Great Big Beautiful Life(58)

But—perhaps obviously—it’s not my dad texting me back.

It’s a one-word message, and for some reason, it really does feel like the perfect message.

Hello, Hayden writes.

Hello, I write back.


What are you doing tonight?





18




Old Mo’s Sugar House is a hit from the beginning.

For one thing, the entire exterior is painted in three separate shades of frosting pink. It’s a little grungy from the passing of time, but still looks like the setting of my childhood dreams. It’s the same kind of fare as Ray’s or the Atomic Café, and the same kind of no-nonsense service.

If you were out of touch enough to ask for a latte here, I’m sure you’d be the proud recipient of a nice bless your heart from the staff.

When our server drops off our dangerously hot plates, I catch Hayden’s gaze traveling straight past his steel-cut oatmeal to my gravy-doused biscuits and short stack of pancakes.

“You look like a wistful war bride right now,” I tease him, “watching at the window for your baby to come home.”

“What?” He looks up abruptly, blinking clear of his biscuit haze.

“Would you like a bite?” I offer.

“No,” he says, “that’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “I really don’t mind.” I push the bowl of biscuits toward him.

“Maybe just a bite,” he says, and retrieves his silverware, neatly cutting a small hunk from one of the biscuits, swooping it over his plate, and popping it between his lips.

His eyes go glassy. He makes a little hum in his throat. I lean forward and scoop the rest of the biscuit he cut into onto his plate. “Wow,” he says finally.

“Good?” I ask.

“Very,” he says.

“You know what I bet would make it better?” I ask.

“What?”

“Pink food coloring,” I say, sawing into my pancakes.

He snorts. “I don’t think that has a taste.”

“Maybe not, but it would have an impact. I’d feel the pink.”

He grins crookedly, and my heart leaps. “You’d feel it? What does pink feel like?”

I think for a moment. “I think it’s, like, the giddy part of a sunrise.”

“The giddy part of a sunrise,” he repeats.

“Yeah, you know how sunrise mostly just makes you feel like…awed, or moved? Like it feels profound?”

“No,” he says.

“Well, for me it does,” I say. “But there’s a moment when everything’s just all pink. Pink-lemonade pink. And it feels almost silly. Like the sky is playing. It’s a color that I’m shocked can be in nature. But since it can be, I really see no reason why it couldn’t also be in biscuits.”

He laughs, shakes his head to himself as he stuffs another bite of biscuit into his mouth.

“What?” I say.

“I’ve never once thought the sky seemed like it was playing.”

I shrug and sip on my coffee. “You think I’m being ridiculous,” I say, half statement, half question.

“I think you live in a world that’s more interesting than the one most people live in,” he says, and just as my heart starts to sink with disappointment, with a kind of loneliness, he adds, “and I wish I could live in it too.”

I feel myself beaming. “I’ll take you sometime.”

“I’d like that,” he says.



* * *



? ? ?

After breakfast-for-dinner, it’s clear neither of us wants to go home yet, but it’s just as clear that neither of us is going to suggest going back to my house. We can be friendly, if not merely professional, as long as we’re somewhere public.

We walk for a while around Old Mo’s, but there’s nothing cute or quaint here—we’re trapped back in an industrial complex much newer than the diner. When we get to our cars, I say, “I know what we should do now,” and his expression is so dubious, I can only assume he’s bracing himself for a pitch that we chug a vat of pink food dye and have sex in his car.

I step away from him, toward my own rental parked two spots over. “Follow me,” I call, unlocking the car.

He doesn’t ask any questions, just nods.

I remember the day he hesitated to shake my hand at Margaret’s house, and the change from then to now makes me go so warm I have to blast the air-conditioning on the ride over.



* * *



? ? ?

Hayden follows me through the dark, up the wooden platform through the grassy dunes to the beach proper.

“Are you sick of the beach by now?” I ask, given that we’re only a half block from the Grande Lucia here.

“I haven’t really been,” he says. “I’m not a huge beach person.”

I slant a look at him. “It’s hard to be a beach person when you’re not a shorts person.”

“Good poi—fuck! Shit!” He lurches sideways on the platform, grabbing me bodily and hauling me against the railing.

“What! What!” I yelp, eyes skittering around the path ahead of us. A tail slithers over the side of the walkway, disappearing into the dunes.