My feet are silent on the way up the stairs. They don’t have to be; clearly, he’s so busy throwing himself into work, the only thing besides this house he’s apparently ever really cared about, he wouldn’t notice if I brought a high school marching band upstairs.
The drawers of my bureau—no, not mine: the bureau he let me use—screech open. My fingers run along the shopping bags I had in hand the day I moved in. Pretty telling, the fact that I kept them.
My clothes, makeup, and new perfumes fill them in no time. I change out of my dress and switch to jeans, a T-shirt, and my leather jacket, instantly feeling like myself again as I shake my hair out of the collar.
I was right. I might have forgotten it in the heat of one night, the gilded novelty of one date—but I remember, now.
One of these days, I’ll have to thank him.
24
“You’ve skipped too many family dinners. You’re coming.”
This scold doesn’t come from Cohen on the video chat, but from Juliet in the background. I hear Marisol singing a song that’s half-gibberish, half-Disney.
“I. Had. Work,” I remind them.
Cohen gives me a blank look that few others would be able to decode. I know it’s a challenge. “Do you work today?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“It’s not event stuff,” I backtrack, “so much as...marketing.”
“Sending emails and designing some new ten-percent-off promotion takes a few hours, tops,” Cohen deadpans, “and can easily wait until Monday. Or at least spare a couple hours for you to come visit everyone.”
“Yeah? Okay, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your schedule for this week is practically non-existent.” I don’t mean to snap at him. It’s not his fault I feel like shit today, or that I’ve been so distracted this month with Mara here, I haven’t found any new clients. We have exactly two events planned for the next two weeks. How I’ll pay the rent on the warehouse or storefront office, I have no idea. I’m lucky I can even pay Andres and Cohen.
He takes a long blink, the sign he’s letting my bitching slowly roll off him. He’s good at that: choosing exactly what he puts his energy into, and when. And from the looks of it, my little fit doesn’t make the cut.
“Well…if you change your mind, you know where we’ll be.”
“Tell Mara she’s invited too,” Juliet shouts, from somewhere behind the phone. “She never answered my text.”
“Will do,” I mumble, and say goodbye right as I hit the End Call button, so Cohen can’t get a chance to read my face.
The last thing I need is an onslaught of questions as to why Mara no longer lives here. Not only have I been trying not to think about it all day—I also have no clue why she left.
Of course you know why.
I treated her like shit, last night. Nothing outright or cruel, but much worse than she deserved. I’d promised her an incredible first date, my only goal to get back that feeling we’d had in my bed, where everything felt...happy. It was like that first dip in the air that tells you the seasons really are changing, or smelling woodsmoke from nowhere. That’s what I’d wanted to get back: that feeling of everything renewing.
When we were kids, Cohen hated fall. School started again, and days were too short to stay out playing until dinner. Even when we lived in the nudist colony and were homeschooled, he hated the fact we suddenly had to sport sweaters and flannel-lined jeans, or that we couldn’t climb trees past six p.m. and stay up catching fireflies in Mom’s old jam jars.
He loved summer, when everything was bright and warm, and days seemed to stretch on forever. Which was fitting, because Cohen was all about milking every single day for all it was worth. I used to be like that, too.
Somewhere along the way, though, I grew to like autumn, then prefer it. I still hated school, but I liked the idea of a brand-new year. Another chance, over and over, to get things right.
I liked the smell of bonfires, and the way every tree grew bare. If I had kept climbing after we moved into a normal neighborhood, I would have appreciated the views a lot more, nothing obscured in leaves and all that green.
I liked pumpkins and cinnamon. I liked sweaters and seeing my breath bloom in front of me on the sidewalk on the way to school.
More than anything, I liked that everything felt new, when fall started. In a time where so much around you was dying, it was somehow easier to feel alive. You watched the world turn over, regenerating without fail, and couldn’t help but feel like you could, too.
When I woke up with Mara yesterday, that’s exactly how I felt.
And when I woke up today, I felt the exact opposite. Everything was flat and gray, possibilities stunted, no new beginnings. Just endings.
The house had that same held-breath stillness it had before she moved in, bringing noise and perfume with her like a cloud, moving my shit without asking. Making this place feel like home again.
I knew she was gone. As I rolled onto my back and traced every recessed light with my eyes, I knew the noise I’d heard last night was her packing. I hadn’t imagined the click of the front door.
Now, I drop my phone onto the desk and stare at my blank computer screen. This used to come easily: marketing emails, promos, networking. I could do it in my sleep. Although, usually, I just skipped sleep altogether.
Throwing myself into work hadn’t made me happy, per se, but it didn’t make me sad. It was its own emotion: a constant push to check the next item off the list, or reach the next milestone. It wasn’t good, or bad. Just safe.
I move my mouse, watch the screen blink to life, and get started.
The calm settles in fast. Once that push takes over, there’s no room to feel anything else. It’s just like I remembered.
Until it isn’t. And that’s the exact moment my open window lets in a blast of wind, filling the room with the scent of woodsmoke from somebody’s bonfire, miles away.
25
“You had no fucking right to tell him.”
