I collapse back onto my beach chair, and on instinct all three of them pull theirs closer to me. Dane grabs the remaining babka and shoves it into my hand. A good first step, I suppose.
“You stand up for yourself,” Tom says with authority.
I start laughing, because the thought is so ridiculous. I’m hungover, predumped by my neighbor who I shouldn’t have slept with; my two major codependent relationships are with my dog and a person I only text; and I’m apparently being steamrolled by my parents way more than I thought.
“I think you did most of the standing there, Tom,” I argue.
“So you needed a little help with your parents, big deal.” He shrugs, like that telling off of my mom wasn’t a watershed moment. “That’s what friends are for.”
“Exactly my point!” Kwan says, pleased.
“I appreciate that,” I say, truly meaning it. Maybe there’s something to having adults in your life who try and take care ofyou. Kwan insisting on taking George and Tom blocking me from my mother might be the most restful things anyone could do for me. And maybe that’s my problem. I’m so loaded up with other people’s nonsense, but no one is takingmyloads off. There’s only so much Dane can do—that I’ve everlether do. It feels special to have other people gladly taking on that weight.
But it doesn’t shift my impending dread about what to do about Eli.
“I can’t bombard Eli right now,” I say, thinking out loud. “He has to help his mom get better and deal with his dad, and that’s a lot. I don’t need to be complicating his life any more.”
“Well, weren’t you guys planning to meet up?” Tom asks. “I mean, J and Eleonora at any rate.”
“We never confirmed a time,” I say slowly. “He was being so cagey about the whole thing. Like, he kept insisting wewouldget coffee, but didn’t want to pick an exact moment.”
“Well, that makes sense now that you know he actually lived in New York,” Dane points out.
“Yeah, but isn’t that a sign that something was off to begin with?” I ask.
“It’s not off. He’s a complicated fellow,” Tom sums up in just about the simplest diagnosis I’ve ever heard.
“Preach, Tom,” Dane cuts in.
Tom continues. “His life is in disorder, with losing his grandmother and still fairly recently going through a breakup. I wouldn’t hold it against him that he wasn’t ready to divulge that particular piece. You need totalk with him. Don’t make any more assumptions with half information.”
Kwan is sitting and nodding but looking contemplative. I turn to him. “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden.”
He looks at me with a shy grin. “I was just thinking about my wife, Lina,” he says, and it makes my heart pang, realizing that even decades later, missing her can make him so wistful. “We met pretty late, all things considered. I was a little over forty, and she was a little under. We had so much activity in those years—we never wanted more than one child, so we were a happy little trio once our daughter arrived a few years later. I was always busy with my job. We were together twenty years when she got sick. I realized the other day that I’ve been livingwithout her now longer than I had her. And she was only in a quarter of my life, total. Every year that percentage shrinks a little bit.”
He looks up at the clouds and gets lost in thought. None of the rest of us speak, that sentiment lingering and spreading, like a dandelion’s feathery seeds once they’ve been blown off the stem. It’s somehow so beautiful and so sad at the same time.
When he looks back over to us, I can see his eyes are shining, the memories pushing emotion to the surface. “I’d give anything to have another day with Lina,” he sighs.
And that there, that one sentiment, is all that matters, isn’t it? There’s no regret, no oversaccharine pretending that everything was once always perfect. But it’s the fact that, when we are without someone we love, the big problems don’t seem so big.
Dane reaches out and gives me a shove so hard I wobble the chair. “Ow,” I hiss back at her.
“I don’t think hitting is necessary to get the point across.” Tom gives a look of amused exasperation to Dane.
“All right, but let’s state the obvious,” Dane says and then turns to me. “You’ve gotta tell Eli.”
“You’re seeing him in London anyway, even if he doesn’t know yet that it’s you,” Tom points out.
“Yeah, but maybe I shouldn’t ...,” I venture, my mind a knot that seems impossible to untangle.
But Dane swats me again. “Stop being so self-sabotaging. He thinks he’s doing you some favor by unburdening you with his complicated life. And you think you’re doing him a favor by not complicating it even more with this bonkers secret. But that’s all a pile of nonsense, especially when he realizes you’ve been having a pseudo-long-distance-friendship-relationship for years anyway. He needs to know.”
“You have to give him thechanceto know,” Kwan says.
I grab the last cardamon bun.
Because I need all the sugar I can get. It’s time to try and make a plan.
