Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (18 page)

“Whereas your job was so exciting.”

She laughed. “You have a point. But
I
liked it.”

“How’d you get into it to begin with? Is that what you wanted to do?”

“No, I wanted to illustrate children’s books.”

“Oh yeah? What’s your …” He couldn’t think of the word for what kind of paints or whatever she used. “What kind of art?”

“My medium,” she said. “Pastels, mostly. Some watercolors. I draw a lot of cartoony people, little bunnies, fat squirrels. Happy stuff.”

“You should draw me something.”

“What, right now? Like with a stick in the dirt?”

“Later. On a napkin.”

She smiled, testing a foothold with her toe. “Okay. I’ll sign it and everything, and then you can keep it in your junk drawer forever.”

He probably would.

“So did you ever do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Illustrate?”

“Just a little bit. In college. Mostly stuff I wrote myself, which doesn’t count.” She gave the boulder a pat and started walking again.

“Why not?”

“Why doesn’t it count, you mean?”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“You know how families are. My mom thought the art was nice for a hobby, but she wanted me to figure out how to make a living. There was a lot of talk about health benefits and insurance, and I believe the phrases
life-altering catastrophe
and
major strain on the family
were used. So I switched from fine arts to graphic design. I thought I could maybe illustrate greeting cards. When I graduated, I wanted to move to Chicago, but Green Bay had the job listed, and who could turn down a job with the Packers?”

“So then you met Dan, and the rest is history?”

“Complete with shrimp fork.”

“How’d that happen, though?”

“The shrimp fork?”

“No, you and Thor.”

He knew how the shrimp fork had happened. He’d found the video on the Internet after she went to sleep last night. Listening to Dan’s proposal had made him so tense, he’d just about strained a muscle in his neck snapping the laptop closed.

He’d thought the video went viral because of what May did at the end, but it was Thor
and his numb-nuts proposal. The lamest declaration of love in history.

Ben no longer wondered why she’d forked him. He wondered how she’d endured a relationship with such a douche for four years.

She shrugged. “I met him through work. He asked me out. I said yes.”

“That’s the whole story?”

“No, not really. But you know. More or less.” The path emerged into open space, and she stopped short. “Wow, what’s this?”

“Long Meadow.” They came out of the woods into a broad, undulating lawn that stretched in both directions, surrounded by trees and sky. Kids ran wild, moms sat on blankets in the grass, a group of shirtless men played Frisbee.

Ben steered May away from the shirtless men.

“This is great,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “Where’d the city go?”

He pointed to the right. “That way. See, there’s one building, fucking up the view.”

“Oh. Bummer.”

“Yeah. The meadow was designed so you wouldn’t be able to see anything but outdoors, but some zoning moron gave that one the green light.”

“I can’t stand those people.” She didn’t sound like she meant it, though. Her face was full of light when she spun toward him. “You know, those people who are like, ‘Amazing mountain. I think I’ll stick my house right in the middle of this ridge and ruin the view for everybody else’?”

“You hate rich people?”

“No, only the annoying ones. And honestly, if I met them, I’d probably be like, ‘Oh, you have a lovely house.’ ”

That made him crack a smile. “I thought
you
were one of those people, about to get hitched to Einarsson and all. Don’t the Jets’ wives all live in big piles of granite in some rich Jersey suburb?”

She made a jokey, disgusted face. “I did. For a few weeks.”

“Did you hate yourself for it?”

The wrong thing to say. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

“Ah, hell. I was kidding.”

“I know.”

He couldn’t think what to tell her, so he held out his hand and said, “Come on, let’s walk.”

May meshed her fingers with his and leaned into him. After a while, she cheered up again. She smiled at a kid, then pointed to a little dog that looked like a rat. Its owner was pushing it in a stroller, which Ben didn’t find quite as strange as she did. She said this proved her theory that all New Yorkers were at least a little bit crazy.

He felt brighter just being next to her. Like she could transmit all that enjoyment to him by touching him. Inoculate him against every dark obsession, every bad memory.