Danny’s sigh is impossibly drawn-out, his signature “losing patience” reaction, which pisses me off even more. He doesn’t get to lose patience. He doesn’t get to be angry.
“Mara, I’ve already apologized for not talking to you about it first—”
“And for not warning me he’d be in town? Letting me get blindsided like that? Yeah, that felt really good, by the way. Maybe for Christmas you can hit me with a car.”
“It’s just...I knew you wouldn’t be receptive to the idea.”
“I wonder why,” I snap, the hotel bed swallowing me as I fall back and shut my eyes.
I knew I shouldn’t have answered his call. Normal chitchat with my uncle is fine; we usually talk jazz, share work drama, and catch up. It’s when he starts updating me on my mom’s progress, which is basically nonexistent for someone in her shoes, that I regret answering. Or now.
“Next time you talk to him,” I say, teeth gritted, “tell him to go back to Indiana. I’m never going to ‘work things out’ with him, because we can’t. So the least he can do is go back to his own life and leave mine the fuck alone.”
“Did he tell you he bought a house there?”
My eyes fly open. The ceiling is textured, a characteristic that reminds me of motels and makes my skin hurt, like I’ve scraped myself on it. When Mom and I would visit Dad on some of his faraway jobs, or the times we moved with him, we stayed in dirt-cheap motels with popcorn walls and itchy comforters, places with roach traps under the furniture and remotes glued to the tables. I couldn’t stand them.
Which was why, when I left Levi’s last night and realized my only options were getting a cheap motel, a moderately priced hotel, or staying with Juliet—a surefire way to run into Levi again—I picked the most expensive of the three. I know I can’t afford it forever, but I don’t need forever. Just long enough to find another place. A roommate I don’t want to sleep with. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Anyway: the hotel is decent, but not
ideal. I slept horribly compared to the plush, Spade-clad bed of Levi’s spare room, which is one of many reasons I can’t force politeness when Danny reveals this fact.
“A house? So he honestly thought I’d forgive him, just like that, and we’d suddenly become buddies who visit all the time. Family dinners and shit. Is that it?”
Danny’s end of the line is quiet. His apartment is always quiet, actually. Except for my family, he’s never had roommates, a live-in boyfriend, or even a pet.
“Go talk to him. I’ll text you the address. You need to ask him why he bought it.”
I can already imagine why: he wants to invite me to live there, like giving me a home now can make up for the one he didn’t give me before. Or he wants to schedule family dinners every week, the way Juliet’s family does, where we’ll laugh and pretend everything’s fine while my mother’s off in that nursing home, running out the clock he shattered in the first place. And I’m supposed to go talk to him about all these grand ideas?
I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat: “Hell fucking no.”
Danny hangs up before I can say this, or any version of it, out loud, his “Love you” clipped short. A few seconds later, he texts me: 3403 Greenbrae Lane.
I know the neighborhood. It’s in one of the city’s historic districts: lots of townhouses with mansard roofs and columned porches. Mostly wealthy retirees or double-income socialite couples, with the occasional single-child family, outfitting their precious baby Appaloosa or Lejund with designer clothes and obscure Japanese toys.
In other words, I have no idea how he afforded a house there, or why he wanted one. He’d fit in there even worse than I would.
I felt that way about Levi’s neighborhood, too. With row after row of identical, giant houses and sidewalks filled with Ivy-or-just-below graduates, I didn’t fit in.
Then again, neither did Levi.
“I mean, God, do they all own Pomeranians?” I’d asked him, shortly after moving in. We were eating breakfast in the living room and watching the news for updates on the incoming hurricane. I let the curtain flutter back into place and turned to him. “And what’s the deal with all the blue siding?”
“Homeowner’s association,” he answered, mouth filled with cereal. “They only let you paint your house with some pre-approved color list. But they aren’t all blue. There’s a yellow one on the corner.”
I’ve been told I have resting bitch face, but in that moment, I actually felt it transition to active bitch. “That’s so stupid.”
“Why?” His spoon clattered in his bowl as he set it down, wiping his mouth with his thumb. “It keeps people from painting their house some insane color that would bother their neighbors.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Hot pink, for example.”
“I’ve never seen a hot pink house in my life that wasn’t twenty-four inches tall and made of plastic, but whatever.”
Levi smiled, like he was explaining the ways of the world to some snot-nosed kid. “HOAs protect property investments. If I decided to sell this place, I know I’d get a fair amount for it, and quick—because my neighbors have normal, well-maintained houses.”
“Where did you live before where they didn’t?” Granted, I’d never lived in a real house. Not once in my entire life...until I moved here.
I spent a lot of time looking at them, though. Studying them when I went to sleepovers and birthday parties. Memorizing them in magazines. Staring at them through car windows as I passed, wondering about the people inside. And aside from a few that were literally falling apart, I never once thought it wouldn’t be nice to live in them. Any of them.
“The rancher where my mom moved us, for one.”
I picked up the remote and squinted at the channel guide. “After the nudist colony?”
His eyes flashed with the smirk he wouldn’t dare show. “Yes. After the nudist colony. We lived near the stadium. You know how the neighborhoods are there.”
