Laura shrugged. “No need. We’ll figure out something to tell her.” She glanced at Paul. “You’re okay pretending you’re a building inspector, right?”
“Just give me a pen and a clipboard.”
“Improv. Right.” Then she smiled, and I realized she was happy to see me happy. “Well, I’m going to head to bed,” she said. “You two have fun.”
I led Paul into my bedroom, and he looked around, taking it all in. The room smelled of my scattered collection of perfumes, the musty ventilation system of older New York buildings, and the city at night.
He took my face into his hands and kissed me, gently. It was an optimistic kiss, like the start of something. Then he took my hands and led me onto the balcony, and he leaned out over the railing to look both ways. The view was nothing too exciting: the glow of an awning lit up on the corner, some mid-century apartment buildings in slow decline, people calling to each other at street level, seeking connection or possibly drugs.
“So,” he said, “the Big City.”
I took his hand, threading my fingers through his. It felt right, like we were facing this together. He leaned over into my ear.
“Important question about apartment living, since your niece is in the living room.”
“Yes?”
“Exactly how quiet do we need to be?”
I started laughing.
Lauraand I ran into each other an hour later as she was coming out of the bathroom and I was going into it, already in my pjs.
“He looks like Tom Hiddleston, Abby. What the fuck? You said improv comedy and I thought he’d be some off-brand Adam Sandler.”
“Don’t tell him that. He doesn’t know he can do better than me.”
“There’s no one better than you.” She put her arms around me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I couldn’t remember the last time that our mother had given a kiss like that: it felt like a blessing.
The next morning,Paul was up and dressed before Hannah got up, and we told her that he’d come over early to show off his pancake recipe.
He demonstrated his cooking techniques in the kitchen while Hannah observed him curiously from one of my stools. He offered to let her flip a pancake and then carefully held her over the stove while she did so, one hand behind hers on the spatula. I watched them, smiling.
Hannah suspected something weird was going on, but she couldn’t quite figure out what.
“Are you a real chef?” she said at last, her eyes full of doubt.
“No,” he said. “I’m actually a teacher.”
“Yeah.” She considered this, nodding slowly. “That makes sense.”
EPILOGUE
WINTER
It turnsout that I hate January in Newfoundland.
The piles of snow get taller than the pedestrians in some places, and the stores are stocked with whatever sad, expensive fruit we can get from tanker ships. The coast is stunningly beautiful, bedecked in white and ghostly silent under the frost, but the process of digging out your car every time you want to go anywhere gets old.
So instead, I’m sitting inside next to Paul’s woodstove—our woodstove, for the last year—and letting Paul take his turn running errands while I write a letter to Hannah. She likes getting hand-written letters from me, and the more fancy Canadian stamps I put on them, the better. She spent three weeks with Paul and me over the summer, and she has announced she wants us to have an ‘official wedding,’ since the first one we did was a hurried affair at the city hall which ‘didn’t really count’ because I had neither a princess dress nor sufficient flowers, and more importantly, because she wasn’t there to see it.
I’ve told her that she can come up and plan a better wedding for us herself when she comes back this summer, and we’ll have it somewhere along the coast. I’ve agreed to let her pick thespot, and I’m hoping she’ll choose a farmhouse in honor of my friend Jasmine. There aren’t really that many people I’d want to invite. I’ll start with Laura and her new boyfriend Ollie, who is a quiet tax attorney from Laura’s work who seems to make her happy. I’ll ask Jasmine and Lucas and whoever they are dating at the moment, which changes frequently enough that they always qualify for ‘and guest’ on their invitations.
There’ll be Lisette, of course, and the rest of our improv group: Ellen and Jacob and Rene. The five of us make a good team, I’ve found, and you can do much more elaborate scenes and movie re-enactments when you have more people.
I’ll invite Mrs. Mahoney and her daughter Penny and her family, if they can make it up from Ottawa.
I’ll invite Kedar, who won’t come but will be glad to be invited, even though I only freelance for him now.
