“Youquit? Why?” The forkful of gnocchi lowered somberly.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like being a lawyer.”
“But you went to law school.”
“I know.” She had the loans to prove it. She was good at the things that make good lawyers; she had an analytical brain, and she was a good listener, and a good communicator. But she hadn’t thought through enough what the actualdoingof the job would be like, and now that she’d done it, she knew it didn’t suit her. “I’m bored, Zachary. And I don’t want to be bored for the rest of my life.”
“Bored?”
“Aren’t you ever bored?”
He blinked at her. “No?” In high school he’d been a middling backstroker, and he gave off a perpetual vibe of having emerged from the deep end after a relay, shaking water out of his ears.
She tried coming at it from a different angle. “Do you—do you think maybe we act older than we are?”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I mean, do you ever feel like we act like we’re sixty?”
“My parents are sixty.”
“Exactly.”
“And I think they have a really good life.”
She sighed. “Exactly.”
He lowered his voice and asked, “Is it the sex?”
Yes, Nicola thought, but didn’t say. “No.No.” Zachary looked relieved. “I just feel like I need—a change. Something different.”
Nicola has friends who are married or engaged to be married; her best friend from University of Rhode Island, Reina, who lives in Brooklyn, already has a toddler and an infant. Two wholly separate lives, two beating hearts, four lungs, twenty fingernails and twenty more on the toes, are dependent on someone who was a champion Flip Cup player until age twenty-five. It’s not that Nicola doesn’t want to end up there eventually (maybe), it’s that she doesn’t want to go from one to the other with nothing in between.
When Zachary had helped her carry the last box down to her car he’d cried. She tries not to think about that now.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure she comes to her own parties,” says the guy in front of her.
“I don’t think she does,” says the female. “Or she might make an appearance, sometimes.”
“Let me get this straight,” Nicola says. “This famous person named Juliana George throws these parties and doesn’t even come to them? Why would she do that?” She’ll have to move her white noise machine closer to her head. Maybe she’ll prop it on her pillow, where a romantic partner might go, if she had one.
“Dunno,” says the girl. She takes the guy’s hand, the one not holding the vape, and turns to make her way back toward the house, tossing an invitation over her shoulder. “Hey, Polar Bear Girl, you should come in. Get a drink.”
“No, thanks,” says Nicola. “I have work in the morning.” It doesn’t matter. The couple is gone before she’s finished talking, and her words dissolve into the night air.
The next evening Nicola, tired and cranky, has been invited to have dinner with David and Taylor. She’s due at seven, so at six-thirty she hops on her bike to make her way, for the first time, to the Carr-Buchanan home. She can practically see where David and Taylor live by peering across Great Salt Pond, but, not being a fish or a bird, she has to bike out Corn Neck to Beach to Ocean to West Side to Champlin before turning right on a dirt road, rutted and hilly, that leads past a gate from an old horse barn, past meandering stone walls, and finally to the house.
And there, swinging open one of the double dark-wood front doors, cool as a frozen cucumber, is David, her favorite cousin, the brother she never had, her partner in crime on long-ago humid, firefly-laden summer nights at the lake. When David was fifteenand Nicola thirteen they once stole the neighbor’s pontoon—“Borrowed,” David corrects when they tell the story—went for a moonlit ride, and fell asleep once they’d moored it.
“Hey, Nicky,” he says, leaning against the doorjamb, one finger hooked casually in a belt loop, the still-high summer sun illuminating his Hollywood-worthy good looks, those sapphire eyes. “Welcome to my little shack.”
“You know I’m rolling my eyes at you, right?” says Nicola, wiping the sweat from her brow. She wheels the bike up close to the house and lays it ever so gently on the grass; the bike is just as borrowed as the cottage and has no kickstand. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, are we?”
“Nope. But we never were.” He opens his arms, and they embrace, and David says, “Holy hell, you’re sweaty. Why didn’t you tell me you were biking? I could have sent someone for you.”
“Sent someone?” Nicola can’t keep a straight face.“Help me, Officer. My cousin has been kidnapped.”
He waves a hand, dismissing her humor, and says, “Sorry, that made me sound like a jerk. I would have picked you up. You want the tour?”
