

  They lapsed into silence, which allowed too much space for him to think about Sandy.

  They’d had their share of drama, but by the end the writing on the wall had been twenty feet tall. He’d daydreamed about selling the restaurant and moving back to Sardinia, where he could open a local place. Something seasonal and dead simple, where the Michelin critics would never dream of visiting.

  Sandy hadn’t been with him on the imaginary airplane.

  He thought about May’s illusions. It was easy to love your idea of someone—to fall hard for their very best self. The question was whether, once you had to spend some time living with their worst self, you could bear to be with them anymore.

  “You want to sit?” he offered. “Rest your feet for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  They found a flat spot beneath a huge oak tree, and Ma
y futzed with the grass, running her hand back and forth over it. He heard a bee several feet away where there was clover. Maybe it was one of his bees. They were only a mile or so from some of his hives.

  “The thing is,” May said, “I’m not as sad as I should be. And that makes me sad, because it makes me realize I was being a dope. And then I wonder what’s wrong with me, and I go into this whole mental spiral, and that’s no good.”

  “No.”

  She turned her head sideways, resting it on her knee. All wrapped around herself, gold hair and red sweater, long legs and black boots. She looked gorgeous and disappointed. He wanted to fix her, but he was the wrong person. Ten times more broken than May was.

  “I have a suspicion that I’m in the middle of one of those really important life lessons,” she said. “I’m just not sure what the lesson is yet.”

  “I know how that feels.”

  “It’s not a lot of fun,” she said. “But it’s really liberating, too.”

  “Because you’re not who you used to be, but you’re not who you’re going to be yet, either.”

  “And you don’t even have to figure it out if you don’t want to,” she said.

  “Exactly. You can do what you want.”

  “Tend bees,” she said with a smile.

  “Eat borscht.”

  “Kiss strange men.” Her eyes were still glistening, her voice husky and solemn when she said it. He couldn’t figure out what it meant. Whether to be funny or serious, or to just kiss her again like he wanted to.

  But no. No kissing. Not unless she asked.

  He leaned back against the tree trunk, wiping his palms on his jeans. “You think I’m strange, woman?”

  “No.” She unwrapped her arms and leaned against the tree beside him, bumping his shoulder with her own. “I think you’re pretty great.”

  He let that sink in, soaking it up until it saturated him.

  The most meaningful compliment he’d received in a long time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ben took her to Park Slope to see about some bees. She liked the neighborhood. The brownstone where he kept the hive was four stories tall, one of a row of beautiful, interconnected red- and beige-brick homes with elaborate stonework and neat front walks on a beautiful leaf-shaded street.