Friday, May 12
As promised, Marco wakes me up at 4 a.m. He rolls on top of me, covering my throat with kisses, even as I moan and whine in protest, muffled under his mouth on my
chin and neck, his hair falling into my face. I can feel the weight and heat of his naked body through the thin sheet and
only that stirs me.
“You know,” I begin, running my nails over and around his shoulders as he plants lazy kisses on the soft planes of my stomach.
“Two weeks ago I didn’t even know who you were. Now you’re pressing your dong into my thigh to wake me up.”
“That’s love, baby,” he mumbles into my skin, and I try to ignore the ache in the center of my chest.
We cross the bridge into Evergreen and every part of me relaxes. This is home.
I quickly change and drop off my stuff before running down the steps. I actually can’t wait to get back to my place behind
the till, the crisp, sappy smell of fresh-picked peppers and green beans and onions all around me. Soph left extra early to
haggle for a better spot, away from the food trucks, and suddenly, this feels deeply exciting. I imagine our little stand
accruing more customers.
Allie’s waiting for me on the last step of the porch with a thermos of fresh coffee. “I need to know everything. Everything. ”
“We fucked,” I say, taking my thermos and pressing my lips to her cheek. “Gotta go.”
She gasps—a wild, uncharacteristically loud sound for such a country mouse. “Oh my God. You’re obsessed with him.”
I screw my mouth up into a grimace as I buckle my bike helmet under my chin. “I am. I’m so obsessed with him. It’s a real
problem.”
“Wow.”
“An absolute pickle.”
Allie wraps her arms around herself, a barefoot bundle of hoodie and sweatpants in the morning breeze. “What if he’s your
soulmate?” she shouts after me.
I laugh as I swing my leg over my bike. “That would suck, wouldn’t it?”
“You cannot leave me like this.” She’s hauling ass after me down the driveway as I’m pedaling away. “I need details, specifics,
timelines! Give me content, Nadia!”
“I promise,” I call back, picking up speed. “You’ll get details, but if I’m late again Soph’s going to kill me and then you’ll
never, ever know.”
I zoom down Neptune until it meets Brambleberry, then I make a left and pedal past The Billiards and the record shop and Cecily’s
Hot Donuts and the bench where I lay down after my first night out with Marco. The sun is heavy and orange, dripping like
honey down the vinyl-clad roofs. My phone is playing music from my bike basket, and I’m feeling sensations I haven’t felt
in weeks. A tingling in my hands, in my wrists. A quickness in my pulse.
I want to write something . A script, a story. Something complete, more complete than scribbles on the notepad I keep next to my bed. I want to sit
down and try to capture this feeling—this type of aliveness. It’s like I’ve glimpsed a butterfly resting on a purple dahlia,
and I know I have to take a picture because this is rare. So rare that in twenty years it might no longer exist.
Happiness has that feeling for me now. A depleting resource.
I start to piece together some words—barely fragments. I like the butterfly metaphor. I’ll keep it. I’m not ready to start
a big project, but a few lines about last night I could do, and that feels incredible. Maybe I could blow the dust off my
laptop and even open a Word document.
I’m pulled away from my music and my thoughts when my phone starts buzzing in the basket of my bike.
I wouldn’t stop this song for anyone else.
“Hello,” I call out to Marco. “You’re on speaker.”
Marco chuckles, his voice deep and sleepy. The man laughs at everything I say. Preemptive joy. “Okay, I’ll keep it PG. Listen,
I just got some really good news. Remember that work thing I said I didn’t want to jinx? Well, it’s happening—soon, too. This
week, and I want you to come with me.”
“Come with you?” My pedal strokes grow languid. I thought he’d retired from acting, given up the whole shebang forever. “On
location or something? Is this a movie?”
“No, it’s something totally different. You’ll just have to trust me. It’s in Rome.”
I come to a sudden, total stop. “Rome? Italy ?”
“That’s the one. What do you say, Fabs? Wanna come on a Roman holiday with me?”
“I’d... love to. I just... I’m not sure...” I’m stuttering, a thousand thoughts coming together and dissipating. I can’t travel. Travel requires togetherness—constant togetherness. No sneaking away to take medicine, to recover, to cry in the shower or
nurse a migraine.
If we travel, he’ll absolutely figure out I’m sick.
