by Emily Henry
Okay, not surely. But hopefully.
Pete took off the apron as she led the way into the bookstore.
“Maybe you should get a Clark Kent trench coat,” I said. “Seems like less hassle than bows and knots.”
“Yes, and who doesn’t want to buy their coffee from a gal in a trench coat,” Pete said.
“Touché.”
“So here we go.” Pete stopped at The Revelatories display, which was now only halfway a pyramid of Revelatories. The other half was comprised of bubblegum pink, bright yellow, and sky blue books. Pete beamed. “Thought it would be kinda neat to do this local-authors display. Showcase the whole spectrum of what we’ve got goin’ on here in North Bear. What do ya think? Grab a stack, by the way.” Pete was already carrying an armload over to the counter, where a roll of AUTOGRAPHED stickers and a couple of Sharpies awaited.
“It’s great,” I said, following her with another stack.
“And Everett?” she said.
“Great,” I answered, accepting the uncapped Sharpie she was pushing into my hand. She started flipping to title pages and sliding books across for me to sign, one at a time.
“Sounds like you two’ve been spending a lot of time together.”
I balked. “Sounds like?”
Pete threw her back into her guffaw. “You know, as private as that boy is, I have to pull a lot from context out of our conversations. But yes, I’ve gathered the clues that you two have formed a friendship.”
I tried to hide my surprise. “You talk often?”
“He probably answers about a third or so of my calls. Sure, I drive him batty calling as much as I do, but I worry. We’re the only family each other’s got here.”
“Family?” I looked up at her, no longer hiding my confusion.
Her own features seemed to snap upward on her face, surprised. She scratched the back of her head. “I thought you knew. I never can tell what he thinks is private and what isn’t. So much of it shows up in his books you’d think he’d be comfortable peeling off his skin and parading through Times Square. ’Course, that might just be me projecting. I know how you artist types are. He insists it’s fiction, so I should read it as such.”
I was barely tracking. Apparently my face revealed that, because Pete explained, “I’m his aunt. His mother was my sister.”
A wave of dizziness hit me. The shop seemed to rock. This didn’t make sense. Two and a half weeks of near-constant (albeit nontraditional) communication, and Gus hadn’t even shared the most basic parts of his life with me.
“But you call him Everett,” I said. “You’re his aunt and you don’t use his first name.”
She stared at me for a moment, confused. “Oh! That. An old habit. When he was a little guy, I coached his soccer team. Couldn’t show favoritism, called him by his last name like any other player, and it stuck. Half the time I forget he has a first name. Hell, I’ve introduced him as Everett to half the town by now.”
I felt like I’d just dropped a wooden doll only to watch six more fall out and discover it had been a matryoshka. There was the Gus I knew: funny, messy, sexy. And then there was the other Gus, who disappeared for days, who had played soccer as a kid and lived in the same town as his aunt, who said no more than he absolutely had to about himself, his family, his past while I spilled wine, tears, and my guts all over him.
I bent my head and went back to signing in silence. Pete kept sliding books across the counter to me, stacking the signed ones neatly on my other side. After a handful of seconds she said, “Be patient with him, January. He really likes you.”
I kept signing. “I think you’re misunderstanding the—”
“I’m not,” she said.
I looked into her fierce blue eyes, held her gaze. “He told me about the day you moved in. Not a wonderful first impression. It’s a recurring issue of his.”
“So I hear.”
“But of course you have to give him a break on that one,” she said. “His birthday’s really hard for him ever since the split.”
“Birthday?” I parroted, looking up. Split? I thought.
Pete looked surprised, then unsure. “She left him on it, you know. And every year since then, his friend Markham throws this huge party to try and keep his mind off it. And of course, Gus hates parties, but he doesn’t want Markham thinking he’s upset, so he lets the party happen.”
“Excuse me?” I choked out. Was this some kind of joke? Had Pete woken up this morning and thought, Hm, maybe today I shall release snippets of shocking information about Gus to January in a random yet cryptic order?
“She left him on his birthday?” I repeated.
“He didn’t tell you that was what had gotten a bee in his bonnet that night you moved in?” she said. “Now, that really does surprise me. If he’d told you he’d been thinking about his divorce, of course it would’ve explained how rude he was to you.”
“Divorce,” I said, my whole body going cold. “It was about . . . his divorce.”
Gus was divorced.
Gus had been married.
Pete shifted uncomfortably. “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. He felt so bad about being rude.”
My brain felt like a top spinning in my skull. It didn’t make sense. None. Gus couldn’t have been married. He didn’t even date. The store seemed to wobble around me.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Pete said. “I only thought it might explain—”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, and then it was happening again: the word-spilling. The feeling that I’d held everything in a moment too long and now had no choice over how much I let out. “I’m probably overreacting. I just . . . This year’s been weird for me. Like, in my mind marriage has always been this sacred thing, you know? Like the epitome of love, the kind that can weather anything. And I hate thinking some bad experiences justify people shitting on the entire concept.”
Gus shitting on the concept. Calling relationships sadomasochistic without even telling me he’d been married. Almost making me feel stupid for wanting and believing in lasting love, just because his own attempt hadn’t worked. Hiding that attempt from me.
