“I was a frosting fiend when I was a kid. My mom used to tell a story—I don’t remember this, but it sounds like me—that one year for my birthday, she gave other people cake and just put a huge scoop of frosting on my plate.”
Izzy felt so relieved, she couldn’t hold back her smile. She was glad she had the excuse to put a cinnamon roll on a plate so she could turn away from Beau. She was just happy everything felt…normal between them.
“Want to take these to the library?” he asked. “If so, I’ll grab another one.”
She nodded.
“And I’ll grab the wipes. We can’t get frosting on the books, after all.”
They worked together like normal that day, though Izzy tried her best to remember the lecture she’d given herself, and not let herself get too close to Beau. Or think about him too much.
On Sunday, their work time in the library started like it always did. Izzy pushed Beau’s notebook across the table to him, he opened it, wrote for a while, then typed, and kept typing until the timer went off. Afterward, though, Beau did something different.
“Izzy,” he started. And then stopped and looked down at the table.
“Yeah?” she asked. Was something wrong? He looked nervous.
“I. Um.” He took a deep breath. “Can you…Would you like to read something? I mean, some of”—he gestured to his laptop—“this? If you don’t want to, it’s okay.”
Izzy tried not to react. Beau was clearly stressed about asking her to read his work; she didn’t want to make it into an even bigger deal. But inside, her mind was one big exclamation point.
“I’d be happy to,” she said.
He nodded quickly. “How about, um, right now? Because if I don’t show you right now, I might lose my courage here, so…”
Izzy tried to smile as encouragingly as possible. “Right now is great.”
Beau brought her his laptop and then sat back down in his chair. “Okay. Um, just that part. The part that starts with ‘This house.’ It’s rough, and it needs a lot more work, obviously, but I think it’s time to see if I’m on the right track or not, and if not, what to do, or…something.”
Izzy wanted to reassure him, but she knew that wasn’t what he needed right now. He needed actual feedback.
“Sounds good,” she said, and started to read.
This house has always been a refuge for me.
Beau jumped up when she was only one sentence in.
“I can’t sit here while you read that. I’m going outside, okay?”
He raced out of the library before she could say anything. Izzy looked after him for a few seconds. Then she turned back to the screen.
This house has always been a refuge for me. When I was little, I would come here, sometimes with both of my parents, sometimes just with my mother, to visit my grandparents. There was so much to explore in the house and the gardens, it was like I found something new to see, to experience, to play with, every time. New corners, hiding places, flowers, books. It always felt like there was a little bit of magic here.
The best times were when I got to spend weekends here with my grandparents alone. They would let me roam free, occasionally coming outside to bring me more snacks or call me in for meals, sometimes just yelling my name to make sure I answered. My grandmother was always in the kitchen, baking something delicious, so I would usually stumble inside, clothes torn and dirt on my face, and sit at the kitchen table, and she would set a stack of cookies in front of me with a smile.
My grandfather was always in the library. I spent hours there with him. He had shelves of children’s books in the corner, just for me. He never told me when he’d added a new book to the shelves, but I would just check every time I came in, and there was almost always something new there, something I would grab, along with an old favorite or two, on my way into the room. My grandfather would nod at me, and I would nod back at him, and I would feel very grown up. I would curl up in the window seat and sit there in the corner for hours, as he sat at the long table, or in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace, working or reading.
As I got older, the house became a refuge for another reason: No one here seemed to know or care who I was, or who my parents were. At home, in LA, everyone knew my whole family. Photographers would take pictures of us on the street. People would call out my name, or my mom’s name, and I was supposed to be nice, polite, but I never wanted to be. In the neighborhood around my grandparents’ house, people just knew me as their grandson; at the beaches here, no one paid attention to me at all. I loved that.
But I got busier, I worked more, and I had less time to come see them. My grandmother died, my grandfather got older and sicker. I would come here sometimes to see him, but they were quick visits, not the long, relaxed, peaceful times I had before. It got harder to come, after my parents’ divorce, when things between my mom and me started to get strained, but that’s just an excuse. I guess the truth is that it hurt to see him like that, hurt to have to answer the same question over and over, hurt to think of him as mortal. I think I thought I would have him forever. That’s one of my many regrets.
When he died, it hurt to think of this house without him in it. Even after I knew he left it and all its contents to me, I didn’t come here. I know, spoiled rich guy, saddled with a house he didn’t know what to do with, boo-hoo. Trust me, you’re not thinking anything I haven’t already thought myself. But I felt like the house would feel empty without him, that I would feel his absence in every room. That it would hurt even more to be here.
But one day, after my whole world and everything I thought I knew changed, I had to get away. From my life, from everyone who knew me, from everything I knew. And without even thinking about it, I got in the car and drove straight to this house.
As soon as I got here, I realized how wrong I’d been to stay away. Instead of feeling my grandparents’ absence here, I feel their presence. I feel him in the gardens, I feel her in the kitchen—talking to me, comforting me, and sometimes lecturing me, for all the many ways I’ve fucked up, and continue to fuck up. (Even though my grandmother would be horrified to hear me use that word.) But they would both lecture me in the kind, loving way they always did before, the way that made me want to be a better person, for them. (Not that I’ve been particularly good at that, but I keep trying.)
But I especially feel him in the library. Nodding at me, encouraging me, smiling at me. Helping me deal with everything I don’t want to deal with. Helping me write this.
Izzy looked up. She glanced over at those chairs by the fireplace. They seemed old, worn, comfortable. She could feel approval emanating from those chairs. Like they were happy she was here.
She had to go find Beau.
She suddenly felt guilty for the way she’d been thinking about his book. When she’d first gotten here, she’d assumed there was no way someone like Beau could write a good book. She’d changed her opinion of him a lot in past few weeks, but she realized that perception of his book had lingered with her—that his writing wouldn’t be good, that despite some of the things he’d said to her, he wouldn’t think hard enough about his life, or the world around him.
She’d been wrong.
She found him over by the rose garden. The rosebushes were a lot fuller than they had been when she’d first gotten here, though there weren’t any blooms on them yet. He turned around when he heard her coming.
“Okay, just say it,” he said as she approached. “Tell me how bad it is, on, like, a scale of one to ten? With one being like, ‘I’m embarrassed to be in a room with this guy’ and ten being like, I don’t know, I didn’t think this scale through enough before I started talking, I don’t know if ten is actually good or even more terrible than I could ever imagine, and now I’m just still talking so you won’t say anything, aren’t I?”
Izzy laughed out loud. “Beau, it’s good.” He looked at her with narrowed eyes, and she laughed again. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m serious. Yeah, it’s rough, yeah, there’s stuff you need to tinker with, expand on, sure, of course. But it grabbed me right away, it drew me in, and it made me care about the story that you’re telling, which is absolutely the most important thing you want it to do. I’m really—” She was going to say she was proud of him, but that felt condescending. Who was she, to be proud of him? “I’m really glad,” she said instead.
He looked at her hard. “You know you don’t have to say all this, right? If you don’t know, I’m telling you right now: I know I seem all stressed, but I want you to tell me the truth. I want to know what you really think.”
Izzy looked him in the eye. “I’m telling you what I really think. Haven’t I done that, since I’ve been here?”
It was true, she realized. Most of the time—at work, even at home—she hid what she really thought behind the veneer of cheerful, everything’s-fine-happy-to-help! Izzy. But she wasn’t like that here, with Beau.