They passed a group on blankets, a mom with an infant in one of those sling things, another dangling a toy in front of a baby barely old enough to sit up. Some bigger kids were playing a few feet away, trying to get a kite to fly. May couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“What is it?” he asked when they’d passed.

“I hadn’t realized,” she said. “I thought babies in New York … You know, you see them on the street in Manhattan in their strollers, or on the subway, and you feel so sorry for them. Getting carted around, bumped into. All the dirt.”

“What, you thought they were all working in garrets and getting black lung?”

She punched his arm. “No. But I hadn’t imagined this. It’s nice. I can see how it would work now, kind of. Having a family here.”

They walked toward the far end of the meadow.

“You want a family?”

Even as he asked it, he wondered what he was doing. It was a question you asked a woman you wanted to be with. Testing the waters, trying to find out if getting in over your head with her was a good idea.

It wasn’t a question he had any reason to ask May.

“I do, sure. I had one all planned out.”

She sounded wistful, but not sad, so he pushed a little more. “What was your imaginary family like?”

“Two kids, a boy and a girl. Dan was not consulted, mind you.”

“Didn’t he want kids?”

“Someday, sure. But I wouldn’t have even considered it while he was still playing football. The NFL sounds glamorous, but it’s an awful job. The hours are endless, the work’s a
grind, there’s no job security, and it seems like they’re always in PT for one injury or another. I’d have been a single parent, basically. And there wasn’t any way to guess how long he’d be playing or where we’d live or anything, really. That’s one reason we waited so long to move in together. The first couple years we were dating, he thought he might be released, and I was afraid to get too attached. Then he had a great season right as his contract was ending, and he got the offer from New York. I wanted to go with him, but he said maybe we should wait and see how the Jets panned out, first.”

“That’s a lot of uncertainty to put up with.”

“I didn’t think of it that way, like I was putting up with him. I thought it was just what you did, when you loved somebody.”

“You don’t sound so sure now.”

“I’m not.”

“That you should have put up with it, or that it was love?”

“Both, I guess.”

Ben took her lowered eyes and quiet voice as his cue to steer them into the more comfortable territory of sarcasm. “The money’s good, though.”

“There is that.”

They lapsed into silence, which allowed too much space for him to think about Sandy.

They’d had their share of drama, but by the end the writing on the wall had been twenty feet tall. He’d daydreamed about selling the restaurant and moving back to Sardinia, where he could open a local place. Something seasonal and dead simple, where the Michelin critics would never dream of visiting.

Sandy hadn’t been with him on the imaginary airplane.

He thought about May’s illusions. It was easy to love your idea of someone—to fall hard for their very best self. The question was whether, once you had to spend some time living with their worst self, you could bear to be with them anymore.

“You want to sit?” he offered. “Rest your feet for a while?”

“Sure.”

They found a flat spot beneath a huge oak tree, and May futzed with the grass, running her hand back and forth over it. He heard a bee several feet away where there was clover. Maybe it was one of his bees. They were only a mile or so from some of his hives.

“The thing is,” May said, “I’m not as sad as I should be. And
that
makes me sad, because it makes me realize I was being a dope. And then I wonder what’s wrong with me, and I go into this whole mental spiral, and that’s no good.”

“No.”

She turned her head sideways, resting it on her knee. All wrapped around herself, gold hair and red sweater, long legs and black boots. She looked gorgeous and disappointed. He wanted to fix her, but he was the wrong person. Ten times more broken than May was.

“I have a suspicion that I’m in the middle of one of those really important life lessons,” she said. “I’m just not sure what the lesson is yet.”

“I know how that feels.”

“It’s not a lot of fun,” she said. “But it’s really liberating, too.”

“Because you’re not who you used to be, but you’re not who you’re going to be yet, either.”

“And you don’t even have to figure it out if you don’t want to,” she said.

“Exactly. You can do what you want.”

“Tend bees,” she said with a smile.

“Eat borscht.”

“Kiss strange men.” Her eyes were still glistening, her voice husky and solemn when she said it. He couldn’t figure out what it meant. Whether to be funny or serious, or to just kiss her again like he wanted to.

