Happy Place(29)

He clears his throat a little. “You’re right. We’ll have to tell them after this week.”

I’m not sure why that floods me with relief. The rest of my week is now guaranteed to be torturous. But at least Parth and Sabrina will get their perfect day.

Wyn gets a text. He’s not usually so attentive to his phone. While he’s checking it, I lean toward him a little, trying to peer into his paper Murder, She Read bag.

He stuffs his phone back into his pocket. “You can just ask.”

“Ask what?” I say.

His brow lifts. I stare back at him, impassive. Slowly, he slides his purchase from the bag and holds it out to me. It’s huge.

The Eames Way: The Life and Love Behind the Iconic Chair.

“This is a coffee-table book,” I say.

“Is it?” He leans over to look at it. “Shit. I thought it was an airplane.”

“Since when do you buy coffee-table books?” I ask.

“Is this some kind of trick question, Harriet?” he says. “You know these don’t require a special license, right?”

“Yes, but they require a coffee table,” I say. “And Gloria’s won’t have room for this.” Wyn’s mother is a pack rat. Not in a gross way, just in a sentimental one. Or rather his father was, and Gloria hasn’t changed much about the Connor family home since her husband passed.

The last time I was there, there was hardly an inch of space on the refrigerator. She had a printout of a group picture we’d all taken at the cottage on our first trip taped up there, right next to a Save the Date for one of Wyn’s cousins, who’d already gotten married, divorced, and remarried since then. His older sister Michael’s engineering degree sat on the mantel, right next to a framed one-page short story his younger sister, Lou, wrote when she was nine, beside a framed photo of Wyn’s high school soccer team.

Aside from the lack of space in his childhood home, this book had to have cost at least sixty dollars, and Wyn’s never been one to spend money. Not on himself, and not on anything whose value is primarily aesthetic. In our first apartment together, he used a tower of shoeboxes as a side table until he found a broken one on the street that he could fix.

He slides the coffee-table book out of my hand and drops it back into his bag. I’m still staring, puzzled, trying to make sense of all the tiny differences between the Wyn of five months ago and the Wyn in front of me, but he’s gone back to checking his phone.

Kimmy comes bounding up with a bundle of sunflowers. “Where are Parth and Sabrina?” she asks, shielding her eyes against the sun.

“Sabrina needed more coffee,” Wyn says. “And Parth needed more Sabrina.”

“Awh.” She clutches her heart. “They’re so cute. Terrifying, but cute.”

I catch Wyn peeking into the bag again, sort of smiling to himself.

In my chest, a metric ton drops onto the proverbial seesaw.

Oh my god.

The beard, the slight softening of his body, the sixty-dollar coffee-table book. All of the texting.

Is he . . . nesting?

Is he dating someone?

The seesaw jolts back in the other direction. A burst of cold air-conditioning and roasted espresso beans wafts toward us as Sabrina and Parth emerge from the coffee shop’s lesser-used interior. “I don’t know about y’all,” Sabrina says after a loud slurp on her paper straw, “but I could use some popovers.”

Ordinarily, the thought would make my mouth water.

Right now, the idea of dumping fried egg and jam into my seething stomach is worse than hearing puce a thousand times in rapid succession.

I smile so hard my molars twinge. “Sounds great.”

“Awh. Sunflowers. Sab loves those.” Parth leans over to smell them.

Kimmy thrusts the bundle toward him. “These are for you and Sabrina.”

“They’re just a sample,” Cleo puts in. “We went ahead and ordered some bouquets for Saturday. I know you want it to be simple, but it’s not a wedding without flowers.”

Sabrina goes from eyeing the bouquet like it might be some kind of Trojan horse, sneakily stuffed with tiny mushroom encyclopedias, to clapping her hands together on a gasp. “Cleo! You didn’t have to do that.” She hooks an arm around Cleo’s head, pulling her in for a hug. “They’re gorgeous.”

“You’re gorgeous,” Cleo says, starting down the street, the rest of us following like baby ducks.

“No, you guys,” Parth says, “I’m gorgeous.”

Wyn hangs back beside me, asks tersely, “What just happened in there?”

“In where?” I say.

“Your brain,” he says.

“Body shots,” I say. “My brain is full of body shots.”

“Both a surgeon and a medical anomaly,” he says.

“What can I say,” I reply flatly. “I’m—”

“I know.” He waves his arm in a circle. “Vast.”

My stomach lurches at the years-old inside joke. “I was going to say hungover.”





10





HAPPY PLACE

MATTINGLY, VERMONT


A NEW APARTMENT for our senior year, the first floor of a peeling white Victorian at the edge of town. Windows that rattle whenever the wind blows, a half-collapsed porch where Sabrina and I intend to spend the fall sipping brandy-spiked hot cider, and a patch of side yard where I promise to help Cleo plant a vegetable garden: broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi—things that can withstand the frost that will arrive in a few short months.