How to End a Love Story(34)

“You feel a lot of responsibility for other people’s feelings,” her therapist once told her, as she described the careful little ways she frames her life for her parents.

She supposes that’s true. Her mother’s knuckles still turn white from gripping the steering wheel whenever they drive down that one stretch of Route 22 on the way to the mall. Helen once boldly asked why they didn’t just move somewhere else, somewhere they weren’t as burdened by the knowledge that there should be two Zhang sisters moving through the world.

“What’s the point?” Mom had said. “We know this place and we’re too old to start new somewhere else and have to learn everything again. Besides, your sister is here.”

Helen knows she doesn’t mean Michelle’s ghost. Her mother is unfailingly turned off by any kind of superstition. She means Michelle’s body is here, in a cemetery over the hill on the other side of the mountain that carves out the boundary of Dunollie, New Jersey, from its neighboring townships.

Helen looks around the study, trying to feel Michelle’s ghost here.

Nothing.



On her third day home, the day before Christmas Eve, Helen tells Mom to take the night off from cooking. She drives to Rhymer’s Pizzeria and orders two large pepperoni pizzas and a bundle of garlic knots from the pimply-faced teenager behind the counter. A few moments later, her first kiss, Ian Rhymer, appears from the kitchen, his eyes crinkled in their perpetual smile, his arms stretched out for a hug that she submits to happily.

“It’s my famous author friend,” Ian says. “I heard you moved to LA and you’re a Hollywood big shot now.”

Helen snorts. “You sound like a cartoon right now,” she says. “Hollywood big shot, fuck off.”

Ian grins and pulls out a chair to sit down with her. “I feel like it’s been ages. What’s going on in your life?”

“My life is the same as always,” she says. “Writing, hating my writing, revising, convincing myself I’m a genius, then doing it all over again. Tell me about your life.”

Ian shakes his head. “Nuh-uh, you don’t get off that easy. You moved across the country, where they don’t even have good pizza. How are you doing?”

“Honestly? The farther away I am from my parents, the happier I am.”

She says this glibly, the kind of joking thing they would have said to each other as teenagers. But does she actually mean it?

“So you like it out there.”

Helen thinks of her condo in Santa Monica, of the podcasts she listens to on her long commutes in the morning, of the bright blue sky and the palm trees and the sound of trucks unloading on the studio lot as she walks to the writers room.

“I do,” she says.

“That’s great, Helen,” Ian says. “It’s nice to see you happy.”

Helen smiles, then nudges him. “What about you? You’re a family man now.”

He grins and whips out his phone to show her pictures. “Deanna’s hoping to go for a second kid next year,” he says. “But look at this little fluff ball. He had so much hair when he was born, Dee almost cried laughing.”

As Helen carries the pizzas and garlic knots to her car, she thinks about how much fatherhood makes sense on Ian Rhymer. He’s not the skinny kid cutting track practice to kiss her in the library anymore; he looks more solid and dependable now.

Like he’s grown up, she thinks, and feels the ache of something bittersweet stretch up.

“Hey,” a familiar voice calls out when she reaches the parking lot.

She turns to see Grant standing across the lot, next to an unfamiliar gray CRV. He clicks the keys to lock the doors with a chirp.

“Hi,” she says, placing the pizzas on the hood of her car. “Fancy seeing you here.”

He looks a little amused at her old-fashioned turn of phrase, and she kind of wants to disappear into the woods.

“What’d you get?”

“Pepperoni. And garlic knots,” she says.

“I never got the garlic knots here before,” he says.

“You should try them.”

Grant looks up at the sky. It’s a thick kind of light gray. “Think it’s gonna snow later,” he says.

She cranes her neck and looks up too. “I think it’s already snowing on the other side of the mountain.”

“Better get my pizza order in soon then,” he says.

“I better get home before they get cold,” she says.

He nods and heads toward the pizzeria. He pauses at the sidewalk outside and turns to wave at her. “It’s good to see you,” he says.

“You too,” she says, and gets into her car.



Would have been nice to find out you were in town sooner.

Grant stares at the text from Lauren on his phone, the one he hasn’t responded to yet.

He’s been busy and he knows she would understand if he told her. He’s been shuttling his mother from their home to his uncle’s house in the next township every day, spending hours at a time in Fred Shepard’s basement sorting boxes of old family photos, saved receipts, and letters—a lifetime of paper.

It’s emotional work for his mom and Grant wishes sometimes they could dump all the boxes in the street with the rest of the trash after Christmas and be done with it. Instead, Lisa Shepard insists on seeing each picture, clucking and cooing over it, explaining to him who each acquaintance featured in the background might be, she thinks, and sighing.