by Emily Giffin
When I return to the living room, I see that Grant has built a small fire and is waiting for me on the sofa with a bottle of wine and two glasses. He smiles at me as my heart races.
“Aww,” he says, doing a half stand as I approach him. “You’re so cute with wet hair.”
I smile back at him as he takes my hands in his before we sit together.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asks, gesturing to the bottle.
I tell him I’d love one, and he pours our glasses a little more than halfway full, then raises his. I do the same, finding it impossible to believe that it’s been only six days since we met.
“To us,” he says, as I remember our first toast: To moving on.
“To us,” I repeat, nodding, thinking that he got it right, once again.
We clink our glasses and take a sip, our eyes still locked.
I swallow, then say, “I don’t know much about wine…but this is really good.”
“Yeah,” Grant says, now reclined with his feet on the coffee table. “I don’t really, either. My brother’s the wine guy.”
“I hope I meet him someday,” I say. “And your parents.”
He blinks, his expression instantly changing for the worse. I brace myself, somehow knowing what’s coming. Sure enough, he clears his throat and says, “So my dad died—”
“Gosh, I’m so sorry,” I say, squeezing his hand.
“It’s okay. It happened a long time ago. My brother and I were six years old. But thank you.”
I wait a few seconds for him to say more, tell me how he died. When he doesn’t, I say, “What was he like?”
“He was a great guy. A really great guy. Honest, hardworking, loyal. Always wanted to help people, and never met a stranger.” He smiles as if remembering something specific, but it quickly fades as he continues. “Anyway, one night, he was on his way home from work. At the steel mill. Second shift. Four to midnight. It was nasty out. Typical February in Buffalo. Rain, snow, sleet, the whole nine…And he sees a guy on the side of the highway with a flat on his Mercedes. So my dad stops to help. I’m sure he didn’t even hesitate…partly because that’s the kind of person he was, and partly because he loved working on cars. He could change a tire blindfolded….So he stopped and popped on the spare in no time.” Grant pauses to take a sip of wine as I stare at him, riveted and very scared of what’s to come.
“So anyway. My dad starts walking back to his car just as a van slides on a patch of black ice and hits him….And that was it.”
“Oh my God,” I say, wincing, squeezing his hand harder. “Grant.”
He takes a deep breath, then says, “They say he died instantly and never knew what hit him. I want to believe that…but who really knows?”
I tell him again how sorry I am.
“Yeah. It was rough…especially on my mom. She was really never the same after that.” He shook his head.
“Did she ever remarry?”
“No…never did.”
“Did your dad have life insurance? A pension?” I say, hoping the question isn’t a crass one.
“Yeah,” Grant says. “He had a union-sponsored life insurance policy and a vested pension with survivors’ benefits. It was decent, but not like it was when he was working.”
“What did your mom do? Did she work?”
“Before the accident, no. She was a stay-at-home, milk-and-cookies-type mother.”
“And after?”
“After he died, she worked here and there as a receptionist and then a secretary….But it was hard because she wanted to be home for us….You know, since we’d already lost one parent.”
“Of course,” I say, feeling heartsick for those little boys. For her.
“She was a great mom,” Grant says.
I freeze, hearing the past tense. Was. “Oh my God…Did she…” My voice trails off.
“Yeah. She passed away, too,” Grant says.
I shiver. “When?”
“October second. Nineteen ninety-three. Three days before her fortieth birthday.”
I try to do the math in my head. “So you and your brother were…twenty-two?”
“Yeah,” he says, as both of us keep our eyes straight ahead, fixed on the fire.
I swallow, reach out and touch his hand, and say, “Was it…cancer?”
Grant says no, it wasn’t cancer. Then he takes a deep breath and says, “She had what they call familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
I shake my head and say I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.
“Yeah, you have. It’s ALS…Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
“Oh. Yes,” I say, thinking of Morrie in Tuesdays with Morrie. “But wait…familial?”
“Yeah,” he says with a grimace.
“So ALS…runs in families?” I ask as gently as I can.
“Not usually. But sometimes it does,” he says, looking down at me, his eyes turning glassy. “It does in mine.”
I freeze, too petrified to ask the only question on my mind, as Grant says, “I don’t have the gene.”
I take a breath, overwhelmed with dizzying relief until Grant says, “But my brother does.”
My thoughts race as I think of eye color—the fact that a brown-eyed person can have a recessive blue-eye gene. “He has the gene,” I say, praying, “but what about the actual disease?”
“He has both,” Grant says. “He has the gene. And the disease.”
“Shit,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry….How long has he had it?”
“He was officially diagnosed two years ago,” Grant says. “June of ninety-nine…But he had symptoms before that. Symptoms that we knew all too well…shaky hands, stumbling on stairs, falls…”
“Is it possible…that he just has a mild case?”
