“Well,” Laurie said, “when Nick and I were locked in the office closet at the antiques shop, we heard Matt tell his buddy I was lonely and neglected and I would probably die alone in Dot’s house, so if I cross my fingers, I might just get that ending after all.”
When they debriefed about the meeting in the office and about hiding in the closet, they had not included this. Nick had yet to acknowledge out loud that he’d even heard it. One night, Laurie had lain on her back in one of the deck chairs and looked up at the stars and thought and thought and thought about it, writing comebacks in her head. She wrote stinging rejoinders about how Matt didn’t know her and he didn’t know what she wanted and it wasn’t a matter of a lack of attention, because she could be married right now if she’d wanted to. She thought about how she could have thrown the closet door open and told him all about it. She had sat with the sensation of that moment, of what it was like being stuffed into a closet with Nick’s sympathy—or maybe pity—until the memory stopped feeling like it was covered with thorns. Now his little jab at her meant much less; it was just a piece of a story, a story about Bad Matt, about a cheap con. But they all got pretty quiet when she mentioned it, and how quiet it got made it feel thornier again.
“Well, to hell with that guy,” Ryan finally said. “We’re getting back our duck.”
They all stayed at the table for about another half hour. It was so late, but this mix of laughs was like a song she hadn’t heard in years, and Laurie just wanted to keep hearing and hearing it. Still, eventually, June put her water glass in the sink, and Nick stretched his arms, and Ryan said he should probably get to bed. “Fortunately,” Laurie said, “Dot’s got five bedrooms, and two of them are cleaned out with almost no boxes left in them, so you should be able to get a good night’s sleep without worrying that you’re going to trip on something if you have to get up in the middle of the night.” She gestured toward the stairs. “You’re in the blue room where the rocking chair is.”
Ryan nodded and yawned. “All right, I’m off to sleep, friends. I’ll see you all very soon, I’m sure.” And with a wave, he vanished down the hall, a duffel bouncing on his shoulder that read Clone of Kong 2: Aped Again. Straight to video, that one.
June left too, and then it was just Nick, standing in the kitchen doorway in his jacket, hesitating like he had when they were kids, when he wasn’t ready to go, when he wanted to kiss her good night or kiss her good night again. It was on one of those occasions, two months before high school graduation, when he had eventually squared his shoulders and said, “I love you, Laurie,” to which she had said, “I love you, too,” and then he had slipped out the door and into his 1992 Honda Accord, the chosen transportation of so many great lovers through the ages.
This time, he didn’t say that. He considered her, though, for so long that she walked over toward him, less like she knew what she would do when she got there and more like she was stepping into a circle he’d drawn on the floor. When she was close, he finally said, “Just so you know, that guy could be married, or in a club—hell, that guy could be in the middle of Mardi Gras, and he would still be alone. And you could float on a piece of ice at the South Pole, and you wouldn’t be.”
She thought about being in that closet with him, listening for his breathing, feeling his hand on her elbow in the dark. She thought about the first time they’d ever kissed for real, not over somebody else’s sink but in the upstairs library at Ginger’s during Nick’s mother’s birthday party. It had been the middle of the afternoon, with light coming in the windows from every direction. They’d sneaked up there with pieces of cake on paper plates, because everybody downstairs was impossibly old—though in many cases younger than they were now, of course. And sitting in the library, on the love seat in front of one of the tall shelves, they had kissed, still holding their plates in their laps, jumping apart when Nick’s dad’s voice carried up the stairs: “Nick, are you up there? We’re giving Mom her presents.”
So now here they were, in the doorway to Dot’s kitchen, again sheltered by a woman who had been decades older than they were, who had made a home for herself. “Nick,” she said. “Thank you.”
He lifted his hand and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. “I always think about doing that,” he said. “Whenever I see you.”