“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. But wait, now it’s Founders’ Day, and you can pretty much insert any community event here—Christmas tree lighting, soup kitchen opening, children’s recital—and he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!”
“Yes!”
“She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm. The end.”
“That’s so stupid. Is it always the same?”
I down the rest of my wine. “Pretty much. I change the names and the kind of farm, for good measure. And I flip the genders. Half the time the guy leaves.”
“But he always comes back?”
“Always.” A moment passes between us, where I’m pretty sure we’re both thinking about Ben. For some reason I need Leo to know that I don’t want Ben back, that I’m happy and whole with him gone.
He goes ahead and says it. “But Trevor left, end of story.”
“Yep,” I say. Leo’s giving me this look, like maybe I’m a puzzle he’s about to solve. “Well, now you know all my secrets. I’m going to bed.”
CHAPTER 6
Leo isn’t up for the sunrise. I should be glad to have the swing all to myself, but I’m not. This alarms me on the deepest level. I’m getting used to him and how he follows me around. I like how he listens to me when I talk. I like how he looks at me.
Ben used to sit at the kitchen island and talk about real estate and what’s wrong with people while I made dinner. “You know what’s wrong with Mickey?” Or “You know what’s wrong with that guy at the bank?” These were rhetorical questions, and the only real variety to them was which person had wronged him that day. He liked to keep the TV on at all times, background noise while he moved the papers outlining his newest scheme around on the kitchen table. Ben took up a lot of space.
The night he told me he was leaving, he slept on the couch with the TV blaring. I lay in bed trying to process what was happening. The whole thing was so confusing. I remembered Penny’s face the first time I told her I was seriously dating him. “Oh. My. God,” she’d said. “Don’t blow it.” Ben was kind of a catch. He went to prep school and moved through life like a knife through soft butter. Ben was the kind of guy Penny would know.
Penny and I grew up in Chesterville, Connecticut, a medium-size town that had previously been two small towns—one affluent, one working class. When things were rezoned in the 1950s to create a single town with a single public high school, the result was a town divided like you’d see in a John Hughes movie. If you lived up the hill, your parents were likely professionals. If you lived down the hill, your parents worked a trade. If you were me, your dad was in the business of cleaning all the professionals’ pools.
The divide in our town was something I almost never thought about. I took the bus to school with the kids in my neighborhood, and we played in one another’s yards after school. We spent our vacations at the public pool, which my dad also cleaned. In high school, my friends and I made fun of the hilltoppers’ pretentious clothes and sweet-sixteen convertibles that were invariably crashed and replaced within a month. I felt comfortable in my little house, in my faded jeans, where I knew exactly what to expect.
But not Penny. She wanted to be up that hill. Starting in middle school, she emulated the hilltop girls and the way they put themselves together. When they bought new skinny jeans, Penny spent the weekend on my mom’s sewing machine tapering the legs of her Levi’s. When they cut bangs, Penny followed suit. This never would have gotten her anywhere, but in the tenth grade Penny tried out for the spring musical and landed a leading role along with a handful of the hilltop girls. After prolonged exposure to Penny’s giant heart and passion for fun, they became her real friends. The transition was seamless, making me think that Penny had always been a hilltopper just biding her time in our twelve-hundred-square-foot ranch.
Throughout college and when she moved to Manhattan afterward, these were the circles in which she ran. I was surprised to learn that these circles are everywhere and they overlap in the oddest ways. Rich people, it seems, all know one another tangentially. So I guess I wasn’t surprised when I called her from Amherst to tell her about Ben, and she knew exactly who he was.
While I never bought into the glamour of the hilltopper, when I met Ben I sort of became taken by the ease of it all. His quiet expectation that the world would arrange itself around his whims. His confidence that he would never be called out or punished for any wrongdoing. He was that kind of slightly mean guy that made you feel superior if he liked you. Since the day he picked me, I’d done everything I could not to blow it. And yet here we were.