“It’s a heist!” Lisa said, bouncing up and down with excitement. “You’re doing a heist!”
“I guess that would be one way to put it.”
“Heist!” Lisa repeated. She started clapping her hands. “Heist! Heist! Heist!”
“I have to tell you, Laur,” Ryan said, “it kinda sounds…heist-y.”
Laurie nodded. “Okay. Well, either way, can you come up on Tuesday? Maybe stay until Friday or so?”
“For the heist! The weekday heist!” Lisa contributed, and Ryan and Laurie both laughed, because how could you not?
“You can come with him if you want, Lis. I’d love to see you.”
“You know I don’t go places where I singlehandedly increase the Black population by more than ten percent,” she said. “But you better keep me updated. This is very exciting. And if you don’t let Ryan wear a costume and take a picture of it, I might not forgive either one of you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ryan’s plane was already going to be late, and then it arrived late, and it was almost not worth anyone dragging themselves over to the house to say hello. But when Laurie got him back to Dot’s at 10:30 on Tuesday night, they found that Nick and June had both come in the unlocked back door just as they’d been invited to do, and were sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies. “Can’t resist the Thin Mints, huh?” Laurie asked as she slung her purse onto a hook by the door.
“They set up outside the library every single year,” Nick said as he pushed his chair back. “I’m helpless.” He put out his hand and took Ryan’s, and then they pulled each other in. “Good to see you,” Nick said.
“I love a bro hug!” June cooed, and then she hugged the thirty-six-year-old actor, now handsome and married, who had had the most devastating crush on her when she was eighteen and he was fourteen.
He just said, over her shoulder, “Junie.”
Dot’s square kitchen table now seemed like it had four sturdy chairs in it specifically for this night, for this reunion between these four people who had not all been in the same room at an event that was not a wedding full of strangers for close to twenty years. Laurie sat directly across from Nick, and if asked, she would have denied that it was so she could look at him while she drank her iced tea. Ryan had a pack of gum in his hands and he kept turning it over and over, end to end, fiddling with it on the table, as he told them about the TV job he was auditioning for and the play he was hoping to star in that his friend was writing. “And of course,” he said, “we’re trying to have a baby on top of everything else.”
“Oh boy,” June said sympathetically. “How’s that going, bub?”
“Right now,” he said, “it’s not really going. We’re trying to figure out whether we’re doing one more IVF round or not.”
“What’s that going to come down to?” Laurie asked.
“Whether Lisa wants to go through it and whether she wants to take any more money from her parents,” he said. “It’s the hardest goddamn thing. I don’t know how much you guys know about this, but it’s this series of, like, gambles where the odds keep getting worse. It’s basically like you start with twenty-five coins and three have to come up heads, and it sounds like it could happen. But then they keep checking and checking, and you’re down to fifteen coins, then ten, then eight, and then it’s just…you know, ‘Sorry, you’re out of coins.’ And she’s getting shots and taking meds to keep things from happening too soon or too late or too much or not enough. And I don’t have to do anything I haven’t been doing since I was twelve, but she’s sobbing and she’s miserable half the time and she feels sick and hot, and I don’t know if she wants to do it again.”
June shook her head. “I don’t blame her. Being pregnant isn’t a laugh riot, and going through all this just to get to it, I can’t imagine.”
They were across from each other, and Laurie could see this thread stretching between them, even though June had kids and Ryan didn’t yet. They were baby people, or wanting-a-baby people. They weren’t baby-centric, but they were…baby-forward.
June had gotten pregnant easily every time she’d tried, but if she hadn’t, Laurie felt sure she would have done this, too. The shots, the pills, the crying, whatever it was. June had been talking about having kids since she was old enough to know what it meant. She always wanted to hold babies and play with toddlers and babysit relatives. She never talked about when she would eventually get married to Charlie or what she would do about work without talking about how it would affect the kids she didn’t even have yet. The first thing she told Laurie about Charlie that meant for sure that she was serious about him was that she’d watched him lean down to gently zip up his nephew’s hoodie, and she’d felt like she was watching her future.