Reluctantly, I nodded: having lived inside every bruise this city has on her, I could instantly picture the houses he was referring to.
“Junk in the yard, overgrown grass, garbage on the porches,” he continued. “And it’s not just appearances: when I was sixteen, my bike got stolen right off our front stoop. Someone actually broke the spindle I’d chained it to. How fucked up is that?”
“Wow. I thought I had it bad when my welcome mats kept disappearing.” I sank into the chaise and dropped the remote without choosing anything; he promptly picked it up to scroll himself. “Still, I’d hate getting told what my house had to look like. You wouldn’t even know which one was yours, if you took off the numbers.”
“Of course I would,” he said, exasperated. I thought I caught some hesitation, though.
“A nudist colony...to this.” I looked at him. “You did a complete one-eighty.”
“Because I wear clothes? Because I don’t spend all day running through a bunch of hippies’ gardens?”
“Because that place,” I explained, “was all about self-expression. Being comfortable and...you know. Free.” I motioned to the ceiling, encompassing his house, his neighborhood—his entire lifestyle. “This? It’s the complete opposite. You have to get approval to do the same thing everyone else is doing. Scratch that: you have to pay to get approval.”
On cue, Levi’s eyes focused beyond my head, not on my face. A bolt of guilt shot through me: who was I to judge the way he wanted to live his life?
That was just it, though. I got the feeling from him, several times a day, that he didn’t want this. It was in the way he grumbled when bills rolled in and instantly looked exhausted, or that tight, weird smile when he said hello to neighbors who didn’t even know his name.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s fine, for people like you. I was just saying...for me, it wouldn’t be ideal.”
After a beat, he nodded. We fell silent. I dropped it.
People like you. I’d come dangerously close to saying “people like us.”
Despite our differences, I felt at least one big similarity between Levi and myself: we’d managed to achieve exactly what we wanted in life—his big house, my perpetual singlehood—and still weren’t happy. The ends didn’t magically fix the means. It was a tough pill to swallow.
I guess life goes that way for a lot of people, though. Whether it’s a homeowner’s association and some white picket palace, or guarding yourself from the garbage and overgrown grass the people who were supposed to love you most piled on you, from the moment you arrived—you swear you’ll give yourself better cards than what you got dealt. No matter what it takes.
You think that’s the hardest part, getting the cards. What nobody warns you about is the part that comes next: how hard it is when you still can’t win.
26
“Huh. Well, when you lay it all out like that...yeah. You fucked up.”
I shove Cohen into the elevator. It’s early; I was barely awake when I got Tim’s call for Cohen and me to meet him at the Acre. This is the absolute last place I want to be right now, on my way to talk to the last person I feel like facing, but I thought it might be okay, having my brother with me.
I thought.
“Look,” he says seriously, “I got to know Mara pretty well when Juliet still lived with her, and I don’t think she’s half as tough as she likes to pretend.”
“No, she is.” My smile catches me off-guard. “It’s more like, she’s not as tough as she lets people assume. She’ll tell you about herself and answer questions if you ask, you know?”
Cohen looks at me carefully. “Actually, no.”
“Oh.” I try to check my surprise. “Well—”
“And you know me, I ask questions all the time. She was a closed book.”
I wave this off. “You were the roommate’s boyfriend. I mean, of course she wouldn’t tell you her life story or whatever.”
“She didn’t even tell Juliet the deal with the scar for, like, a year,” he stresses
. “And that was just a highlight reel. From what you mentioned, it sounds like she gave you the full director’s cut.”
“Maybe,” I say, after a minute. I didn’t tell Cohen much beyond the fact Mara isn’t close to her dad, and about the run-in at the festival. For one thing, I’d assumed she’d told him and Juliet everything and more already, and for another, it wasn’t my story to tell.
She only told me. The thought would make me smile, if I could make any sense of it.
“So.” Cohen leans back against the doors, performing a flawless pivot when they open to the second floor of the Acre. “What do you think Tim’s got in store for us?”
“No idea. Probably signing over the train station so Jeannie can’t get it in the divorce.”
Cohen halts in the middle of the hallway. “Who said they’re getting a divorce?”
“Come on, man.” I turn in front of him and put my hands into the pockets of my sports jacket. “You don’t really think they’re staying together after this, do you?”
“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I wouldn’t jump to ‘divorce’ right out of the gate, though. They have problems, yeah, but—”
“Some problems can’t be fixed.” I start walking again. “They’ve been living a lie for years, now. She cheated, he cheated. It’s all fake.”
“Whoa, whoa.” Cohen grabs my elbow, but I keep going. He doubles his pace. “So now having problems means it’s all fake?” He searches my face, like he’s looking for the seam to pull off my mask and see who I really am. “Cheating isn’t okay, ever—I’m totally with you on that. But that doesn’t mean Tim and Jeannie don’t love each other, or that the entire marriage was a lie. That’s pretty cynical.”
“Do you think Lindsay loved me?”
“Yes.” Cohen’s certainty when he answers makes me stagger, but he keeps talking. “Not anywhere near the way she should have, but yeah—I think she loved you, even after she stopped being in love with you.”
Honey, When It Ends: The Fairfields | Book Two Page 17