How to End a Love Story(98)
The house is covered in cardboard boxes and awkward lengths of leftover Bubble Wrap, and he has no idea how Lisa Shepard intends to be out of here completely in two weeks. When he goes downstairs to check the basement, though, he’s startled.
“Wow,” he says involuntarily.
“I know,” she says next to him, and they both stare at the empty space.
Grant used to be jealous of his friends with finished basements, where they could hang out and their feet would stay warm because they had carpeting and recessed lighting in the home theater section. His own basement was a cold, always slightly damp room, where everything his parents didn’t want to find a home for ended up. His old bicycles, Dad’s old receipts, Mom’s boxes and boxes of family photos and the ghosts of Christmas party decorations past.
It looks like a blank space now, and maybe the next family to live here will add carpeting and heating and a home theater of their own. He frowns, and some homesick feeling pings in his chest.
“Who bought the house?” he asks, his voice coming out scratchy and unfamiliar.
“Oh, this charming couple,” his mom says, and leads the way back upstairs. “Newlyweds, and so obviously in love. They met in college and broke up and got back together and it all sounds very tortured but they make it sound so funny now, I think their kids will be stand-up comics.”
Grant nods and follows her up past the boxes to the second floor.
“I put all your boxes in your room.” She waves a hand at the second door on the right. “I sold your bed, because I didn’t think you’d be coming back. But there’s the couch, and I still have your old sleeping bag somewhere.”
“From when I was in seventh grade?” Grant lifts a brow.
“Point taken,” Mom says.
Grant ends up driving to the local A&P to buy himself a blow-up mattress, figuring it’ll be useful enough to take back with him. Mom sends him out with a list of short-term groceries—frozen pizzas, rotisserie chicken, that kind of thing. He remembers hanging out in the parking lot of this A&P with Lauren DiSantos his last summer in Dunollie before college, and he suddenly wants to get out of New Jersey as soon as possible.
“Excuse me, can you get that cake mix for me?”
Grant looks down and the sight splashes over him like a bucket of ice water. It’s Helen’s mother, and she looks equally surprised to see him, standing here in the lazy baking aisle of their local A&P. He remembers then that he’s wearing a baseball cap and wonders vaguely if he should apologize for accidentally hoodwinking her.
He reaches up for an angel food cake mix on the top shelf. “This one?”
He looks back at Helen’s mother, half expecting her to be gone. But she just nods mutely. He hands it to her, and she takes it. She doesn’t look up at him, but stays rooted to the spot, staring at Betty Crocker’s name. She opens her mouth and shuts it a few times, and he’s not sure if she’s gasping for air or trying to say something.
How is she, he wants to ask, but doesn’t.
Helen’s mother puts the box in her cart and turns around sharply, leaving him alone in the cake mix aisle.
He thinks maybe this is the first time he’s heard her real voice.
He blows up the mattress in his bedroom and stares at his couch for so long, he thinks he could summon the ghosts of his and Helen’s past selves if he tried hard enough. He swallows when he thinks of that night—it’s one he’s revisited so many times in his memory, it’s probably haunting him all the way back to LA.
The following Monday, he decides to take a train into the city, and his mom stares at him in surprise.
“But you hate the city,” she says, and she’s not wrong.
When he exits Penn Station, his feet start walking automatically up Seventh Avenue. He takes a right at Times Square, passing tourists and comedy show promoters and Broadway marquee signs, and keeps walking until he reaches the green picnic tables at Bryant Park.
“I used to write at the public library next to Bryant Park,” Helen once said on a podcast, which he had listened to out loud to annoy her because he’d loved the embarrassed pink tinge on her cheeks. “Then I’d take lunch breaks in the park and watch old men play chess.”
He buys a sandwich from a kiosk, even though it’s only a quarter till eleven and barely any old men are playing chess. He wonders if there’s any world where their paths could have crossed differently. He’s been to the city half a dozen times in the last six years for work, usually against his will, hating it the whole time. He’s even been to Bryant Park, sat at these very picnic tables. But would he have recognized her in the crowd? And if he had, would he have done anything about it? What if they hadn’t known each other at all in high school, what then? Would some essential part of him still have recognized some essential part of her?
He spends the following hour in the library next door, wandering from floor to floor of the labyrinthine building, wondering which spots were Helen’s favorites. He can see how their show was inspired by these Beaux Arts marble halls, the gilded ceilings, the church-like atmosphere that has everyone speaking in hushed tones as soon as they cross the front doors.
A librarian informs him there isn’t a young adult section in this research library, so he buys a tote bag and a magnet from the gift shop downstairs and walks out the door to a depressingly modern lending library across the street. He looks for the Ivy Papers on the shelves. There’s only two volumes from the four-book series available on the shelf, and the corner of his mouth lifts at this. She’s in demand. He plucks the thicker of the two available options, the second book (her least favorite), and heads in search of an open chair.