It’s so threadbare the pan’s heat seeps through, but I manage to drop the loaf on the stovetop before it hurts too much. The scent fills the room.
We spoon chili into mismatched bowls from the cabinet and heap them with sour cream and pre-shredded cheese. We spoon out the honey for the corn bread, unwrap the butter.
“I want to hear about your life,” I say. I know I should have told her this months ago. I should have told her yesterday and the day before that.
Mabel tells me about Los Angeles, about all of the name-dropping that goes on around her, about how lost she felt in her first few weeks there, but how lately she’s been feeling more at home. We look up the website for Ana’s gallery, and Mabel tells me about her most recent art show. I scroll through butterfly images, each wing made of fragments of photographs and then hand-dyed in rich pigments until the photographs are unrecognizable.
“I could tell you what they’re about,” she says. “But I’m sure you can figure it out on your own.”
I ask her who she’s heard from, and she tells me that Ben’s liking Pitzer. She says he’s been asking about me. He’s been worried, too. They keep saying they’ll get together one weekend, but that Southern California is huge. Going anywhere takes forever, and they’re both settling into their own new routines anyway. “It feels good to know he’s there, though. Not too far away if I needed a friend from home.” She pauses. “You remember that there are other people in New York, too, right?”
I shake my head. I hadn’t even thought about it for so long.
“Courtney’s at NYU.”
I laugh. “That’s never going to happen.”
“Eleanor’s at Sarah Lawrence.”
“I never really got to know her.”
“Yeah, me neither, but she’s really funny. How far is Sarah Lawrence from here?”
“What are you trying to do?”
“I just don’t want you to be alone.”
“And Courtney and Eleanor are somehow going to fix that?”
“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’m acting desperate.”
I stand up to clear our dishes, but after I stack them, I just set them aside. I sit back down, swipe my hand across the table to sweep away the crumbs.
“I want to hear more,” I say. “We got off track.”
“I already told you about my favorite classes. . . .”
“Tell me about Jacob,” I say.
She blinks, hard.
“We don’t have to talk about him.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s a part of your life. I want to hear about him.”
“I don’t even know how serious it is,” she says, but I know that she’s lying. The way she talks to him at night. The way she says I love you.
I look at her and wait.
“I can show you a picture,” she says. I nod.
Out comes her phone. She swipes a few times and then decides on one. They’re sitting next to each other at the beach, shoulders touching. He’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing. I look at the image of her instead. Her wide smile, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her bare arms, and the way she’s leaning into him.
“You guys look happy together,” I say. It comes out true and simple. It comes out without bitterness or regret.
“Thanks,” Mabel whispers.
She takes the phone back. She puts it in her pocket.
A minute passes. Maybe a few of them.
Mabel takes the plates I stacked to the sink. She washes them, both plates, both bowls, and the pot and the pan, and the silverware. At some point I get up and find a dish towel. She scrubs the splattered chili off the stove while I dry everything and put it away.
chapter fifteen
JULY AND AUGUST
IT WAS A SUMMER OF STAYING OUT LATE, a summer of wandering. It was no longer a given that I’d be home for dinner, as though Gramps and I were practicing for our near futures without each other. Some nights early on he left food out for me. Once or twice I called to tell him I’d bring leftovers from something Javier made. Slowly, the dinners tapered off altogether. I feared he wasn’t eating, but he wouldn’t admit to it when I asked him. One day I went to the basement to do the laundry and found one of his socks was stuffed with bloody handkerchiefs. Seven of them. I laid them out one by one and used the tricks he taught me. I waited by the washer for its full cycle, hoping it would work. All seven came out clean, but my throat stayed tight, my stomach ached.
I folded them, one by one, in little squares. I carried them upstairs on the top of the pile. Gramps was in the dining room when I got there, pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
He eyed the folded laundry.
“How’ve you been feeling, Gramps?”
He cleared his throat.
“So-so,” he said.
“Have you been to the doctor?”
He snorted—my suggestion was ridiculous—and I remembered a time in junior high when I came home from health class and talked to him about the dangers of smoking.
“This conversation is very American,” he’d said.