“I think it’s lovely,” Nana says with the same dreamy look she gets when they watch old movies together. “A dramatic send-off.”
“I’m not sure how dramatic it will be,” Mae tells her. “We always knew we were going our separate ways.”
“That doesn’t make it any less romantic,” she says, beaming. She’s wearing a blue silk robe, and she looks tiny inside it, lost in the folds of fabric. All the chemo she went through this spring—a course so intensive she was in the hospital for over a month—seems to have shrunk her. But it worked, and now, whenever someone remarks on how much weight she’s lost, Nana only grins. “Must’ve been a whole lot of cancer in there.”
It rattles Mae sometimes to hear her joke about it; she knows how close they were to losing her. When Mae was little, some of the kids at school used to ask whether she missed having a mother, and she was always quick to bite their heads off: “I have two dads,” she’d say, eyes blazing. “And I bet they’re both better than yours.”
But that was only half the truth. The other half was that she had Nana.
Every Sunday, they’d drive down to have brunch in her sunny brownstone on the Upper West Side. The place was cluttered with a lifetime of knickknacks, but whenever Mae asked about anything in particular, Nana’s answers were always short on details. “I’ve lived a big life on a small island,” she’d say. “You can’t expect me to remember every piece of flotsam and jetsam.”
It wasn’t the things you’d expect that made her so important to Mae. Her dads were perfectly capable of helping her pick out clothes or teaching her about the birds and the bees. It was more about drinking tea on Nana’s window seat and watching old black-and-white movies together and listening to stories about her past. It didn’t matter that they were sometimes hard to believe. (“There’s no way she had cocktails with JFK,” Pop would say, exasperated.) That wasn’t the point. The point was that she was there at all.
It was like having an extra sun in their orbit, an inexhaustible source of warmth and energy. They were a constellation of their own, Mae and Pop and Dad, but knowing Nana was there on the edges made their little universe feel complete.
Now Nana’s eyes are bright as she peers at Mae over a mug of coffee. “Go enjoy your date. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that a girl your age should be out having adventures.”
“But nottoomany adventures,” Dad chimes in as Mae grabs her bag and heads for the door. She gives them a wave over her shoulder.
“I’ll be back later.”
“But nottoomuch later,” he calls out behind her.
Outside, she cuts through the neighbor’s yard and then winds her way through a few side streets until she reaches the edge of town. She can see Garrett waiting outside the cheese shop, busy with his phone. When he looks up, with his messy hair and thousand-watt smile, she feels a tug of regret that this will all be over soon. It’s not like the way her best friend, Priyanka, described it when her boyfriend, Alex, left for Duke last week: like their souls were being ripped apart. Mae’s summer with Garrett has been a mixture of arguing and making out, all of it passionate, but none of it having very much to do with souls.
“Hey,” he says, giving her a kiss as they begin to walk. “How’d it go?”
“What?”
“The film. I thought you were gonna watch it.”
“Oh,” she says flatly. “Yeah. It didn’t help.”
“Really? Still no idea what went wrong?”
“Nope. And thenot knowingis basically killing me.”
Garrett stops and turns to her. “What if I watch?”
“No way,” Mae says, continuing past him. “Not a chance.”
“But I’m a film critic.”
She rolls her eyes. “Having a Twitter account doesn’t make you a film critic.”
“Fine, but I will be someday,” he says, jogging to catch up to her. “So I can give you an honest opinion. And you already trust my taste, so—”
Now it’s Mae’s turn to come to a stop. “I don’t, actually. You have terrible taste. Everything you like is overwrought and pretentious. Plus, all your favorite directors are men, which really sucks.”
“That’s not my fault,” he says, but there’s a spark in his eyes, because he loves a good debate. They both do. “It’s the industry’s. Besides, it could be a good thing that we have different tastes.” He pauses. “Obviously, the admissions board did.”
She glares at him, and he holds up both hands.
“All I’m saying is that you need answers, and I have opinions.”
They’re nearly to the river now, picking their way down the hill toward the maple tree where they’ve spent the better half of the summer bickering about movies and kissing until their lips were swollen. When they get to the bottom, Garrett drops down in their usual spot, but Mae remains standing. She fishes her phone out of her back pocket and pulls up the video file.
“Here,” she says, holding it out to him.
