“So it wasn’t love at first sight, like it was for him?”
She snorts. “Is that what your dad said? He’s so full of it. No, it wasn’t love at first sight.” She takes a bite of her pizza, pondering. “Don’t get me wrong: I thought your father was cute. But what made me love him was an accumulation of so many things over the years—conversations, small gestures, jokes. He was interested in everything I had to say. He wanted me to achieve my goals as badly as I did. My love for him was like a bucket sitting out in the rain, slowly collecting water, drop by drop, until one day, it was spilling over.” She shrugs. “He was my partner. The person I wanted near me for the good times and when it felt like the world was falling apart.”
“It sounds simple when you put it like that,” I say.
We listen to the song of a whippoorwill, and my mom pats me on the knee. “Love is the simplest thing. Relationships are the hard part.”
She’s not talking about us, but it reminds me of what I’ve been waiting to ask her. “Would you consider coming out east with me one day?” I say, trying not to sound nervous. “I’d like you to show me your whales.”
She turns to me, surprised.
“Don’t you wish you could see them again?” I ask.
“I’d love that, honey.”
After my parents have gone to bed, I sit in the porch swing, staring at the silhouette of the apple tree against the night sky. I think about my mom, and Mimi, and the assumptions I’ve made about other people’s lives, and I send George a message.
I want to hear your story.
He replies within seconds.
George:Which one?
Me:The one where you fall in love with your best friend.
George:Ah. That’s my favorite one.
George:Give me a few days? I think I need to write this down.
Chapter Fifty-one
Thirty days after I last saw George, I wake before the sun has fully risen, as if someone has called my name. But the room is empty. The only sound is the flap of the curtains at the open window. My heart’s patter is quick. Have I forgotten to do something, to be somewhere? I can’t think of anything.
When I get out of bed to shut the window, I find the sky stained with streaks of crimson and ruby. There’s no sign of rain yet, but the sweetness on the wind tells me it’s coming.
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
A blur of brown by the hedge draws my eye. Two rabbits are enjoying their breakfast, right by the spot where the cedar branches part. Just like when I was little, I feel the tug of something waiting for me.
Barefoot, I creep downstairs and hurry through the dew-glistening grass in my nightgown. The rabbits bound into the hedge as soon as they catch sight of me. I’m out of breath by thetime I reach the mailbox. The little log cabin is now weathered and gray, and it creaks when I open the roof.
Inside are sheets of paper, torn from a notebook and folded in half.
George is home.
I hesitate before reaching in to remove the pages. I know whatever this letter says will change things yet again. I shut my eyes, and then I take them.
• • •
George’s handwriting isa chaos of cursive and printing, the words racing from his pen. I read the letter right there in my nightgown and bare feet, only to find that it isn’t really a letter at all.
Once upon a time, there was a boy named George.
It’s George’s story.
George was very sad. First, he lost his mom, and then his dad left him behind. He was eight years old, and he’d only visited his grandmother twice before. Once when he was a baby and then again when he was seven, when his dad left him alone with his strange grandmother right after his mom died.
That weekend, the boy was afraid. His grandmother was tiny and leathery and wore funny wigs. He hated the smell of her cigarettes. But his grandmother’s house had a gigantic backyard he could escape to. And when he went outside, he heard a girl laughing and a woman calling her name. Heloved the sound, so he crept closer and closer to the laughter and to the voice calling, “Frankie. Frankie. Get down from there. You’ll break your neck.”
