Love Interest(72)

At some point, I nod off, lulled into the bright black nothingness of slumber between Alex’s recounting of a heated classroom debate on Maine versus Connecticut lobster rolls and subsequent memories of his freshman year at Harvard. His voice bleeds into my dreams, and I’m on a plane to London, but he’s there, too. I whine because my acoustic guitar doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment. Alex laughs and tells me to buy the guitar its own ticket.

When I wake up, I’m tucked under my covers, head on a pillow, and Alex is gone.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


On the day before Thanksgiving, the blocks closest to Grand Central Station are more claustrophobic than a Bassnectar concert. I’m holding a bouquet of roses. Miriam’s got a fir-scented candle and some peppermint chocolate in a shopping bag—welcome gifts for my parents to make their midtown hotel a little homier, since they seemed disappointed when I told them staying at our place was logistically out of the question.

My phone is empty of new messages from Jerry or Dad. I frown, feeling like an anxious parent picking my child up from summer camp. I try to track them on Find My Friends but give up once their contacts start jumping around.

“Remind me why we’re meeting your folks at Grand Central?” Miriam asks me.

“They wanted to arrive in the city like people do in movies. Which is absurd, because they traveled by plane and took an Uber here from LaGuardia.”

She snorts. “That’s adorable.”

“Get this.” I throw her a grin. “At first, they assumed I was picking them up from the airport. The airport, as in, they didn’t even know which one until they double-checked their flight itinerary.”

Miriam cackles, doubling over and clutching her stomach. “Didn’t you sell your car before you moved here?”

“Yep,” I confirm, popping my consonant for emphasis. “I had to shoot their plan down on account of the fact that hell will freeze over before I take a one-hundred-dollar Uber just to meet someone at baggage claim. Walking to their hotel from here was their next suggestion.”

Miriam shakes her head. “The drama.”

“Gotta love ’em.”

“You realize your dad’s going to write a country song about New York City.”

I groan. She’s right. Holding my hands up in prayer, I mutter, “Lord, have mercy on the country music industry. Preserve the sanctity of its lyrics about dirt roads and summer nights and cold beers in the truck bed of a Chevy. This might sound sarcastic, heavenly father, but I couldn’t be more sincere. Don’t let Marty Maitland ruin a good thing.”

“Amen!” Miriam shouts, pumping a fist in the air.

Inside the terminal, we dart like minnows between New York’s railway-inclined holiday travelers. “Jerry!” I shout when he picks up the phone. “Where are you?”

“Heading in! Sorry we’re late, I had to yank your dad away from a busker with an extra guitar on the sidewalk outside.”

I laugh, grabbing Miriam’s hand as we push through the throng. My eyes smart the closer we get, and then I don’t just hear Jerry’s voice on the phone. I see him.

He’s grinning ear to ear, and Dad is behind him, and I have a full-on breakdown right there in Grand Central Station during the chaos of holiday rush hour. Dad’s hair has more salt than pepper now. Jerry got new glasses. I haven’t laid my eyes on them in almost two years, and the time apart hits me in the chest right now, asking me to pay the toll of time and distance and whatever self-preserving walls I constructed from a half-assed belief that I had to be who I was without them.

Tears stream down my face as I get swallowed into a hug. Dad ruffles my hair. All southern twang and long vowels, he says, “Hey, honey!”

He and Jerry smell like old leather and I breathe it in like a balm.

When I turn around, Miriam’s crying, too (fourteen years of friendship will do that to you). She and I hug, because why the fuck not, and then she and Jerry and Dad hug.

“Your father did really well on the plane,” Jerry tells me. “He only cut off my circulation three times and yelled at a very small flight attendant once!”

We all four walk to the hotel where they’re staying, just a handful of blocks away, near Bryant Park. They both gape in audible wonder at the Chrysler Building, and I can’t even find it in me to make fun of them because my first trip to New York was magical, too. While they settle in and freshen up, Miriam and I have a drink at the hotel bar. When they come back down, Dad’s wearing his cowboy boots and Jerry has on plaid. They’re adorable.

There’s a round of shots, something made in Kentucky, and then we’re off in a cab, cruising toward SoHo for the prix fixe menu at Balthazar.

“Thanks for letting me tag along,” Miriam says.

“Are you working tomorrow?” Jerry asks her.

“Yes, and let me tell you, there’s no place more interesting than the emergency room on Thanksgiving Day.”

At Balthazar, Dad makes a disgruntled comment about how close all the tables are, and why must he be subjected to the neighbors’ conversations about French conservatism and skin boils, left to right respectively? But that’s the only hitch in our otherwise perfect evening. We drain several bottles of wine, devour our soups du jour and birds du domestique and pies du pumpkin, catching up about life up here, life down there, the past, the present, and yes—the future.