London Is the Best City in America (17 page)

We tended to go to our own place—this all-night diner over on Central Avenue, where they’d let us order cheap white wine, the very cheapest, the kind that came in the small bottles they’d serve on airplanes. We just preferred it that way, being alone together, than spending time with my friends. We even made a habit of coming back there once I’d moved to the city, once we moved in together. We’d still split six-packs of little airplane bottles, and a large Belgian waffle, and half a container of syrup. We’d just sit there, talking all night about nothing, our legs touching under the table, lightly, the whole time. A whole time ago.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Justin said, as he passed the bright 7-Eleven sign, parking the car by the old pay phone, under the old rock wall. “It’s too weird, you know? It’s a little too weird.”

I stared out the window, taking it all in. It was great to be back here. I had it all planned out. We’d get a couple of Slurpees and a pack of Parliament Lights and some corn dogs. And then sit in the corner of the parking lot and smoke cigarettes and pretend we were sixteen again.

I felt a smile growing on my face, just thinking about it. The first real smile all day—my house, and everything waiting back there, a little less pressing. But no, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t the first smile. I had been smiling that morning by the lake with Grace, hadn’t I? But was that really just this morning? I wasn’t entirely convinced that was even possible.

“You know,” Justin said, “I really
hate
to burst your bubble here, as your excitement is very nice. But my little brother says that the kids don’t even come here anymore. They go to the Golden Horseshoe instead. They hang out there behind Seven Woks.”

“Near the Dumpsters?”

He nodded. “Someone put up a tepee or something.”

“I don’t want to know that,” I said. “Who wants to know that?”

But I started looking around the parking lot. We were, in fact, the only car in there. There could have been a million reasons for that, though. It was a holiday weekend. It was still pretty early.

“What would you do differently now . . . I mean if the gods came down, and made you sixteen again?”

I shook my head, trying to think about it. What were the right answers? Would I not take the chances I took? Would I take different ones?

“Maybe you should give me the magic potion now,” I said, “And I’ll end up a decade back in time, waking up in my bed all
Freaky Friday
like. I’ll race to the mirror to check out my face and start screaming.”

“Except that you look exactly the same.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Except exactly.”

“Anyway . . . I’d get to wish really hard again that I was just right here with you. And that everything was turning out just like it was supposed to.”

I said the rest in my head, because it sounded too silly out loud.
And I wouldn’t make any mistakes this time, and everyone would still love me, and I’d live happily ever after.
But somehow Justin heard the rest anyway, because he reached for my hand and squeezed it. Then he got out of the car and walked around to my side to let me out too.

“You know, Everett,” he said, putting his arm around me. “I’m beginning to think it’s a good thing we broke up. It seems a little like you have trouble letting yourself be happy.”

I thought of Josh, all the trouble he’d managed to get himself into for the same reason, or something approaching the same reason. I thought of what could be going on back at the house—what probably wasn’t: anything zeroing in on honesty, or resolution, or a good-bye.

“It runs in my family, maybe.” I said, holding on to his waist. “But at least now, I don’t have to feel so badly that you dumped me with no apparent reason in the universe for it.”

“No, you should probably still feel bad. That decision had nothing to do with my sexual preference. Really. It wasn’t about that at all.”

“What did it have to do with?’

“You wouldn’t let me kiss you,” he said.

I looked up at him, having only the vaguest memory of what he was referring to, an image that I wasn’t even sure I wasn’t making up right then—of Justin standing before me on the steps, reaching out.

“Don’t you remember? Everyone in our homeroom played that game where you had to pay the toll to go inside for attendance? Peter Peterson was the head gatekeeper. And the toll was a kiss, and you made an extremely big deal that you’d rather have gym with Mrs. Gallagher two periods in a row than even do that. Than even kiss me on the cheek.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about beyond a vague recollection popping into my head of Peter Peterson wearing a Jets jersey. He was standing in the homeroom doorway, his arms crossed, yelling at me about something.

“What ever happened to Peter Peterson?”

“I think he’s in jail,” Justin said.

