“I was a frosting fiend when I was a kid. My mom used to tell a story—I don’t remember this, but it sounds like me—that one year for my birthday, she gave other people cake and just put a huge scoop of frosting on my plate.”
Izzy felt so relieved, she couldn’t hold back her smile. She was glad she had the excuse to put a cinnamon roll on a plate so she could turn away from Beau. She was just happy everything felt…normal between them.
“Want to take these to the library?” he asked. “If so, I’ll grab another one.”
She nodded.
“And I’ll grab the wipes. We can’t get frosting on the books, after all.”
They worked together like normal that day, though Izzy tried her best to remember the lecture she’d given herself, and not let herself get too close to Beau. Or think about him too much.
On Sunday, their work time in the library started like it always did. Izzy pushed Beau’s notebook across the table to him, he opened it, wrote for a while, then typed, and kept typing until the timer went off. Afterward, though, Beau did something different.
“Izzy,” he started. And then stopped and looked down at the table.
“Yeah?” she asked. Was something wrong? He looked nervous.
“I. Um.” He took a deep breath. “Can you…Would you like to read something? I mean, some of”—he gestured to his laptop—“this? If you don’t want to, it’s okay.”
Izzy tried not to react. Beau was clearly stressed about asking her to read his work; she didn’t want to make it into an even bigger deal. But inside, her mind was one big exclamation point.
“I’d be happy to,” she said.
He nodded quickly. “How about, um, right now? Because if I don’t show you right now, I might lose my courage here, so…”
Izzy tried to smile as encouragingly as possible. “Right now is great.”
Beau brought her his laptop and then sat back down in his chair. “Okay. Um, just that part. The part that starts with ‘This house.’ It’s rough, and it needs a lot more work, obviously, but I think it’s time to see if I’m on the right track or not, and if not, what to do, or…something.”
Izzy wanted to reassure him, but she knew that wasn’t what he needed right now. He needed actual feedback.
“Sounds good,” she said, and started to read.
This house has always been a refuge for me.
Beau jumped up when she was only one sentence in.
“I can’t sit here while you read that. I’m going outside, okay?”
He raced out of the library before she could say anything. Izzy looked after him for a few seconds. Then she turned back to the screen.
This house has always been a refuge for me. When I was little, I would come here, sometimes with both of my parents, sometimes just with my mother, to visit my grandparents. There was so much to explore in the house and the gardens, it was like I found something new to see, to experience, to play with, every time. New corners, hiding places, flowers, books. It always felt like there was a little bit of magic here.
The best times were when I got to spend weekends here with my grandparents alone. They would let me roam free, occasionally coming outside to bring me more snacks or call me in for meals, sometimes just yelling my name to make sure I answered. My grandmother was always in the kitchen, baking something delicious, so I would usually stumble inside, clothes torn and dirt on my face, and sit at the kitchen table, and she would set a stack of cookies in front of me with a smile.
My grandfather was always in the library. I spent hours there with him. He had shelves of children’s books in the corner, just for me. He never told me when he’d added a new book to the shelves, but I would just check every time I came in, and there was almost always something new there, something I would grab, along with an old favorite or two, on my way into the room. My grandfather would nod at me, and I would nod back at him, and I would feel very grown up. I would curl up in the window seat and sit there in the corner for hours, as he sat at the long table, or in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, working or reading.
As I got older, the house became a refuge for another reason: No one here seemed to know or care who I was, or who my parents were. At home, in LA, everyone knew my whole family. Photographers would take pictures of us on the street. People would call out my name, or my mom’s name, and I was supposed to be nice, polite, but I never wanted to be. In the neighborhood around my grandparents’ house, people just knew me as their grandson; at the beaches here, no one paid attention to me at all. I loved that.