“I’d love that,” John said. “You stay in touch.” Laurie could tell John didn’t really think this would happen, and she couldn’t blame him. He would logically think this was the hollow let’s get together soon that you say at the end of a class reunion, but that was only because he didn’t know Nick. Laurie, on the other hand, would have bet a hundred dollars Nick would be back here with Ginger within a month.
They drove home the longest way possible, taking apart and turning over every detail of what he had told them. That Dot had made something beautiful, something she and someone she loved were very proud of, but something she didn’t think she could talk about. It had been enough for her to have it, to keep it, and maybe to know that someday, someone would find it when she was gone. You don’t keep a thing for fifty years by accident, Nick said; not even a secret. He figured that Dot might even have known that Laurie would be the one to find it, the one to figure out what it was. Maybe this was a stretch, but it was as good a version of the story as any, and Laurie gravitated eagerly toward it. This faith in Laurie’s capacity to discover might not have been true of Dot, but it felt true to Dot.
By the time they pulled up in front of Dot’s house, it was gray and the air was heavy, and it had started to drizzle. “Do you want to come inside?” Laurie said. “I can make tea or something.”
He looked over at her. “I know that you’re leaving in a few days.”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to say that before I come in, because I don’t want you to think I’m not listening.”
She nodded. “Let’s go in.”
There was not tea. They stumbled through the kitchen wrapped around each other, up the stairs with her tugging his hand, into the bedroom with their shirts already halfway off. In the big bed they sweated and laughed and she tried to memorize exactly how it felt to be under his weight, or hovering over him with her hair falling onto his cheek, or lying with her face buried in the side of his neck with her eyes closed while their hands worked under the covers. She couldn’t keep it, this feeling. It was a thing she had started, knowing that it would end. And while she would not be the first woman to ever feel a love story slipping away, she wished she could stitch it or carve it or quilt it and then save it, tucked into the bottom of a cedar chest and never entirely gone.
Chapter Thirty
They fell asleep with the damp gray afternoon darkening the windows, and by the time they woke up, it was raining. “I should get home,” Nick said. “I know you have a lot to do.” He rolled out of bed and started pulling on his clothes.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes.” He turned around to smile at her. “I’m okay. I mean…I’m going to miss you, Laur. But I’m okay.” He put on his watch, which he had set on the nightstand, and he looked back at her, still stretched out in the bed in only the T-shirt she’d pulled on before she fell asleep. He raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m going to remember you exactly like this. Forever. In my dreams. When I’m John Harlan hanging out with my ninety-year-old friends griping about the food in the dining room, I’m going to remember you mostly naked while it pours down rain outside, and I’m going to be the happiest guy there.”
She scowled. “I guess I’m honored, and I’m glad you still expect to be that horny, congratulations on that.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked.
She got out of bed and put on a pair of sweats, and she walked him downstairs. They stood in the kitchen, and he put his arms around her, and she grabbed on to his waist and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Do you need an umbrella?” she asked into his neck.
“I’ll be fine. I’m just headed home.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow?” she asked, even though it wasn’t technically a question.
“Sure,” he said. “I want to see you before you go.”
They pulled apart. He slid his hand down her hip as he went out the kitchen door. When he closed it behind him, Laurie stood still, listening to it rain, listening to Dot’s kitchen clock ticking. She closed her eyes and put her hand on the edge of the countertop and gripped it, resisting the gravity that wanted to pull her right through the door, to his car, where she would push him against the door and keep him from opening it and getting inside.
But she didn’t; she heard the car start, heard it drive off, let the silence settle again. She went into the living room and lay on Dot’s couch. The feeling was so familiar: I don’t want this. She’d had it trying to register for wedding gifts, and when Angus talked about how great a mom she’d be, and she’d had it when Nick started talking about her living in Dot’s house. It was a surfeit of negative space, just like June said. Don’t want, don’t want, don’t want.