“I read almost all of them. They were good.”
He gave a sad smile. “So in New York, you’ll still do improv, I hope. I hope we’ve gotten you hooked.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” The space between us felt endless, the hug I hadn’t given at the door haunting me. I could step forward into his arms and do it now.
“This is too sad,” I said.
He nodded.
I looked at the room, where he had tidied up the mess left by his mother. “You know it’s your mother’s loss, that you’re not in her life.”
He shrugged. “I know that, but it doesn’t help. It just makes me worry about her.”
I went on, because he needed to hear this, at least. “You’re marvelous. Maybe when she’s burned her last bridge, she’ll realize that she was the one setting all the fires.”
“I doubt it,” he said with a weary little smile. “But I know your sister needs you,” he said. “So I’m glad you’re going to get to be with her. I always thought that if she needed you, you’d go back.”
I stared into the swirling black quicksand of my coffee mug.
“She can survive without me. She’s moving into my apartment tomorrow, for a few days. So we’ll get back the same day. Honestly, if I wasn’t being forced back by work, I might not have gone at all.”
“But it’s out of your hands.”
“Maybe I could find some other remote job.”
He gave a quick, pained smile. “Well, you’ve never lived here during winter. That’s when people really decide if they like it up here.”
“I like winter, actually. That wouldn’t have scared me. I was happy here. You made me happy. You and Lisette,” I added.
We were both silent, both good at being awfully grown up about the whole thing. I hated it.
“Paul, I—I loved being with you.”
I could see something cross his face, but this time I couldn’t read it. “Thanks, Abby. Me, too.”
I rose, and he stepped forward. I gave him a hug.
“Abby…”
There it was. The feeling, his hands curving around my back. I was pressed into his shoulder, and I could feel him breathing, feel his heartbeat.
Then slowly we let go. It was like that first kiss: I wasn’t sure which of us had taken the step to move away. I put on my coat and took hold of the door handle, the only part of his house that was cold.
“Hey,” he said, as he stepped outside with me, “do you want a ride home or anything? It may start to rain again.” He gazed upat the clouds, which were moving ominously fast and low across the sky.
“No,” I said, glancing up at the dark grey above our heads. “I can handle it.”
I walked as quickly as I could and definitely did not look back until I had turned a corner. Once I was out of sight, I paused and took a breath. I had gotten out of his sight before I could give in to the desire to look back at him.
The morning of my departure,I realized that I had said good-bye to Lisette and Paul but not to Mark. I thought about texting him, but I knew he lived about thirty minutes down the road, and I wanted to see him in person. This felt like the end of an era, and maybe a chance to tell him he’d been right about me and Paul. As a fellow cynic, he might as well hear that he’d been correct all along: we had always been doomed.
I called up Rick, my crossword-loving taxi driver, who was going to take me to the airport and asked him if he could come an hour and a half early and help me find the little donut shop that Mark had said was across the street from his place: Chocolate Heaven. I could surprise Mark with some eclairs.
Rick was happy to drive me because I gave him a few more crossword puzzle clues, and we had a desultory chat as we drove out of the center of the city toward Mark’s suburb. It was slowly turning into a gorgeous day. Sure enough, the pastry shop owner knew Mark, and the owner pointed to a house a hundred feet away, just up the street. I took my box of donuts and told Rick to wait for me in the parking lot and decided to walk over.
Mark’s house was a nice house. A very nice house, in fact, with a broad, colonial face and high ceilings and a front porch. It felt like the setting for some movie flashback about someone’s perfect childhood, porch swings and rose bushes and all.
Thiswas the place he’s been hiding from us?
