20
Maggie
February 15, 1987
I woketo the smell of coffee. For a moment I just lay there, eyes closed, feeling the warmth of Jack beside me and the comfort of a bed that was becoming familiar. His arm was still around my waist.
I felt different. Not in any way I could name—not lighter or heavier, not sadder or happier. Just... settled. Like something that had been vibrating at a frequency too high to hear had finally gone quiet. Like the last tuning fork in an empty room had stopped ringing, and what remained was just silence. Ordinary, blessed silence.
“You’re awake.” Jack’s voice, rough with sleep, close to my ear.
“Barely.”
“I made coffee. Real coffee. Not the terrible coffee.”
“You went to the bodega?”
“I went to the bodega. At six in the morning. In the snow. For you.” He kissed the back of my neck. “If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
I rolled over to face him. His hair was sticking up on one side. His eyes were still half-closed. He looked ridiculous and perfect.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m also making eggs.”
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Your eggs are terrible.”
“My eggs are experimental. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
But we got up anyway, and he made eggs that were somehow both burnt and runny—a culinary impossibility he seemed to have perfected—and I made toast that was only slightly charcoal, and we sat at his tiny kitchen table drinking good coffee and eating bad food and it was, without question, the best breakfast I’d ever had.
“So,” he said, pushing eggs around his plate with a fork. “What now?”
“Now we make plans. Real plans.” I pulled a napkin toward me and took the pen from beside the phone. “The kind with actual dates.”
“You’re making a list. On a napkin.”
“That’s what you do when you want to remember something. You write it on a napkin and hope you don’t throw it away with the dishes.”
He smiled. “Okay. Dates.”
We figured it out together, sitting at that table with coffee cooling between us. Jack would go to New York in two weeks to start at the Times. He’d stay with a college friend while he looked for an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn, maybe Cobble Hill, maybe Carroll Gardens, somewhere close to the subwayand affordable on a reporter’s salary. I’d stay in Boston through March, give Patricia proper notice, pack up my half of the apartment with Diane. By April, if everything went according to plan, I’d be joining him.
“What about work?” he asked. “For you, I mean.”
“I’ll figure it out. I’ve got a few ideas.” I wroteRandom House — Caroline?on the napkin. My college friend who’d gone into publishing in New York. We’d lost touch after graduation, but I was pretty sure I could track her down—directory assistance, or calling the main switchboard directly. “Publishing isn’t the only industry in New York, but it’s the one I know. And it’s where everything happens.”
“You’ll be amazing.”
“I’ll be starting over. New company, new contacts, new everything. Nobody there knows who I am.”
“Yet.”