“I think that’s right,” I said. Then I looked at him. “I’m sorry I wouldn’t kiss you. I’d be glad to kiss you now.”

“Sure, now that you know I don’t want to.”

“I didn’t say I know how to make things easy,” I said.

He leaned down, whispered in my ear. “You may want to work on that,” he said.

When we got inside Sevies, the first thing I did was head to the Slurpee machine in the back. Meanwhile, Justin ran up and down the aisles, grabbing all the other goodies: two packs of cigarettes and potato chips, a king-size bag of Charleston Chews, four cans of grape soda. I was halfway through filling up the second Big Gulp cup with blue Slurpee mix when Justin got a call on his cell phone.

“Is that Chicago?” I said.

“That’s Chicago,” he said, dropping all the goodies in a pile on the Slurpee table. “You’ve got all this?”

“I’ve more than got it.” I smiled at him. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

He started to offer me a cursory, Are you sure? But really, he was already halfway out the front door. His phone already up against his ear. I topped off the second large gulp—capping the rim with a dome lid—the whole time my eyes on our prizes, trying to figure out how I’d get them to the checkout counter. I knew I could take two trips, but I didn’t want to do that. It felt like a certain kind of failure.

So I maneuvered it like this: a pack of cigarettes under each arm, the sodas and Chews in my left hand, the Slurpees and bag of chips in the other. I looked like a scarecrow or a robot, or a fancy Christmas tree—or a little bit of all three.

And this was when I looked up and saw him.

Just standing there.

Right by the cashier. Looking down into his wallet. Wearing jeans and a splattered T-shirt.

Matt.

I looked back down again, before looking up again, just to be sure. But I was already sure. He was buying a pack of cigarettes, pointing to the ones he wanted. He hadn’t seen me yet.

“Oh, my God,” I said. For a second, I didn’t think I had spoken out loud. I was pretty sure I hadn’t spoken out loud. And I started looking all around me for a way out. He was between me and the exit. My only hope was hiding, quickly, behind the Slurpee counter.

But then he looked up at me—heard me, somehow—and I was still right where I’d been. In clear view.

At first, he didn’t do anything. He just stood in place without saying a word. He had all the same things: light eyes, dark skin, girl-waist. His hair still flipped behind his ears—that awkward in-between flip that always seemed a little too businessman, and a little too NASCAR driver at the same time. It was my favorite part about him.

I wanted to be the first one to wave or do something. But I couldn’t. My arms were too full of junk food. I couldn’t even foresee a graceful way to put any of it down, or do anything at all.

“Hey,” he called to me.

“Hey,” I called back, trying to match his tone, his intonation, as if that would help something.

Then I watched as he took his change from the cashier and put his cigarettes in his pocket. I knew he wasn’t going to yell or make a scene or do anything nasty, but I did think—truly—he was going to turn around right then, and walk right out the door. I thought he was going to walk right out the door as though he didn’t know me.

But what he did instead was walk right toward me, carefully removing things from my arms, one item at a time, until he was carrying all of it.

“You’ve been smoking?” he said, motioning to the cigarettes.

I shook my head. “Just today. Not usually anymore.”

He didn’t look like he believed me. It was one of his funny things—one of his requests—even though he smoked, he never wanted me to. Even though he might have done things to hurt me, he never wanted me to hurt myself.

I cleared my throat. “Usually now I don’t. I don’t smoke now so much is . . . my point.”

He nodded. “I saw Meryl earlier,” he said.

“I know.”

“She told you?” he said.

“She told me,” I said.

We started walking to the counter, and he put everything down—beckoning to the cashier, who had disappeared somewhere in the middle of this. He took out his wallet to pay. As if this was what we did. As if we were there together.

The cashier handed him the bag of food, me the tray of drinks. We walked outside, stopping right in front of the store. I was worried I was going to cry. I was so worried I was going to cry. But I willed myself with everything I was not to. Not even to start. Because I knew—
I knew—
if I did, I’d never stop.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the rehearsal dinner at your folks’ right now?” he said.

“Kind of,” I said.

He nodded. “Do you have to go back?”

“Do you want me to go back?” I said.

“What’s that?”