Grant shakes his head. “It doesn’t really work that way. It’s a degenerative disease. It progresses….”
“Always?” I ask.
“Always,” he says. “For everyone.”
“But it can progress slowly, right? For some?” I say, grasping at straws.
“I guess that’s a matter of your perspective….I mean, life is fast even when it’s long….And things can drag, too….” His voice trails off.
I nod, trying to decipher the answer. Is he being philosophically vague because he doesn’t really know what the future holds? Or because it’s already so bad that he doesn’t want to talk specifics? I play it safe and wait for him to speak. Several long seconds pass before he does. “It’s different for everyone. But when it picks up, it picks up fast…at least it did for my mom—and it seems to be tracking that way for Byron, too. That’s why we’re going to London.”
“Oh,” I say, putting everything together. “For treatment?”
“Yeah. We got him in a clinical trial,” Grant says. “At King’s College Hospital.”
“That’s great,” I say, trying to sound upbeat though I’m on the verge of tears.
“We’ll see. First I have to get him to actually go. He keeps wavering. He’s stubborn as hell.” Grant shakes his head, a slight smile on his face.
“Why’s he wavering?”
Grant sighs and says, “He thinks it’s futile…and a waste of time and money….He doesn’t want to be a burden.”
“On you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, he won’t come out and say that. But he just makes all kinds of excuses.”
“Is the trial…really expensive?” I ask tentatively.
“Yeah…especially when you add in travel and stuff,” he says. “And he’s between jobs so he doesn’t have health insurance. Not that a study in the UK would probably be covered….So anyway. That’s my sob story.” He gives me a tight-lipped, strained smile that is as heartbreaking as tears, then says, “So…did my tragic tale scare you away yet?”
“No,” I say. “Quite the opposite.”
“So you still like me?”
“C’mon. Of course I still like you,” I say, staring into his eyes. “I like you more.”
He lets out a brittle laugh, as if to deflect, then blinks a few times and says, “I find that a little hard to believe. But if you say so.”
“It’s true,” I say. “The more I know about you, the more I like you.”
He takes my hand and squeezes it.
“Thank you for sharing all of that with me. For trusting me…”
“I do trust you,” he says. “But I don’t want to drag you down with all of this heavy shit—”
“You’re not dragging me down,” I say, cutting him off.
“I hope not,” he says. “Because I gotta tell you, Cecily…meeting you has been the only bright spot in my life for what feels like a pretty long time.”
“Really?” I say, equal parts touched and sad.
“Yeah,” he says. “Really. But I want to be a source of light for you, too.”
“You are,” I say.
“Well, I hope so.” He hesitates, then says, “Do you remember what you said the other night? About timing?”
“Kind of,” I say, trying to recall my exact words.
“You said that the whole ‘bad timing’ line is a cop-out.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I think it is.”
“Well, I loved that,” he says. “I really loved that.”
I stare into his eyes, feeling a warm, tingling buzz that isn’t from the wine. At least not only from the wine. “Why?” I finally say.
“Because I really do worry about our timing,” he says, one arm draped on the back of the sofa, the other encircling me. “But I like you, Cecily. I want to know you.”
“I want that, too,” I say as our eyes lock and my vision blurs.
And then it happens. He puts one hand on my cheek, then lowers and tilts his face toward mine until we are just inches apart. Less than that. When he closes his eyes, I do the same, waiting, spinning, falling harder by the second. Until finally, finally, I feel his lips softly graze mine. Time stands still, and I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can’t think. All I can do is listen to the crackling of the fire and my heart pounding in my ears. Then we kiss for real—a long, deep, hungry kiss—as I feel myself fall all the way.
We kiss for what feels like hours, but do very little beyond that. In a sense, it’s frustrating, but I also kind of love how slowly he’s taking things, as well as the anticipation of what’s to come.
In a funny way, it also gives me the opportunity to fully digest the finality of breaking up with Matthew. It’s impossible to avoid thoughts of him completely—we were together for so long—and I want that to no longer be the case before something more significant happens. It occurs to me that Grant might be doing the same—or maybe he’s just being really respectful.
The one thing I know for sure is that it’s not a lack of passion holding us back; I’ve never felt such intense chemistry with anyone—which, by definition, can’t be one-sided.
When the wine is gone and the fire is reduced to glowing embers and we are both struggling to keep our eyes open, we climb the ladder to the loft, where we undress most of the way, then crawl between soft flannel sheets.
As Grant pulls the curtains closed around our alcove, I admire the lines of his torso and put my hand on his back. He rolls toward me, holding me as I lay my head on his chest like I did on our first night together. Only this time, we are skin to skin, and he’s no longer a stranger, and I don’t have to wonder what it’s like to kiss him.