But even so, why did I care what he thought? I shouldn’t need everyone to believe in or want the things I believed in and wanted.
When it came down to it, I resented the fact that some part of him must think I was stupid for still believing in something my own father had disproven. And beyond that, I resented myself for not letting go of it. For still wanting that love I’d always pictured for myself.
And a small, stupid part of me even resented that Gus had secretly loved someone enough to marry her, while one brief make-out session with me had apparently been enough to make him relocate to Antarctica without so much as a See ya!
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Does that make sense?”
“Of course it does.” Pete squeezed my arm.
I had a feeling she would have said that even if it didn’t. Like maybe she just knew it was what I needed to hear right then.
16
The Porch Furniture
Thursday at noon, Gus was back at his kitchen table, looking less “sexily disheveled” and more like he’d been dragged behind a dump truck with a loose tailgate. He smiled and waved, and I returned the gesture, despite the sick roiling in my stomach.
He scribbled a note: SORRY I’VE BEEN MIA THIS WEEK.
I wished that hadn’t replaced the nausea with the zero-gravity rush of a roller coaster loop. I looked around: I hadn’t brought my notebook in today. I went into the bedroom and grabbed it, writing, NOTHING TO BE SORRY ABOUT as I ambled back into the room. I held the note aloft. Gus’s smile wavered. He nodded, then jerked his attention back to his laptop.
It was harder to focus on writing now that he was back but I did my best. I was about a quarter of the way through th
e book, and I needed to keep up.
Around five, I (discreetly, at least I hoped) watched Gus get up and move around the kitchen, making some semblance of a meal. When he’d finished, he sat back down at his computer. At about eight thirty, he looked up at me and tipped his head toward the deck. This had been our signal, as close to an invitation as either of us got before we moseyed onto our respective decks and not quite hung out at night.
Now that seemed like a blatantly obvious metaphor—his keeping a literal gulf between us, my readily meeting him each night. No wonder I’d gotten so confused. He’d been keeping careful boundaries and I’d been ignoring them. I was so bad at this, so unprepared to find myself drawn to someone completely emotionally unavailable.
I shook my head to Gus’s invitation, then added a written note to my pass: SORRY—TOO MUCH TO DO. ANYA ON MY ASS.
Gus nodded understanding. He stood, mouthing something along the lines of If you change your mind . . . then disappeared from sight for a moment and reappeared on his deck.
He walked to its farthest point and leaned across the railing. The breeze fluttered through his shirt, lifting his left sleeve up against the back of his arm. At first I thought he’d gotten a new tattoo—a large black circle, solidly filled in—but then I realized it was exactly where his Möbius strip had been, only that had been blotted out entirely since I last spotted it. He stayed out there like that until the sun had gone down and night cloaked everything in rich blues, the fireflies coming to life around him, a million tiny night-lights switched on by a cosmic hand.
He glanced over his shoulder toward my deck doors, and I looked sharply toward my screen, typing the words PRETENDING TO BE BUSY, VERY BUSY AND FOCUSED to complete the illusion.
Actually, I’d been at my computer for nearly twelve hours and I’d only typed a thousand new words. Though I’d managed to open fourteen tabs on my web browser, including two separate Facebook tabs.
I needed to get out of the house. When Gus looked away again, I sneaked from the table out to the front porch. The air was dense with humidity, but not uncomfortably hot. I perched on the wicker couch and surveyed the houses across the street. I hadn’t spent much time out here, since the water was behind Gus’s and my side of the street, but the cottages and dollhouses on the other side were cute and colorful, every porch packed with its own variation on the lawn furniture theme. None was so homey or eclectic as the set Sonya had chosen.
If I’d had no negative ties to this furniture, I’d be sad to have to sell it, but I figured now was as good a time as any. It’d be one less thing to worry about later. I stood and flicked on the porch light, snapping pictures of each individual piece, and some of the whole set, then pulled up craigslist on my phone.
I stared at it for a moment, then exited the browser and opened my email. I could still see the bolded words from Sonya’s last message. I hadn’t deleted any of them, but I didn’t want to read them either. I opened a new email and addressed it to her.
SUBJECT: Porch furniture.
Hi,
I’m beginning to sort out things at the house. Did you want the furniture on the porch, or should I sell it?
I tried out three separate signatures but none seemed right. In the end, I decided not to leave so much as a J behind. I hit SEND.
That was it. All the emotional labor I had in me for the day. So I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed, where I watched Veronica Mars until the sun came up.
* * *
—
On Friday, the knocking on my door came hours earlier than I’d expected. It was two thirty in the afternoon, and as I’d fallen asleep at five that morning, I’d only been awake for a couple of hours by then.
I grabbed my robe off the couch and pulled it over my outfit (boxers stolen from Jacques and my worn-out David Bowie shirt minus a bra). I drew back the linen curtain that covered the window set into the door and saw Gus pacing on the porch, his hands locked behind his head and pulling it down, as if stretching his neck.
