“Oh?” I say. “Not using it to run drugs and host illegal gambling nights yet?”
His lips split into a smile. “Still in the same apartment?”
Our apartment. It still manages to hold traces of him. Or maybe that’s me, carrying his ghost around wherever I go. “Mhm.”
“How’s your sister?” he asks.
“Good, I think,” I say. “She and her hairdresser friend went into business together. They mostly do weddings and dances. Still FaceTimes me twice a month, makes about five minutes of small talk, then says goodbye.”
His teeth skate over his bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
He’s the only person who knows how much it bothers me that I barely know Eloise, that despite having a sister, I always felt acutely alone in our childhood home. Between our six-year age gap and her constant disagreements with our parents, we didn’t have much time to bond.
I shrug. “Some things never change, and the best thing is to stop hoping they will.”
“Other things do, though,” he says.
I break eye contact. “What about your sisters? How are they?”
“Good,” he replies, half smiling. “Lou’s with my mom this week. Said to tell you hi.”
I smile despite the twinge in my chest. “And Michael? Still in Colorado?”
He nods. “She’s dating another aerospace engineer, who works for a competing company. They moved in together, but they’re both under NDAs, so neither of them even lets the other into their home office.”
I laugh. “That,” I say, “is so unbelievably on-brand.”
“I know,” he says. “And Lou finished at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May.”
“That’s amazing,” I say.
Together, the three of them could be loud and rude and competitive. They argued over everything—what to have for dinner, who got first use of the shower, who really understood the rules of dominoes and who was totally off—as if as soon as a thought or feeling occurred to them, it spewed out.
But nothing ever blew up. Little arguments flared and extinguished; small insults casually faded. And everyone went back to joking, hugging, kicking, acting like siblings do in movies.
I wonder but don’t ask whether his younger sister, Lou, is just visiting their mom or if she ended up moving home after grad school like she’d been planning, back when Wyn’s stay out there was supposed to be temporary. She was going to take over Gloria’s care.
“I miss them,” I admit.
“They miss you too,” he says.
I ask, “Do they wonder why I never visit?”
“I go out of town sometimes,” he says. “For work stuff.”
“Work stuff?” I ask.
He nods but doesn’t clarify. “They think we’re seeing each other then.”
I nod. I don’t have anything to say to that.
He clears his throat. “My mom said you were taking a pottery class.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
“I pretended I already knew about it,” he says.
“Right. That’s good.”
“But she mentioned that she thinks you’re getting better. And your newest bowl looked way less like a butt.”
The laugh rockets out of me as if shot from a cannon. “That’s funny, because you should have seen the rapturous text she sent me about that butt-bowl. She pretended it was very good.”
“Nah.” He grins. “She wasn’t pretending. She told me it was really good. It just also looked like a butt. You know how she is.”
“Remember how nice she was about that painting we gave her as a joke?” I ask. “The fucked-up Velvet Elvis that looked more like Biff from Back to the Future?”
His smile widens. “She kept saying how unique it was.”
“But fully making unique sound like a good thing. So much nuance to Gloria’s opinions.”
“The nuance being that she can know something’s objectively terrible,” he says, “but if it’s even loosely connected to one of her family members, then it’s got to also be groundbreakingly special.”
The idea of being one of Gloria’s family members, of being groundbreakingly special, pricks at my heart.
“It’s been weirdly fun, living with her,” he says.
“Nothing weird about it,” I say. “Gloria’s a blast.”
He smiles to himself. “It’s just funny. I spent all those years convincing myself I needed to get away. I saw my sisters finding their things and talking about leaving, and my parents being so proud of how they were going to make something of themselves, chart their own path or whatever. And I thought I needed to do that too.”
I think back all those years to the day the five of us, sans Kimmy, lay on the Armases’ dock, charting our alternative paths, how even then, Wyn used his hypothetical other life to go back to the one he’d left behind. A part of him knew he belonged there.
Once I went home with him for the first time, met Hank and Gloria and Lou and Michael, saw the woodshop and the childhood bedroom filled with proof of a happy, love-filled childhood, a part of me knew he belonged there too.
I tried to hold on to him anyway. Watched, those months in San Francisco, as the walls closed in around him—and it killed me to see him so broken, so hunted, but I hadn’t been brave enough to cut him loose. Maybe that was part of the anger that burned in me too: disappointment that I hadn’t loved him well enough to make him happy nor well enough to let him go.
“Anyway,” he says, “if someone had told me, at twenty-two, that I’d end up living in my childhood bedroom and doing crosswords with my mom over breakfast every morning, I would have believed them, but I’d be shocked to hear I’m actually happy in this scenario.”
“You do crosswords?” I say. “You never wanted to do crosswords when we lived together. I used to try to get you to, every time it rained.”
“And I always said yes,” he says.
“And we never finished them,” I say.
“Harriet.” His eyes settle on mine, a knowing glint in them. “That’s because I could never sit still that long across from you without touching you.”
Blood rises to my cheeks and chest, thrums down into my thighs.
Without my realizing it, we’ve moved closer together. Maybe it’s like Cleo’s Bernie’s-induced hangover: a Pavlovian response that will always draw us together.
I say, “And here I thought it was the crosswords themselves getting you riled up.”
“As it turns out,” he replies, “it’s not writing letters in tiny boxes that gets me riled up.”
“That’s good,” I manage. “That would make breakfast with Gloria pretty awkward.”
The fan blows a wisp of hair across my face, and he catches it, twisting it between his calloused fingertips. My heart pounds, my every cell tugging toward him.
Behind us, the door to the theater swings open. Our friends stream out in a flurry of chatter and laughter. Intermission has begun.
I start toward them, but Wyn catches my wrist.
“I like the bowl,” he says. “She showed me a picture. I thought it was beautiful.”