“I’m so sorry, Junie,” Laurie said, continuing to stir next to her oldest friend. “I’m glad you told me. I appreciate not thinking about my duck for five minutes.”
“How are things with Nick?” June asked as she peered again at the bottom of the pot of water.
Laurie hesitated. “I don’t want to get into my thing, we’re dealing with your thing.”
“My thing was that I needed you to come over here and stand next to me so I didn’t start screaming. You are officially allowed to get into your thing. Maybe it will take my mind off this fucking pot of fucking water.”
Laurie laughed and put the spoon down, and she leaned up against the counter. She told June about her visit to Rosalie, and about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She told her about the paint on Dot’s hands, and the bin of unfinished ducks, and the way Nick had come over, and the way he had left. “I think,” she said, “it might be over. Like, not over-over, but…I see how it’s going to be over.”
“Oh, Laur,” June said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, you called it.” Laurie shook her head. “It was doomed from the start, no matter how much I wish it weren’t.”
June stepped away from the stove and went to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge. “Well,” she said as she pulled the cork, “I mean, how much do you wish it weren’t?”
“A lot,” she admitted. “But not enough to come back. You know what it’s like? It’s like when I asked Bethie about her Legos and she said she was making a barn. It was going to be a school, but all she had was a rectangle, so boom, it was a barn. That’s how I felt about meeting other people when I was in my twenties. You meet them, all you really have so far is a rectangle, it’s your life, but you’re still putting it together. If you happen to meet somebody else, you can turn it into a barn pretty easily.” She looked at June, who was smiling a little while pouring wine into two glasses. “What?”
June handed her a glass. “Nothing. I am very impressed with this entire metaphor. It’s going to change the whole way I look at Legos.”
“But now, you see, I’ve already built the school. I built the windows, I put in the desks, I put on the bell, I’ve got whiteboards, I’ve got erasers—”
“This is a very involved Lego school.”
“Stop making me laugh, you’re being too literal, June. The point is that now, I’ve done all this building already. And when you’ve done a bunch of building and you meet another person, and they already have a whole barn, well, now you’re trying to figure out how to put a school together with a barn. And there’s this romantic bullshit idea that the most you can possibly love another person is to love them so much that you tear down everything you’ve made so far. You love them enough to turn yourself into a little piece that fits into what they already have and makes it perfect. Like you’re the missing element in a plan that already exists. That’s what Nick wants, that’s this fantasy that he has where this all turns out well and I come back here and I live in Dot’s house, and we have brunch at Ginger’s, and it’s exactly the thing he already has, except with me. And I’m not saying I’m any better; I’m exactly the same. I think about telling him I want him to come live, like, down the street from me, and he’ll get up and leave after sex so I can sleep. And then he’s just a piece of what I’ve already built. Neither one of those things is right.”
“Did you tell him this part?” June asked.
“Which part?”
“Did you tell him that there’s any part of you that wants to find a solution to this, or did you just say no to the thing you thought he was suggesting?”
Laurie narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, why not?”
“June, I don’t care what he says, he’s never going to leave here. He’s the shadow mayor. They love him. He picked this place over staying married.”
June looked skeptical. “I’m not sure it was only about this one job. She was just more ambitious, and he was more settled. Charlie and I always thought they made kind of a weird couple.”
“You don’t think it means he’d never leave?”
“Laurie, I don’t know. You don’t know. Neither of us knows, because you haven’t asked him. You think he’s making this approach to you—what if you came back here, what if you bought Dot’s house—and all you’re doing is saying no to that. Which is great, and right. Laurie, you are braver than anyone I know when it comes to knowing what you don’t want. You’ve always been pretty sure you didn’t want kids, you know you don’t want to get married, you know you don’t want to share all your space. But none of that means you don’t want somebody in your life. It doesn’t mean you don’t want him. You aren’t even telling him what you want.”