She squints at me. “When was the last time you counted my kids, Sissy? Because there are two.”
“Not to make you feel like a terrible parent,” I say, poking her belly, “but I’m eighty percent sure there’s another one in there.”
“Fine, two and a half.” Her eyes dart toward mine, cautious. “So how are you, really? About the breakup, I mean.”
“We were only together four months. It wasn’t serious.”
“Serious is the nature of how you date,” she says. “If someone makes it to a third dinner with you, then he’s already met four hundred and fifty separate criteria. It’s not casual dating if you know the other person’s blood type.”
“I do not know my dates’ blood types,” I say. “All I need from them is a full credit report, a psych eval, and a blood oath.”
Libby throws her head back, cackling. As ever, making my sister laugh is a shot of serotonin straight into my heart. Or brain? Probably brain. Serotonin in your heart is probably not a good a thing. The point is, Libby’s laugh makes me feel like the world is under my thumb, like I’m in complete control of The Situation.
Maybe that makes me a narcissist, or maybe it just makes me a thirty-two-year-old woman who remembers full weeks when she couldn’t coax her grieving sister out of bed.
“Hey,” Libby says, slowing as she realizes where we are, what we’ve been subconsciously moving toward. “Look.”
If we got blindfolded and air-dropped into the city, we’d probably still end up here: gazing wistfully at Freeman Books, the West Village shop we used to live over. The tiny apartment where Mom spun us through the kitchen, all three of us singing the Supremes’ “Baby Love” into kitchen utensils. The place where we spent countless nights curled up on a pink-and-cream floral couch watching Katharine Hepburn movies with a smorgasbord of junk food spread across the coffee table she’d found on the street, its busted leg replaced by a stack of hardcovers.
In books and movies, characters like me always live in cement-floored lofts with bleak modern art and four-foot vases filled with, like, scraggly black twigs, for some inexplicable reason.
But in real life, I chose my current apartment because it looks so much like this one: old wooden floors and soft wallpaper, a hissing radiator in one corner and built-in bookshelves stuffed to the brim with secondhand paperbacks. Its crown molding has been painted over so many times it’s lost its crisp edges, and time has warped its high, narrow windows.
This little bookstore and its upstairs apartment are my favorite places on earth.
Even if it’s also where our lives were torn in half twelve years ago, I love this place.
“Oh my gosh!” Libby grips my forearm, waving at the display in the bookstore’s window: a pyramid of Dusty Fielding’s runaway hit, Once in a Lifetime, with its new movie tie-in cover.
She pulls out her phone. “We have to take a picture!”
There is no one who loves Dusty’s book as much as my sister. And that’s saying something, since, in six months, it’s sold a million copies already. People are calling it the book of the year. A Man Called Ove meets A Little Life.
Take that, Charlie Lastra, I think, as I do every so often when I remember that fateful lunch. Or whenever I pass his shut-tight office door （all the sweeter since he moved to work at the publishing house that put out Once, where he’s now surrounded by constant reminders of my success）。
Fine, I think Take that, Charlie Lastra a lot. One never really forgets the first time a colleague drove her to extreme unprofessionalism.
“I’m going to see this movie five hundred times,” Libby tells me. “Consecutively.”
“Wear a diaper,” I advise.
“Not necessary,” she says. “I’ll be crying too much. There won’t be any pee in my body.”
“I had no idea you had such a . . . comprehensive understanding of science,” I say.
“The last time I read it, I cried so hard I pulled a muscle in my back.”
“You should consider exercising more.”
“Rude.” She waves at her pregnant belly, then starts us toward the juice bar again. “Anyway, back to your love life. You just need to get back out there.”
“Libby,” I say. “I understand that you met the love of your life when you were twenty years old, and thus have never truly dated. But imagine for a moment, if you will, a world in which thirty percent of your dates end with the revelation that the man across the table from you has a foot, elbow, or kneecap fetish.”