“Safe travels.”
Priyanka steps back and gives her a long look. “You too,” she says finally.
Up until that moment, Mae wasn’t completely sure. But right then, she realizes they both know exactly what she’s going to do.
Afterward, she walks around the side of the house and finds Nana out on the porch, her favorite spot to nap these days. Her eyes flicker open as Mae jogs up the old wooden steps.
“And then there were two,” Nana says with a melodramatic sigh. “I can’t believe Priyanka busted out of here before us.”
Mae laughs. “Won’t be long now.”
“Five days,” she says. “But who’s counting?”
They tried to persuade Nana to stay permanently, arguing that the country would be more relaxing for her. But she made it clear she has no interest in relaxing, and now that she’s got a clean bill of health, she insists on moving back to her own apartment in the city.
“You know what Iwillmiss about living here?”
“Giving my dads a hard time?”
Nana laughs. “No.”
“The burnt coffee?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“You,” she says, and Mae smiles.
Out on the street, a red car that looks just like Garrett’s comes spinning around the corner, and for a second, Mae thinks maybe it’s him. But of course he’s already gone.
As if she can see right into Mae’s head, Nana says, “You doing okay with everything?”
This strikes Mae as funny, coming from someone who recently went through four straight weeks of induction chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia. But she doesn’t say so. “Yeah,” she says instead. “I’m doing fine.”
“You know, the only way to get over a broken heart is to find someone new.”
“This isn’t a broken heart, Nana. Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s bruised.” She thinks about what Priyanka said, imagining her heart packed carefully away, a tiny fence around it. Then she glances sideways at her grandmother. “Have you ever been on a train trip? Not the train to the city, but something longer.”
Nana is quiet, but her eyes have a faraway look. “I was only a little older than you,” she says with a wisp of a smile. “Maybe nineteen or twenty. A friend and I took a train to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. She had some family down there, so we went on a lark. That first morning, I met a boy in uniform, and he bought me a cup of tea. My friend barely saw me for the rest of the trip.”
Mae sits forward. “So what happened?”
“What do you mean what happened? We talked. We flirted. We kissed.”
“You did?”
“Of course we did,” Nana says impatiently. “We were in love.”
“People don’t fall in love that quickly,” Mae says, thinking this sounds suspiciously like one of the old romantic movies her grandmother loves so much.
But Nana is adamant. “They can. And we did. We spent the whole weekend together, dancing and eating and listening to jazz. We were practically giddy. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other and couldn’t stop—”
Mae hurries her along, eager to move past this description. “And then what?”
“Then we said goodbye.”
“But if you were in love…?”
