It was just before midnight when she let herself into Brian’s apartment. He’d cleaned up, washed-out cans lining the sink. AJ woke him.
He looked at her with tired blue eyes as she stepped forward and opened her palm. Her voice trembled as she spoke. “I tried so hard to want this,” she said, and placed the two-carat Elsa Peretti in his hand.
For a moment, Brian stared at it. Then he closed his fingers. “I know,” he said.
And he stood and held her in his arms as she cried, because he really was a good guy.
New York, New York
May 21, 2013
As of last month, AJwas thirty, which called for some baseline recognition of the march of time and what it did to a person’s metabolism. And so AJ had taken her first brave steps away from Reese’s Puffs into the adult world of Special K Red Berries.
That was what she was doing when she saw the Apple News Top Stories alert—eating Special K Red Berries.
Tony Award winner and comedy pioneer Eudora Drew has died at 84.
It was a Tuesday morning, the week afterSNLhad wrapped for the summer, and AJ’s one-bedroom was bright with spotless sunshine. In the months since her split from Brian, she had gotten into cleaning.
She had never really cared before—she’d always treated her apartment as a crash pad, a way station between her childhood home and the one she’d share with her own family. But ever since ending her engagement, she’d started to see her space differently.
Maybe she already had a home. Maybe she should take care of it.
AJ was also taking better care of herself. The therapist she’d been working with since the split classified her drinking as “more of a chemical crutch than full-blown alcoholism,” but AJ wasn’t taking anychances. Hibernia had been her last drink, and she was sticking to it.
Now when she felt stress, even work stress, she ran. Ran and swiffered.
AJ felt oddly frantic as she clicked on an Associated Press story about Eudora’s multiyear struggle with congestive heart failure. She had died last night at home surrounded by family.
That meant Noah. AJ’s mind returned to their encounter at Simmons a little over a year before, when he’d been taking Eudora for her blood work. She would have already been sick. AJ couldn’t picture Drew House without Eudora sailing through its rooms.
She wondered if Noah was there now, alone or with Allison. The latest gossip was that Allison had walked out after he’d failed to propose during award season. Not that it mattered.
AJ and Noah still had not exchanged a word since Blue Con. AJ had considered congratulating him after the Oscars, but the idea of smooshing into his inbox between every other person he’d ever given his email address to felt too cloying.
Should she reach out to him now?
Only if you’re okay not getting a response.
Instead, AJ deposited her bowl in the dishwasher, laced her sneakers, and headed to Central Park. Spring was an almost nonexistent season in New York, but today was dappled and glorious. AJ walked to the corner of Fifty-fourth and Sixth, then jogged toward the park’s south entrance.
Her favorite loop girdled the Mall and Bethesda Terrace, an ideal route for not thinking. AJ switched to airplane mode, cued up her Spotify, and let the rhythm of her steps do the rest.
When she returned home an hour later, she discovered that Libby had texted her aBerkshire Eaglearticle about Eudora’s memorial service:Wanna go?
AJ stiffened. The last time they’d spoken, Libby had utterly reamed her out for ending her engagement. “You’retoo oldto start over” had been her exact words. AJ sighed. This was Libby’s version of an apology.
As her fingers paused over the phone screen, she stared across her clean, sunlit kitchen, and felt the silence of the room press against her, pregnant as the breath before curtain up.
Grovelawn Manor was Gladstone’shistoric stone mansion-for-rent. AJ hadn’t visited since her senior prom, which she’d spent avoiding Nick Davies and wishing Noah would miraculously appear. To return thirteen years later with the certainty of seeing Noah felt uncanny.
As AJ and Libby merged into a flock of mourners, AJ reassured herself that whileshewould see Noah, it was extremely unlikely thathewould see her. Not in this crowd.
Eudora’s local popularity had skyrocketed in death; the brick path from the parking lot to Grovelawn Manor was teeming. There had to be at least five hundred people here.
AJ almost hadn’t come. She had hemmed and hawed for most of Wednesday, citing a range of hypothetically pressing conflicts, from being on a writing deadline to not wanting to seem like a stalker.
Then that night, she had started flipping channels only to find herself watching a rerun ofAstronauticals,the one where the crew landed on a planet of love children who made nightly sacrifices to a vicious space monster in order to stay young and beautiful forever.