* * *
—
The next morning, after coffee and a lot more kissing, we go for a long, easy hike—which is really more of a glorified stroll through the woods. We talk about a lot of things, including my family.
I tell him my mom’s a nurse in a pediatrician’s office, and my dad’s a pilot for Southwest Airlines—and that they’ve been together since college.
He asks what they’re like, and I smile and tell him they’re both sort of cheesy, but in the best possible way.
“Cheesy how?” he says, smiling.
“Like they put on Hawaiian shirts and leis and go to Jimmy Buffett concerts…and my dad is the pun king—and my mom laughs every time no matter how old and tired the material. She thinks he’s hilarious…and their favorite show is America’s Funniest Home Videos,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It’s so embarrassing.”
“Ooof,” he says with a laugh. “That’s rough.”
“Brutal.”
“What about your brother and sister?” he says, obviously remembering our conversation in the diner the day after we met. “What’re they like?”
“They’re great,” I say, wondering why it’s so hard to describe the people we know and love the most. “Jenna’s a nurse like my mom, and Paul works for the Milwaukee Brewers in marketing—he’s a total sports nut.”
“Is either of them married?”
“My sister is. To a great guy named Jeff. My brother’s single. He’s only twenty-four, but we joke that he’ll never settle down. He’s very good-looking. Currently dating Miss Wisconsin 1999.” I laugh and roll my eyes. “But anyway, we’re all really close.”
“And does your sister have kids?” he asks.
“Yeah. A little girl named Emma. She’s two and so adorable. She’s one of the reasons I think about moving back home. I don’t want to be that long-distance aunt she barely knows.”
“I get that,” Grant says. “There’s nothing more important than family. And it sounds like you have a really good one.”
“Yeah. I’m lucky,” I say, feeling a guilty twinge for having a family so unscathed by tragedy given all that he’s been through. We’ve had no fatal accidents, no terminal cancer. Hell, Willard Scott just wished my great-grandmother a happy hundredth on the Today show. “But no family is perfect,” I add.
He smiles and says, “Oh, come on. You can admit it. You’re just like the Waltons.”
I laugh and say, “John-Boy had problems, too, ya know.”
“Such as?”
“Well,” I say. “They were all trying to survive the Great Depression…and remember how he lost his first novel in a fire?”
“Nope,” he says. “I must’ve missed that episode.”
“Well, he did….And when he left the family mountain to move to New York? That wasn’t easy,” I say, thinking that I could certainly relate to that plot line.
The parallel must occur to Grant, too, because he says, “Wait, wait. Hold up. Are you John-Boy?”
I laugh and elbow him as I say, “No. I’m not John-Boy…but I guess I do feel torn sometimes.”
“Torn how?”
“I don’t know…just the whole moving to New York thing….I wanted to prove to myself that I could be brave. You know, ‘if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere’…yet here I am writing about defunct bowling alleys and how to ‘beat the heat’ over Memorial Day weekend.”
“You’ll work your way up,” Grant says.
“Yeah. I hope so….I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a brat. I know I shouldn’t be covering the world economic slowdown right out of the gate. I have to pay my dues and prove myself…but sometimes I don’t even know if I want to be a reporter at all. I’d really rather write fiction.”
“Then why don’t you do that?”
“Well, I do. On the side sometimes,” I say, thinking about the manuscript I’ve been working on for the last several years. “But I also need to eat.”
Grant nods and smiles.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m doing what I really want to be doing—or what I think I should want to be doing. I worry that I’m on the wrong path…and that I’
d be better off back in Wisconsin, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. So to speak.” I feel like I’m making no sense.
But Grant must pick up on some of the nuances because he says, “So you feel that that might be settling?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You don’t want to do that,” he says. “But I get what you’re saying….At the end of the day, you just want to be happy and fulfilled and sometimes it’s hard to know what that looks like.”
“Exactly,” I say.
I start to say more, but before I can, Grant stops walking, turns to face me, and leans down to kiss me.
* * *
—
The next thirty-six hours are nothing short of magical—the stuff of romantic movie montages—filled with long hikes, conversations by the fire, and endless kissing and cuddling. We don’t have sex, but we do everything else, and it’s all mind-blowing.
On our last night, we go into town to have dinner at a rustic postage-stamp-size bistro run by hippie foodies. I’m wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps that is probably a bit much for the Adirondacks, but I have the feeling Grant likes it. Not only has he complimented me twice, but he’s now staring at me across the table with an expression approaching swooning.
“What?” I say, feeling self-conscious—but in that good way where your skin tingles.
He inhales so hard I see his chest expand under his white linen shirt, then says, “You’re just so beautiful.”
I smile—not because I believe it, but because I can tell he means it. “Thank you,” I say.
“I fell for you the moment I saw you,” he says, looking a little emotional. He fights it with a smile, adding, “When I told you not to call that guy on the phone.”