He stopped, wide-eyed, and spun toward me as I opened the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. In that moment, I saw the part of his gene pool that overlapped with Pete’s in the way that his expression shifted from confusion to surprise.
He shook his head quickly. “Dave’s here.”
“Dave?” I said. “Dave as in . . . Dave? Of Olive Garden fame?”
“It’s definitely not Wendy’s Dave,” Gus confirmed. “He called me a minute ago and said he was in town. He drove out on an impulse, I guess—he’s in my house right now. Can you come over?”
“Now?” I said dumbly.
“Yes, January! Now! Because he’s in my house! Now!”
“Yes,” I said. “Just let me get dressed.”
I shut the door and ran back to the bedroom. I’d fallen behind on laundry this week. The only clean thing I had was the stupid black dress. So naturally I wore a dirty T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
Gus’s door was unlocked, and I let myself in without thinking. When I stepped inside, it all struck me. We’d been friends almost a month and I was finally in the house I’d peered curiously into that first night. I was tucked between those dark shelves, far overstuffed with books, Gus’s smoky incense smell in the air. The space was lived-in—books left open on tables, stacks of mail on top of anthologies and literary journals, a mug here or there on a coaster—but compared to his usual level of sloppiness, the room was meticulously neat.
“January?” The narrow hall that veered straight into the kitchen seemed to swallow his voice. “We’re in here.”
I followed it as if it were bread crumbs leading to some fantastical place. That or a trap.
I stopped in the kitchen, a mirror image of mine: on the left a breakfast nook, where the table I’d seen Gus sit behind so often was pushed almost flush to the window, and the counters and cupboards on the right. Gus waved at me from the next room over, a little office.
I wanted to take my time, to examine every inch of this house full of secrets, but Gus was watching me in that focused way that made it seem like he might be reading my thoughts, so I hurried into the office. A minimalist desk, all sleek Scandinavian lines and utterly free of clutter, was pushed against the back window.
Where Gus’s house sat, his deck overlooked the woods, but the trees fell away before the furthest right side of the building, and here the view of the beach was unobstructed, the silvery light filtering through the clouds, bouncing along the tops of the waves like skipped stones.
Dave wore a red T-shirt and a mesh-backed hat. Bags hung under his eyes, giving him the look of a sleepy Saint Bernard. He took his hat off and stood as I entered the room but didn’t stretch out his hand, which gave me the disorienting feeling of having wandered into a Jane Austen novel.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m January.”
“Pleasure,” Dave said with a nod. There was a desk chair (turned away from the desk so Gus could face the rest of the tiny room), an armchair wedged into the corner (which Dave had evacuated when he stood), and a kitchen chair Gus had clearly brought in especially for the occasion. Dave sat back in that one, gesturing for me to take the armchair.
“Thanks.” I sat, inserting myself into the triangle of chairs and knees. “And thanks so much for talking to us.”
Dave put his hat back on and swiveled the bill anxiously. “I wasn’t ready before. Sorry for wasting you all’s time, driving out my way. Feel awfully bad.”
“No need,” Gus assured him. “We know how sensitive all this is.”
He nodded. “And my sobriety—I just wanted to be sure I could handle it. I went to a meeting that night—when we were supposed to meet at the Olive Garden, that’s where I was.”
“Totally understandable,” Gus said. “This is just a book. You’re a person.”
Just a book. The phrase caught me off guard coming from Gus�
��s mouth. Gus “Books with Happy Endings Are Dishonest” Everett. Gus “Drinking the Goddamn Literary Kool-Aid” Everett had said the words “just a book,” and for some reason that unraveled me a bit.
Gus has been married.
He caught me staring. I looked away.
“That’s just it,” Dave said. “It’s a book. It’s a chance to tell a story that might help people like me.”
The corner of Gus’s mouth twisted uncomfortably. I still hadn’t read my new copy of The Revelatories—I was afraid of how it might dim or exacerbate my crush on him—but from everything Gus had said, I knew he wasn’t writing to save lives so much as to understand what had destroyed them.
Gus’s rom-com was supposed to be different, but I couldn’t imagine him using anything Dave had said to tell a story with a meet-cute and a Happily Ever After. The contents of this interview would be far more at home in his next literary masterpiece.
Then again, this was Gus. When we’d started down this path, I’d thought I’d be writing bullshit, just mimicking what I’d seen other people do, but really, my new project was as quintessentially me as anything else I’d written; maybe Gus’s rom-com really would have a place like New Eden as a backdrop, all kinds of horrible things happening between kisses and professions of love.
Maybe he was finally going to give someone the happy ending they deserved, in a book about a cult.
Or maybe Dave was barking up the wrong tree.
“It will be honest,” Gus told him. “But it won’t be New Eden. It won’t be you. It will—hopefully—be a place you can imagine existing, characters you believe could be real.” He paused, thinking. “And if we’re lucky, maybe it will help someone. To feel known and understood, like their story matters.”
Gus glanced at me so fast I almost missed it. My stomach somersaulted as I realized he was quoting me, something I’d said that night we’d made our deal, and I didn’t think he was teasing me. I thought he meant it.
“But even if not,” he went on, focusing on Dave, “just knowing you told it might help you.”