I closed my eyes, tears filling them up. I wasn’t willing to ask for it again—what it was that I had started to ask for. But it turned out, I didn’t have to ask again for anything. He reached out and touched my right cheek. First with the outsides of his fingers, then with the insides.

“Stay,” he said.

For the first several weeks after I left Matt, I had the same recurring dream in which he would be sitting on a stool at the coffee shop near his parents’ home in Maine, drinking a Dr Pepper, a large cup of coffee. This was the whole dream. Nothing else would happen. No one would talk to him, the coffee wouldn’t spill, he wouldn’t stand up or leave. It took me a while to figure out that I probably kept having the dream because this was the last thing I was sure Matt had done. I knew he had gone on to his parents’ (what that arrival scene looked like, I couldn’t imagine), and I knew he had, at one point over the remainder of that weekend, gone to that coffee shop and ordered his usual drinks. I could be sure of it. And I must have wanted to hold on to it, that one last thing I knew about him without question. The one last piece of knowledge that made him mine.

After we walked out of the 7-Eleven, the dream came back to me in full force, almost as if it were more real—more actual—than what was happening now. This—the walking to the car to tell Justin what was going on, that I’d call him tomorrow; the walking back quickly to where Matt was waiting for me—had become the dream, and it was like, without knowing it, someone had slipped me one drink too many. Suddenly the world had become hazy, slow-moving, everything appearing to me in faded, incomplete shapes.

But I followed Matt across the street anyway, in my somewhat stupefied state, to the one lone bench down behind the train station. The bench looked out on this great, misplaced waterfall, which ran into a river I didn’t know the name of. A long row of rocks filled up on each side of it. Lots of woods and trees. It was like walking out of suburbia and into the middle of nowhere for a quarter of a mile or so.

We took a seat on the bench, a small space between us, and started to try to talk. I wasn’t even sure how. I really didn’t want to say the wrong thing to him. There seemed to be no safe territory. I doubted Matt wanted to talk about my leaving him that morning. I was scared of discussing that too, scared that he’d get mad and walk away and leave me alone here, which maybe I deserved. But I also didn’t want to cover the time since. What was I going to say, anyway? I didn’t want to tell him I was still living in Narragansett. I was afraid he’d misunderstand. And I was equally afraid he’d understand exactly.

“So I started playing ice hockey again,” Matt said. “Up in Katonah actually. There’s this intramural team. We head up there every Saturday morning. Nine A.M. The goalie’s a woman. Her name’s Betty Lou. She just turned seventy-three.”

“And she’s good?”

“She can kick my ass.”

I shook my head. “You’re making this up.”

“Scout’s honor,” he said, raising his hand.

“So that’s what you’re doing home this weekend? Celebrating Betty Lou’s latest birthday?”

“That,” he said. “And helping my parents get ready to move.” I must have looked at him disbelievingly because he kept talking. “They’re moving to Maine full-time. They like it better there anyway. So . . . I helped them repaint the downstairs, and they needed me to pack up whatever of my belongings I don’t want left behind, and they’re getting the hell out of Dodge.” He lit a cigarette, and offered me the pack.

I shook my head, and he nodded, taking a drag. He did it in that way, though, blowing the smoke out the side, the way he used to, when he was nervous about telling me something. Which is why I’m not sure why I was surprised when he did.

“I’m actually thinking about moving too,” he said. “I’m supposed to move. I’m supposed to go to Paris.”

“Paris?” I looked at him. “As in France?”

“As in France.”

I looked away from him, and then straight ahead at the waterfall. The water was doing the heavy lapping farthest away from us, vanishing over the bend. Unbelievable. He could have said anywhere else in the world, and he wouldn’t have conjured up inside of me everything I was feeling now. How could I help but think of that trip to Paris that Matt and I had gone on together? And of course, the trip we
didn’t
take all those years later, after we’d gotten engaged?

I cleared my throat. Matt hated Paris. Or at least didn’t like it. If there were anything I didn’t have a question about, it was that. Which let me know the first thing I didn’t want to know, sitting here with him tonight. Someone was making the choice
now
for him.