Sometimes we run so far out that we walk back, and sometimes he holds my hand. We are in the middle of a days-long conversation that winds around the most inconsequential and most monumental details of our lives.
“So, my mom had lung cancer,” he tells me on a walk. “But they didn’t tell me until the very end. They didn’t want to interrupt my filming, like that matters.” He’s quiet for a while. “I finally saw her the day before she died. Luke had been there for two weeks, which really pissed me off. The last thing she ever said to me was ‘movie stars don’t do hospice.’？”
“What does Luke do?” I ask.
“Luke’s a lawyer. I guess lawyers do hospice. Anyway, in three days I found out she was sick, said good-bye, and she died.”
“So that’s why you’re here?” I hate the neediness in my voice the second I say it.
“You’re why I’m here,” he says. “But before you, this, it felt good to connect to real life—the forest, the sunrise, the schedule. Like a person who knows about that stuff can totally handle hospice.”
Later, in the tea house, he wants to know more about Ben. “There must be something very, very wrong with him,” he says and kisses me so softly that I might start to cry.
He knows most of the story, because he played him in the movie. How we met in college and moved to the city. How I got a job in publishing and he was going to start a tech company. How a year into his start-up, a bigger company launched the same project. How the same thing happened with his next idea, and the next. The movie doesn’t cover the real money stuff—how Ben blew through any money I made almost aggressively. Like he shopped out of anger.
“I guess because he was raised rich, he never expected anything to be hard. He literally couldn’t handle it if things didn’t go his way. Like he was owed.”
“What happened to the grandfather’s money?”
“It was all mismanaged over the years; Ben’s dad didn’t really focus on the business when it was his turn to run it. So what’s left is a bunch of angry, entitled people with no money who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
“You should have put that in the movie. I would have liked that for his character, like it was hard for me to understand why Trevor was such a tool.”
I move Leo’s hair out of his eyes. “It was my fault too. I let him pretend he was about to hit it big. I covered for him for years because I didn’t want to be wrong about my marriage, my life.”
“You’re a chump,” he kids. “I should tell you, I’m not good with money either. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Except that you can afford a lot of bananas.”
Leo laughs. “So many bananas.”
“Well, I’m rich now, so it’s all good,” I say.
“You are? All my dreams have come true.” He pulls me in tight. “What a catch.”
“I’m serious. The Tea House got me out of debt. When you’ve been in a lot of debt, having no debt feels pretty rich. This isn’t going to be the movie where the heroine has to sell the farm.”
“Thank God. I like the farm.”
“One day, Ben found me in here sorting through a stack of bills, trying to figure out which ones we needed to pay and which ones we could lag on. I said something about how we’d be better off if we both had jobs. And I think that was the end. On that day, I think he added me to the list of people who were getting in the way of his big dreams.”
“That was actually in the movie.”
I laugh, because it all is a blur. Real life made into a movie that turns into a wild affair with the man who pretended to be my husband on-screen. For a person whose life is pretty straightforward, I never thought all my story lines would loop back in on one another.
“Did you love him?”
“Maybe early on. But there are parts of people you can’t unsee after years of living with them. Well, his disinterest in the kids, for one. But also his total self-obsession, his inability to appreciate beauty. Lots of things.”
“I appreciate beauty,” he says. And he smiles a smile I don’t know from the movies. It’s the same one he had when Arthur made it all the way through his script without looking.
“What’s this smile?” I ask, tracing his lips.
“I’m happy. I’m so happy he left you.”
* * *
? ? ?
Penny texts me ten times a day: What’s happening now? How long is he staying? Why aren’t you texting me back????? I reply: I am dangerously happy and generally too naked to text you back.