“Nothing,” she said quickly, sweating despite the central air-conditioning vents. She’d filled Stu in broadly about how she’d dated a guy with depression back in New York and how it had helped her understand what she wanted in a relationship, but she’d never mentioned him by name, never revealed anything that might give Stu any reason to think she hadn’t fully moved on, when she had.
Dustin wasn’t on her mind, or even if he was on her mind, he wasn’t on her heart, which was what mattered. The only thing dragging her heart down right now was her own self-doubt about her writing, and by extension, her purpose in the world, the legacy she’d be leaving behind when time catapulted her to the end of her life.
Looking into Stu’s eyes, the same unwavering brown as always, she whispered, “What if this is the only thing I ever publish?”
For so long, she’d been worried about dead or deferred dreams, but what if living, breathing dreams were the real risk? What if she tried as hard as she could and never got there, and no longer had theOh, I never really focused on itexcuse? Or what if she did get there, but actual success fell short of imagined success, and she could no longer comfort herself with the wondrous wonderings ofone day?
Stu walked across the carpet and met her at the window. “First of all,” he said. “I know you’re going to publish more, if you want to.”
He said it with such nonchalant confidence that Rae nearly believed him. “But if I don’t?”
“Then I’m glad I bought a hundred and twenty-three copies of this one. Low supply makes it more valuable, right?”
A smile squeezed its way out. Rae left the overwatered plant in the window to collect the overcooked quiche from the kitchen.
“Just promise you won’t forget me?” Stu asked, as he opened the front door and held it for her. “When you’re a big-shot poet?”
“I thinkbig-shot poetis an oxymoron,” Rae said, trying to laugh though her lungs felt squeezed by the impossibly large gap between local paper and international best seller. “And,” she added, more to herself than to Stu, more of a regret than a rebuttal, “I don’t know how to forget people I love.”
Fighting off one fidget by surrendering to another, Rae balanced the quiche in one hand and texted the poem to her dad with the other, explaining that she’d gotten published under a pseudonym.
Then she put on her shoes and led her new, blueless muse down the single flight of stairs, reminding herself that this wasup.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
STEADY EMOTIONAL CASH FLOWS
“There it is,” Rae said, pointing to the top floor of a grime-splotched apartment building with a precarious-looking fire escape on the fringes of the West Village. “The Perry Street Penthouse.”
She and Stu were half a step behind Ellen and Aaron, both couples hand in hand as they walked on a sunny sliver of sidewalk. The October air was quintessentially crisp. Rae had forgotten how an autumn day could reform Manhattan, and in the next gust of wind, tinged with yellow cab exhaust and mismatched restaurant kitchen scents, Rae caught a whiff of missing listing New York as her city of residence.
They were celebrating Rae’s twenty-ninth birthday weekend. She hadn’t freaked out nearly as much as she’d anticipated she might upon entering the last year of her twenties. She liked to think it was because of how secure in herself she’d become, but something told her it was mostly because of how secure she was in her relationship with Stu, how on track she felt to getting engaged and perhaps even married in the next 365 days before reaching the dreaded cliff of thirty.
It was Stu’s first time in New York, so they’d been checking off the obligatory items—Times Square, dollar pizza, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street (they’d gone in her old office, where Stu had refused to stand anywhere near the forty-second floor windows), and more pizza. They hadn’t made it to Brooklyn. Now in the late Sunday afternoon, they were at their final tour stop.
“Ninety-six steps to get up there,” Ellen said. “One hundred and twelve if you count the full trek from the laundry in the basement.”
“Which is why we only did laundry once every five weeks,” Rae explained. “We had it down to a science.”
“Called bulk-buying underwear,” Ellen said.
“And rewearing socks whose stench levels fell below the ‘repulsive’ threshold,” Rae added.
Stu paused to take it in as passing pedestrians glared and huffed at his audacity to stop in the middle of a sidewalk. “It’s not as shabby as I pictured from the stories.”
“You’d have to see the inside to understand,” Rae said, cringing at cockroach memories but also craving the coziness of being curled up on that love seat couch with Ellen, tossing popcorn in the air, squealing if they caught it in their mouth and squealing if they didn’t.
“Should we buzz up and see if someone’s home?” Aaron asked.
“Let’s not bother them,” Rae said. “They’re probably busy waiting for their shower to warm up.”
“Or waving dish towels in front of the smoke detector after a kitchen fiasco,” Ellen added.
“Raelynn’s still never cooked me a scramblette, you know,” Stu said, feigning offense. “Says it belongs to a ‘prior era.’”
“You haven’t lived if you haven’t tasted a scramblette!” Ellen exclaimed, at the same time Aaron coughed, “Count your blessings.”
Rae looked at her old bedroom window—that skinny, sorry little thing dripping with condensation from a window air-conditioning unit—and wondered if the half wall still existed or if the newtenant had torn it down and turned it back into a real one-bedroom apartment.
