You fold your arms and are you really that petty? “Okay,” I say. “But doesn’t the same family own both restaurants?”
The Meerkat groans and puts on her headphones—rude again—and you wave me into the kitchen. “Well, yeah,” you say. “But the food’s a little different at both of them.” You open the fridge and I stash my lunch and you’re being irrational but you know it. “Oh come on. Isn’t this small-town quirk what you wanted when you moved here?”
“Holy shit,” I say. “I live here.”
You rest your hands on my shoulders and it’s like you’ve never been to a sexual harassment seminar. “Don’t worry, Joe. Seattle is only thirty-five minutes away.”
I want to kiss you and you take your hands away and we leave the break room and I tell you that I didn’t move here to take the ferry to the city. You peer at me. “Why did you move here? Seriously. New York… L.A.… Bainbridge… I’m genuinely curious.”
You are testing me. Demanding more of me. “Well, I joke about Cedar Cove…”
“Yeah you do…”
“But I guess it just felt right to me. New York used to be like a Richard Scarry book.”
“Love him.”
“But it lost that Scarry feeling. Maybe it was Citi Bikes…” Or all those dead girls. “L.A. is just somewhere I went because that’s what people do. They go from New York to L.A.” It’s been so long since anyone wanted to know me and you bring me home and away all at once. “Hey, do you remember those black-and-white pictures of Kurt Cobain and his buddies in the meadow? Photos from the early days, before Dave Grohl was in Nirvana?”
You nod. You think you do, yeah.
“Well, it just hit me. My mom had that picture up on the fridge when I was a kid. It looked like heaven to me, the tall grass…”
You nod. “Come on,” you say. “The best part of this place is downstairs.”
You stop short in Cookbooks. Someone’s texting you and you’re writing back and I can’t see who it is and you look at me. “Are you on Instagram?”
“Yep, are you?”
It’s just so fucking easy, Mary Kay. I follow you and you follow me and you are already liking my book posts—heart, heart, heart—and I like your picture of you and Nomi on the ferry, the one with the best fucking caption in the world: Gilmore Girls. It’s Instagram official. You’re single.
You lead the way to the stairs and tease me about my account. “Don’t get me wrong… I love books too, but your life strikes me as a little off balance.”
“And what would you suggest, Ms. ‘Gilmore Girl’？ Should I post my beef and broccoli?”
You turn red. “Oh,” you say. “That’s Nomi’s little joke. I got pregnant in college, not high school.”
You say that like the father is a sperm donor with no name. “I’ve never seen that show.”
“You’d like it,” you say. “I used it to get my kid to think of reading as cool.”
I know what you’re thinking. You wish there was more of me on my fucking “feed” because here I am, seeing your whole life, pictures of you and your best friend, Melanda, at various wineries, you and your Meerkat off being #GilmoreGirls. You don’t get to learn much about me and it’s not fair. But life isn’t fair and I won’t bore you by humble-bragging about being a “private person.” I put my phone away and tell you that I had Corn Pops for breakfast.
You laugh—yes—you leave Instagram—yay!—and I feed you the right way, mouth to ear. I tell you about my home on the water in Winslow and you roll up your sleeves a little more. “We’re practically neighbors,” you say. “I’m around the corner in Wesley Landing.”
There’s no way you’re this way with all the volunteers and we make it downstairs and you graze my arm and I see what you see. A Red Bed. Built into the wall.
Your voice is low. Hushed. There are children present. “How good is that?”
“Oh, that’s a good Red Bed right there.”
“That’s what I call it too. And I know it’s smaller than the green one…” The green one is too green, same green as RIP Beck’s pillow. “But I like the Red one. Plus it has the aquarium…” Like the aquarium in Closer, and you scratch an itch that isn’t there because you want to throw me down on that Red Bed right now but you can’t. “My library was nothing like this when I was a kid, I mean these kids have it made, right?”
That’s why I wanted to raise my son on this island and I nod. “My library barely had chairs.”
There was a little tremor in my voice—stop vague-booking out loud about your shitty childhood, Joe—and you lean in closer as in Closer. “It’s even better at night.”
I don’t know what to say to that and it’s too good with you, too much, like ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and you feel it too and you point at a closet. “Alas, some kid peed on it and the janitor’s out sick. You mind getting your hands dirty?”
“Not at all.”
Two minutes later I am scrubbing urine out of our Red Bed and you are trying not to watch but you want to watch. You like me and how could you not? I do my dirty work with a smile on my face and I moved here because I thought it would be easier to be a good person around other good people. I moved here because the murder rate is low, as in not a single fucking murder in over twenty years. The crime is so nonexistent that there are not one but two articles in the Bainbridge Islander about a couple of architects who stole a sandwich board from another architect and the population skews older and the Red Bed is good as new and I put my cleaning supplies away and you’re gone.
I go upstairs to find you and you knock on the glass wall of your office—come on in—and you want me in your den and I like it in your den. I wave hello to your posters—RIP Whitney Houston and Eddie Vedder—and you offer me a seat and your phone rings and I never thought I’d feel this way again, but then, I never thought Love Quinn would kidnap my child and pay me four million dollars to walk away. If unspeakably bad things are possible, then unspeakably good things are too.
You hang up the phone and smile. “So, where were we?”
“You were just about to tell me your favorite Whitney Houston song.”
“Well, that hasn’t changed since I was kid. ‘How Will I Know.’？”
You gulp. I gulp. “I like the Lemonheads cover of that song.”
You try not to stare at me and you smile. “I didn’t know that existed. I’ll have to check it out.”
“Oh yeah. It’s good. The Lemonheads.”
You lick your lips and mimic me—“The Lemonheads”—and I want to lick your Lemonhead on the Red Bed and I point at the drawing on your wall of a little storefront. “Did your daughter do that?”
“Oh no,” you say. “And now that you point it out… I should have something she made up here. But yeah, I made that when I was little. I wanted to have my own bookstore.”
Of course you did and I’m a rich man. I can help you make your dream come true. “Did this bookstore have a name?”