But no. No kissing. Not unless she asked.

He leaned back against the tree trunk, wiping his palms on his jeans. “You think I’m strange, woman?”

“No.” She unwrapped her arms and leaned against the tree beside him, bumping his shoulder with her own. “I think you’re pretty great.”

He let that sink in, soaking it up until it saturated him.

The most meaningful compliment he’d received in a long time.

Ben took her to Park Slope to see about some bees. She liked the neighborhood. The brownstone where he kept the hive was four stories tall, one of a row of beautiful, interconnected red- and beige-brick homes with elaborate stonework and neat front walks on a beautiful leaf-shaded street.

No fish deliveries or abandoned mattresses on the sidewalks. This was a family place, like the park, and it was easy to envision herself living somewhere like it, if she’d been a city woman. Taking the subway to work every morning, coming home to her pretty little brownstone to find her husband sautéing something that smelled delicious, presiding over the kids doing their homework at the table. She’d lean around his shoulder to see what he was making, kiss the side of his neck, and he’d turn to grasp her waist and kiss her properly.

She had to admit, she was dying for him to kiss her properly. Slow and long and deep, or hard like he had last time, with all that heat and urgency. She wanted his body against hers, his hands all over her, and why hadn’t he kissed her in the park?

Maybe because the last time he kissed you, you started crying on a curb, you space cadet
.

There was that. Or maybe he’d somehow intuited she was having marriage fantasies about him. She kind of felt like apologizing for them preemptively, but she wasn’t sure she could quit if she tried. A woman with a brain like hers, hanging around a man like Ben, talking about life and disappointments and babies—what was she supposed to do?

Change your brain to another channel
.

“This looks like
The Cosby Show
,” she said.

“Yeah, it was set in Brooklyn. But I think they actually filmed the exterior shots in Manhattan somewhere.”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“I know a lot of random crap like that. I told you I’d be a good tour guide.”

No one answered when he rang the bell, but he had a key to the building. He led her through the house to the fenced-in backyard, where two stacked white wooden boxes sat in a corner, buzzing.

“There they are.”

“Cool. So what are you going to do?”

“Just a general check. I’ll pull out the screen and look for mites, look to see if there’s enough honey to harvest yet. With winter coming, I want to make sure there are enough bees here to get through the cold months, and that they have enough to eat.”

“Where’s your, you know …” She waved her arm around her head. “Bee hat.”

“I don’t usually wear one. If you know what you’re doing, they’re not that dangerous.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Ben grinned and stepped closer to the box. “You ever been in the kitchen of a busy restaurant during the service?”

“I was a waitress once.”

“Where?”

“Olive Garden.”

“Okay, well, what I’m talking about is a little different. Much smaller, for one thing, because in New York the kitchens have to be as small as possible to make room for more tables in the front. Crammed with people—executive chef, sous chef, pasta guy, grill guy, sauté guy—more than that, really, but the point is, it’s crowded, it’s small, and there’s open flame and boiling water, plus hot oil. It’s fucking dangerous.” He pointed at the innocent-looking humming box. “This is a piece of cake.”

He walked around the side of the box, and May craned to see better. “You want to come closer and look?” he asked. “I think Natalie has a suit you can wear.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll admire you from afar.”

“All right, Guinevere.” He lifted a putty-knife-looking tool from a case he’d retrieved inside the house and slid it slowly around the edges of the lid. “The bees glue everything down. If you leave the hive long enough, they’ll seal the top on.” He pried it off and lifted it slowly, setting it next to the hive. Inside, there were dozens of bees crawling on top of what looked like a set of parallel slats. More landed and flew away as Ben retrieved another tool from the table.

“This is a frame,” he said, pointing to one of the wooden slats. “You put it in with a sheet of wax, and they make the comb and put the honey in it.” He used tongs to lift it out of the hive while a bee landed on his hand. As May watched, the bee seemed to push up in front, and its stinger end pressed against Ben’s hand.