Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 34

“Odd that you, of all people, would be telling that to me.”
He laughs a little bit through his nose. “Okay. Fair enough.” He looks at me for a long moment, and I’m surprised to see how sad his eyes are. “You have every right to be pissed off at me,” he says. “That was a horrible thing I did to you, and I want you to know that I’ve kicked myself many times.”
I sit down on one of the wicker couches, feeling woozy. “Really? Have you now?”
“Well, let me clarify. I’ve kicked myself for the way I handled it.”
So there we have it. He’s not sorry he left. Just sorry for the way it went down. Nice.
He laughs again. “Please. Let’s don’t talk about this. It cannot lead to anything good.”
“So what happened with Africa? Why aren’t you still there? You had to dump Africa, too, did you?”
He grimaces a little at my joke. “Yes. Africa. Well.” He sits down on the couch across from me and starts peeling the label off his beer, the way he always used to do, and launches into a story that involves Whipple signing both of them up to teach music to schoolchildren as part of a fellowship he’d gotten, but then, as he puts it, bureaucracy happened. Whipple, in typical fashion, hadn’t filed all the papers they needed and after a long, drawn-out time of bobbing and weaving and trying to go through other channels, finally they got kicked out of the country.
“Same old Whipple bullshit,” he says with a sigh. “Fun but sketchy. For a month or so, we hid by traveling around, trying to keep from getting deported. But it was touch and go, and then . . . well, I decided I’d had enough, and—well, I figured I’d come back to the US, and I arrived here in Brooklyn just before Blix died. I think he’s still backpacking around trying not to get jailed.”
He’s silent, picking something off his shoe. Then he looks right at me, and my heart does a little unauthorized flip-flop.
“She liked you, didn’t she?” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”
I look down, suddenly shy. “Yeah, I think she did. She was nice to me.”
“I know. That horrible party at my mom’s. The way she stayed there talking with you the whole time. God, my mom was so pissed that you weren’t circulating! Neither of us circulated much, I guess. Did you know that’s a guest’s job according to my mom? Apparently you can’t just go and have a good time, you have responsibilities.”
“I think I’ve heard something along those lines.”
“Yeah, well—fuck that! I went off and played pool with Whipple because I couldn’t take listening to my mom and all her fakey-fake friends. And—didn’t something else bad happen?”
“Yeah. The Welsh rarebit situation.”
He throws back his head and laughs. “Ah, yes. My mom said you wouldn’t eat it due to some snobbish thing?”
“No, I wouldn’t eat it due to who knew what the hell it even was! We didn’t have such things at chez MacGraw in Jacksonville, Florida. You might have warned me, you know, that there’d be an exam on British culinary practices. But you weren’t anywhere around. I had only Blix to defend me.”
“So that’s when it all started,” he says absently. “That’s when the whole thing unraveled. Whipple and I were playing pool, and he started telling me about his amazing fellowship and talking me into getting in on the act with him, and I was thinking about the need for one more big adventure. You were talking to my Aunt Blix outside in the snow, as I recall. And everything got set into motion.”
“That was it?”
“That was the moment.”
“So you’re saying that if we hadn’t gone our separate ways at that party, then we would have just had our regular wedding and you would have stayed with me? Because, I have to say, that is absurd, and you know it.”
“Well, who knows for sure?” he says. He looks right into my eyes. “All I want to say is that I did love you, you know. I really thought I wanted to get married.”
“Until you didn’t,” I say, and he laughs.
“Yeah, until I didn’t. My bad.”
“So are we to conclude that in the great scheme of things, I lost you but got your great-aunt?”
He puts his hands behind his head and looks up at the sky. “Maybe. Oh, hell. There’s a lot I regret, you know, when I think of her. Our family wasn’t very good to her. I tried to make it up to her at the end, but we never did really connect in a huge way, no matter how much I tried. She was always—well, you know . . . crazy.” He pauses. “Listen,” he says suddenly. “Want to grab some dinner? I haven’t eaten anything today but a peanut butter sandwich. I know this sweet little place on Ninth that’s got amazing burgers and stuff. Some local beers. Good people. Because as long as we’re both here, we might as well have fun, right? No hard feelings for all that bullshit that happened?”
I realize I haven’t eaten in a long time either. “Okay.”
“Are you really not so angry with me, then?”
“Not so much,” I say. “I think I’m having an Insufficient Anger Response, actually.”
“Yeah. You probably should be mad as hell. But I’m glad you’re not.” He stands up and stretches, giving me a view of his nice flat belly and low-slung jeans. It hurts, the deep long familiarity of him, the badassness of him, and finally I have to look away, so I take the last drink of my beer and look out at the lights of Brooklyn instead.
I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be here. I take a deep, full breath of the new unknown. I should call Jeremy. I have so many feelings that I’ll have to sort out later.
“And hey, while we’re eating,” he says, “you can tell me everything that’s going on with you—and why you serendipitously showed up on Blix’s doorstep today.”
I guess that’s when it really hits me that he probably has no idea that Blix has left me the house. That thought arrives at the back of my neck first and works its way around to the front of my brain, rather like a bug making its way around a nerve-wracking circuitous path.
Just then, the door to the roof bangs open, and a kid who looks to be about ten years old, with a mop of pale hair and a huge pair of round black plastic glasses, comes charging onto the roof, dribbling a basketball and dancing all around. He leaps up onto the edge of a planter, but he doesn’t notice us until he’s making his last mental calculation, and when he does, he’s so startled that he doesn’t quite make the height he needs. The ceramic planter falls over and smashes on the ground, and dirt goes everywhere.
“Sammy, my man! What the heck you doing?” Noah says.
“Oh! Sorry!” The boy stops and looks instantly horrified.
“Nah, it’s okay. It’s just a planter. You scared me, that’s all.”
“I’ll clean it up.”
“No, go get a broom and dustpan, and I’ll take care of it. I don’t want you to get cut.” Noah turns to me. “This is Sammy, our resident lovable juvenile delinquent and breaker of pottery. His mom is Jessica, the one I was telling you about. And Sammy, this is Marnie.”
Sammy says hi to me, and pushes his hair out of his eyes, and then he runs off and comes back with the dustpan and the broom, and Noah and I get to work sweeping up all the shards while Sammy bounces his basketball over in the other corner of the roof. I keep stealing little glances over at him because he’s so adorable—like a serious little owl with good dance moves.
“Hey, Noah, guess what!” he calls after a few minutes. “My dad’s coming to get me tomorrow morning, and we’re going to Cooperstown for the weekend.”
Noah gives a fake growl. “What’s so great about Cooperstown? You don’t care about baseball or anything, do you?”
“Yes, I do! You know I do! And we’re gonna stay in a B and B and have pancakes for breakfast, and he said maybe there’s gonna be a pool.”
His mom appears just then. She’s thin and gorgeous and wearing jeans and a gray cardigan and she sighs a lot. She looks over at Sammy like any minute he might turn into something that’s going to disappear on her.