“Can I sit here?” Henry asked, plopping down in the chair on the other side of me and running his hands through his hair so the curls stood charmingly on end. He looked, as he always did, both happy and exhausted by the blissful chaos of taking care of everyone around him.
“Please do,” I said, passing him the plate of summer rolls. I remembered my first impression of Henry when he had been working in his garden, how I had wanted to take a pair of hedge clippers to him, scrub the dirt off his face, put him in a pair of pants that fit. I didn’t think any of those things now. I liked his messy, curly hair, and the half beard he ought to have shaved three days ago. I liked his faded band T-shirt and his jeans with the holes in the heels where he had stepped through them. I thought he looked comfortable, warm. I thought he looked like someplace I wanted to be.
When I had gone back to Phillip, I had done my best not to think of Henry. I had wanted to be sure I wasn’t leaving Phillip for Henry, or because there was the possibility of Henry, if there were indeed the possibility of him. I wanted to have left Phillip because I never should have married him, and Henry only confused the issue, with his kindness, and the broadness of his hands, and the way his beard had tickled my face when he kissed me, with the way he could coax food from the ground and the way the people who worked for him looked at him with respect and pleasure instead of irritation or fear, and the way he brought people together just for the joy of it. In the end, I hadn’t needed Henry as an excuse to leave, and when I had come back to Magnolia, it was as though we were starting over, as though Henry were, like everything in my life now, fresh and new and full of possibilities.
“Wanee, this is amazing, thank you,” I said, swallowing a bite of the summer roll, all crisp vegetables and soft rice noodles and the fresh, bright taste of the garden, and everyone else agreed around mouthfuls of food.
“You’re welcome.”
“Typical, right? It’s Wanee’s and Henry’s day off and they’re feeding us,” Arthur said, winking at Henry.
“Hey, I am not feeding anyone. I am just getting you all drunk,” Henry said, raising his glass and taking a sip.
Everyone laughed, and Caitlin stood up in her chair and applauded, and then grinned shyly and plopped back down when everyone laughed again.
“So when are you leaving, Madeleine?” Cassandra asked, spooning some red curry over rice onto her plate and then passing the bowl on to Kira.
“Two weeks,” I said. “I’ll be gone for a month.”
“Ugh, you are so lucky. I wish I could just take off and go to Paris and paint for a month,” Pete said.
“You can’t sit still long enough to draw a stick figure. You’d go crazy in a month,” Arthur said. “Ooof.” Caitlin had jumped from her chair into his lap, and he kissed her as she snuggled in.
“I think I could handle it if Paris were involved,” Pete said. “I mean, I’d struggle through somehow.”
“Well, don’t be too jealous. I’m going to be completely broke when I come back,” I said.
“But you’ll be rich in art,” Kira said dramatically, and everyone laughed again.
“Why Paris?” Wanee’s husband, Pat, asked.
“My grandmother spent some time there. And, you know, it’s Paris,” I said. I couldn’t explain it all, how I had always felt I didn’t belong in my family, but reading my grandmother’s journals was like reading my own thoughts, and I wanted to connect to her, how I felt my grandmother had left something unfinished there and I had the chance to finish it for her, how going abroad by myself signified a bravery I had never even considered I might possess.
“Maybe you’ll end up falling in love with it and never coming back,” Cassandra said.
“Hey, now. No fair trying to get rid of me. I just got here.”
“I’d like to propose a toast.” Henry leaned forward in his chair and raised his glass again. “To Paris.”
The others put down their forks and fumbled for their glasses, raising them high. “To Paris,” we all repeated, and we clinked our glasses together and the sound rang out clear and cheerful in the softness of the evening. I looked at what lay around me—the food, and the kind and happy faces of the people I had grown to love, and the bloom of the trees and the garden, the promise of Paris and the rest of my future beyond me, unknowable but mine to own, and I thought, This. This life where I had the space to find the things that were important to me instead of the things I was forced to do. This life where I was surrounded by friends who believed in art and food and community and who believed, fiercely, in me. This life with the endless, terrifying, happiness of possibility before me, and the light of Paris guiding me home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful to:
Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein, for your faith and encouragement.
Everyone at McIntosh & Otis, especially Alecia Douglas.