“What are you doing now?” I ask.
“Sitting in the hall outside of your bedroom.” His double voice confirms this.
I want him to come in here and lie in this bed with me, then I want to fall asleep in his arms. I want it so badly I can taste it.
“Why?”
“Because I’m hoping you’ll tell me you called off your engagement so I can break down this door.”
“I did not,” I say. “Tell me a story.”
“About?”
“Anything. Your favorite.”
“Well, you were there for myfavoritestory,” he says easily. I can picture him in the hall, just a few feet and a thin wall between us, with his knees bent and forearms resting on them. Can picture the slant of his lips and the disarray of his hair. “That was only eight years ago, though.”
He blasts a tune on the harmonica, and my brain rewires itself.
“Something about Ben Franklin then.” Though there’s nothing he can tell me about the man that he hasn’t before, I want to remember. The stories. Him.Us.
“Ah,” he says, smile in his voice. “Our best president.”
I laugh. “He wasn’t a president.”
“But he should have been.”
Then he talks about his historical hero.
He tells me how Franklin was an avid swimmer and invented handheld swimming fins then an instrument called a glass armonica. The armonica—made from thirty-seven glass bowls—never caught on because claims were made that the sound drove people mad.
He explains how Franklin took air baths where he’d essentially sit naked in front of a window for an hour or longer, often reading and writing, in the name of wellness.
Ben Franklin might have been insane, I consider, but the way Nash talks about him makes me wish I knew him.
“Why do you like him so much?” I ask, when he runs out of steam.
“Right now?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because he knew absence sharpens love.” I swoon just a little. “Night, Rue Conway.”
I don’t want the call to end.
“Night, Nash.”
As much as I need the gold and to get back to my life, when we wake up to a forecast of rain for the entire next day, I’m relieved. Maybe even happy.
My dad makes us laugh with his stories and Nash looks at me like I’m the thing he’s spent the last eight years searching for.
When he calls me at bedtime from his spot in the hall, he tells me his favorite story, the one about the time he fell in love in a small antique store in Fontain, North Carolina. “I bought an old harmonica, and all it cost me was my heart.”
It takes all my strength to keep myself in my bed.
And once again, Jonathan doesn’t answer when I call.
Thirty-Three
The beach is crowded, the sun is hot, and everything is newer than 1865, even the sand.
This information hits especially hard since I woke up to an email with the school supply list for next year, which includes a new laptop.
