Apparently I’m staying.
It’s not that Brooklyn suddenly looks so beautiful, or that I miss my family any less, or that I’ve come to a momentous decision. It’s as though I can feel Blix’s presence all around me, that her words have landed in my soul somehow . . . and I want to bask in that for as long as possible.
Three months suddenly seems like nothing.
A little break from my life perhaps, before it goes rumbling off on its normal track—toward marriage and children and, yes, lawn mowers.
I have a chance to pause. I feel like that woman we sent energy to that time at the engagement party—and just the way she did, looking up to see who’s called her—that’s what I’m doing right now.
I text Patrick, for no reason at all: Just bought the heaviest sweater I’ve ever owned in my life. Question: Is life really possible for a kind of weird person from the South to make it here?
After a long time, he writes back: Sweater is a good start although December can be frosty. Hell, November can be frosty! Also Bklyn is welcoming to weirdos. It’s normal folks who have the most trouble. BUT: Do you say “y’all”? Might be harder to assimilate if you say “y’all.”
I don’t say “y’all.” My time in Northern California whipped that out of me. (BTW, nice punctuation! Colon AND quotation marks! )
Then I’d say you have a good chance. (I’ve been told I’m a punctuator extraordinaire.)
If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere, or so I’ve heard.
That’s Manhattan. Making it in Brooklyn guarantees nothing.
So I need a coat?
Most def. (That’s Brooklynese for “most definitely.”)
I figured.
I go over to Uniqlo and get one of those adorable little parachute-type coats. In dark purple. Because why not?
Then I walk home, trying out my part as a regular Brooklyn girl strolling through the hood.
I’m staying! I’m actually going to live here for three months. I feel like when you’re at the top of a roller coaster and are just about to start the whooshing ride you paid for, and you just hope you don’t freak out.
It’s a long walk back to Blix’s house, but I’m not up to figuring out the subway system just yet, and it’s too nice a day for a cab. And anyway, what else do I have to do but walk? I just want to look at everything, all the nail salons and brownstones and nondescript apartment buildings and restaurants, everything big and noisy and filled with ordinary life. For a while I try keeping track of how many people smile at me, which is not all that many, but who cares. It occurs to me that when it’s this crowded, you can’t afford to be smiling and chatting with everybody. You’d be exhausted within two blocks.
I see a woman sweeping her steps, and her brown arms in her floral-print housedress look majestic. A bird’s nest is perched in a gingko tree. A leaf on the sidewalk is shaped like a heart.
And all three of those things feel like Blix saying, “Welcome. You’re here now.”
My entire family, of course, loses their respective minds when I tell them the news that I’m staying for a bit. But I’m ready for them.
My mother calls it abhorrent and manipulative, and says Blix was probably certifiably crazy. My father says that I should come home and we can let our family attorney look over the papers.
“No one can keep you against your wishes,” he says. “Believe me, I’ll figure out how you can sell the property and still be at home.”
“It’s not like that!” I say, but they are not having any of that kind of talk.
When I get Natalie on the phone, I try a different tack. I start with the good news that I just walked through Brooklyn, and people smiled at me, and that even though it’s loud and dirty here, it’s also kind of amazing and full of stories—and that Blix was perhaps onto something when she said I needed to be here.
“What?” says my sister. “No, to all of this! What happened to our plan to have babies and hang out by the pool? You said you were happy here! Why are you letting this woman, who’s dead, by the way, change your whole life around!”
“It’s not changing my whole life,” I say. But the truth is, I’m not so sure. I finger the good luck charm I’m still wearing around my neck and listen to my sister’s diatribe, which is getting more shrill by the minute. The thing about sisters is they have your whole rotten history right at their fingertips.
She runs through the greatest hits of my misfit life: my admittedly checkered history of dropping the ball, changing the plan, not following through. How, sadly, it’s no wonder that things go badly in my life—I assume she means my marriage, my job—when I let myself be swept along by somebody else’s vision for me. Where is my backbone? What do I stand for?
Think of Amelia! Think of Jeremy! Don’t I care that people here need me? Our parents!
I sit and listen, looking around the bright kitchen, at my shopping bags on the floor, my new coat, my beautiful white sweater that she won’t see. The sun is coming through the kitchen window. Blix’s plants on the windowsills are still in glorious bloom.
Finally I rouse myself enough to tell her I have a pot boiling over on the stove and have to hang up.
I try a new tactic with Jeremy, simply stating the facts. Not coming right home. Three-month residency required for the inheritance. Staying here. All is well. We’ll be fine.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says. “Back up. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
“Yep,” I say. “Me neither. But there we have it. It is what it is. It doesn’t have to be a problem. It just delays things a bit for us, is all.”
“But wait. It does seem like an odd situation, doesn’t it? Having something unusual like that written into a will? Why do you think she did it?”
“Well, she was unusual.”
“It just doesn’t sound like a very nice thing to do to somebody. You know? No offense because I know you liked her, but a gift with such strings seems really . . . well, suspect.”
“I can see that way of looking at things,” I tell him slowly, but what I am thinking is that it’s extraordinary how the late afternoon light slants in the kitchen window and hits the scarred top of the brown table. I love this table. The heft and solidity of it. And the turquoise refrigerator. I love that this whole place seems to hold Blix’s personality—and how does something like that happen?
“Can you come home for a visit, do you think? Or should I maybe come up there and see you?”
“Okay,” I say. I shake myself back into the conversation.
“Okay to you coming home for a visit, or okay for me to come and see you?”
“Either one,” I say, and yawn.
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Look. I’m sorry I’m not such a good phone guy, but I just want you to know that this makes me a little bit sad. And in case you didn’t know, I really loved having you working with me right in the next room, just knowing you were there, and my mom will miss having you to talk to because you know just how to make people feel good, you know? We all need you here. My patients, my mom, me.”
“Well,” I say. “Thank you.”
“And this is really temporary,” he says. “Right?”
“Oh my God! So temporary! Very temporary!”
“Because I love you, you know. I’m going to be so lonely without you!”
“I love you, too,” I say. “We’ll talk every day. I miss you.” And then I add, “It’ll be lonely here without you, too.”
And then, wouldn’t you know that when I hang up and turn around, Noah is standing there next to the refrigerator. Shit, I didn’t even hear him come back in the room. He gets out two beers and holds one out to me, cocking his head and looking way too amused.
“Wow. That was so sweet,” he says sarcastically. “Really. You’ll have to tell me who the lucky guy is.”
“Actually, it was my fiancé,” I say.