Happy Place(51)

His parents stand at the door, smiling, Gloria’s head resting on Hank’s shoulder.

“We’re headed to bed, you two,” Hank says.

“You need anything?” Gloria asks.

Wyn shakes his head. “Just saying good night.”

Gloria’s eyes shrink when she smiles, like Wyn’s. “Sleep tight.”

When they’re gone, Wyn walks me back against the dresser and we make out for a handful of minutes before he kisses the top of my head and leaves my room.

For the next four days in Montana, we barely do anything. We go cross-country skiing once, eat twice at an all-day pancake house that Wyn’s parents describe as “a haunt for old silver tails like us,” and take nightly walks with the whole family through the snow. We bundle up like astronauts, and Hank insists we wear headband lamps so we don’t “get hit by cars or attacked by wild animals” in the solid black of a Montana night.

Mostly, though, we lounge around the fireplace, an endless supply of food and drink cycling through the room. In the mornings, Hank makes each of us individual pour-over coffees, a process that takes so long that by the time he finishes the last one, we’re all ready for our second cups, and he lunges to his feet, without anyone asking, to start all over again.

“Dad, we’re fine with the Keurig,” Wyn tries to reason.

His dad wrinkles his nose and shuffles in his flannel slippers toward the kitchen. “That stuff’s for emergencies, not for guests.”

Most meals are casseroles. Hank doesn’t have the same affinity for food that he has for drinks, and Gloria’s cooking leaves me feeling like a walking balloon after every meal.

After dinner our second night in town, Lou and Michael lie on their backs on the rug, groaning and massaging their tummies.

“Mom, you and Dad need to consider eating, like, even a single vegetable per week,” Lou says.

To which Gloria replies, “Potatoes are a vegetable.”

“No,” Michael, Lou, and Wyn all say in unison.

Vegetables or not, the potatoes at least are helpful for soaking up the bourbons and scotches Hank lines up at their old wooden dining table for us to sample every night.

“Dad’s the Beverage King,” Michael says to me.

“I see why you gravitated toward Parth when you got to Mattingly,” I tell Wyn.

“That’s not why I gravitated toward Parth.” Wyn hauls me against him as he nestles back into the squashy couch. “I gravitated toward Parth because he had the prettiest friends.”

Lou snorts from where she lies on the rug in front of the hearth. “Thank you, Harriet, for saving him from himself.”

“I think you have too high an opinion of me,” I tell her. “I also befriended Parth for his hot friends.”

Wyn kisses the top of my head. Michael and Lou exchange a look I can’t read.

Maybe they’ve seen this before, I think. Maybe he’s always like this with his girlfriends.

But I don’t really believe it. I am in that phase of love where you’re sure no two people have ever felt this way before.

And over those four days, I fall in love again. With Wyn’s family, with all the new pieces of him.

I want to stay up late, digging through his old closet, where his mom stored his homemade stormtrooper costume. I want to sit for five hours in the woodshop, sawdust drifting in the air, while he recounts the fights he got into with Lou’s middle school bullies. I want to know where every single little white scar and divot carved into his permanently sunned skin came from.

The one from when he braked too hard on his bike and went skidding down the road. The white specks on his elbow from the agitated horse that threw him on his grandfather’s now-defunct ranch. The thin line where he split his lip on the corner of the fireplace as a toddler.

I want to stockpile these pieces of him: the quilt his grandmother made him before he was born, his embarrassing preteen journals, his horrifying childhood drawings, the dent in his mom’s truck from when he hit a patch of ice and slid into a split rail at sixteen.

He takes me to see it, the stretch where the beams are less dingy, having been replaced after his accident. He and Hank had done it themselves without being asked.

Wyn ran wild here, and this place carved him into the man I love.

With my hand on the wooden post he’d worked into the ground all those years ago, I ask, “Why’d you leave?”

“It’s hard to explain,” he says, grimacing.

“Can you try?” I ask. “You seem so happy here.”

He lets out a breath and searches the horizon for an answer. “They had money from selling my dad’s family’s land. And they always wanted my sisters to go to college, because Mom and Dad didn’t get to.”

“Your sisters?” I say. “But not you?”

His mouth quirks into a crooked half smile. “Told you, they’re little geniuses, like you. Big dreams. I guess my parents assumed I’d want to stay. Keep working with my dad.”

“Because you love this place,” I say.

He runs his hand over his jaw. “I do. But I don’t know. I was watching all these people with dreams and goals leaving, going other places. And I didn’t know what I wanted. I got scouted by Mattingly’s soccer coach, and it seemed like a sign, I guess.”