Maybe he won’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe I’m not even really sick . Maybe if I just keep —
“You have a passport, right?”
I frown down at my phone. “Yeah. I do.”
“Perfect. I’ll take care of the rest, I swear. Hotel, plane ticket. I really want you there, Nadia.”
Fuck. He sounds so excited . “Can I let you know by tonight?”
“Of course.” His voice lilts with a tinge of disappointment. “Take your time. But... not too much time. I have to leave
tonight, so your ticket would be for tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I repeat, barely containing my shock. He really meant it when he said it’s happening soon . “Marco, I can’t just abandon Soph and my job and—I know it doesn’t seem like much, but...”
The line falls completely silent. For the first time ever, I’ve stunned Marco.
“Yeah,” he says finally. “Yeah, that’s totally fair. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It’s okay,” I say softly. But it’s not. I know what I have to do. I know that the only way I can have Marco is if we stay
here in Evergreen.
Soph is grinning at me across the church lawn as I secure my bike and make my way over. “There she is!”
In all the months I’ve known Soph, I’ve never heard them sound this excited.
I duck my head, because I know my face is red. “You and your lover look like fucking Cheshire cats.”
“I didn’t think you’d ever come back.” Soph pulls me into an awkward sideways hug as I slip my apron over my head. We never really touch, so I take this as a sign that they really missed me, and that alone is enough prompting for me to pull Soph into a real hug, to show them that I did, too.
“ Duh , I came back. New York’s nice and all, but I missed this.”
“Is Marco back, too? Is he gonna stop by?”
“No idea.” I turn so Soph can help tie the strings of my apron while I pull on my gloves. Knots can be a bitch when my hands
feel swollen and achy. “I’m trying not to make him my life. Therein lies disaster.” I busy myself rearranging the display
of chamomile and rosemary, which we have an absolute deluge of. I should probably update the chalkboard sign to include directions
for drying the flowers to make tea.
“Or.” Soph shrugs a shoulder, fiddling with the quart-size green cartons of shishitos and jalapenos. “You two could really
date? Like, you know, just make it a thing.”
I press my lips together and shake my head. “Not an option. He’s made it extremely clear he won’t be in Evergreen after the
end of this month—and he definitely won’t be moving to Philly, which is where I would end up. And also... I read an article.”
Soph looks at me like I’m insane. “Like a newspaper article?”
“Well, it’s not 1960 so the article was on the internet—but yes.” I suck down a breath as I prepare to make my confession.
Forgive me, Father, for I have googled. I tell Soph about Sage Liu’s article—Marco’s cageyness about romance that read like a very-well-media-trained way of saying
I don’t do relationships. For extra evidence, I throw in the casual comment he made about having sex with a twenty-five-year-old.
“So, he’s a commitment-phobe that has basically locked you into a temporary sex contract?”
I swallow roughly. “When you say it like that, it sounds way worse.”
“I mean, but that’s what you guys are doing. It’s just a no-strings sex thing.”
No, no, no, I want to say. We’re like the same person; we completely get each other. He loves being sad and watching old movies and picnics! We’re friends.
Are we friends? If I don’t go to Rome, I’ll probably never see him again. Sweet November , over.
The morning passes at a steady clip as the usual suspects wander from stand to stand. I’m not sure if it’s the afterglow of
the last few days or the Evergreen gossip mill working at its usual lightning pace, but I keep getting looks.
“All smiles today, aren’t we, dear?” Jeanine remarks while thoroughly thumbing a basil plant.
Nancy Birch, my former favorite waitress from the diner, is holding court by the last remaining ashtray at the base of the
church steps. She’s surrounded by a cabal of similarly horny community elders. “They’re saying he has a girlfriend .” Then a woman with very blunt bangs shushes her loudly while making direct, unbroken eye contact with me.
“Boomers are so fucking weird,” I whisper to Soph.
“Don’t even get me started.” They roll their eyes. “Oh my God, Annetta Silva’s headed for them. She’s about to mess their
shit up.”
Annie, endlessly chic with her crisp gray bob and repertoire of caftans, is hauling ass over to the group, pulling along a
gorgeous brown-eyed toddler I’ve never seen before. Annie opens her mouth and in a booming voice calls out: “For the love
of hummus, Nancy, are you really smoking outside the house of God ?”
Don Bilovich drops by with some hefty bulbs of garlic from his garden and a sob story, looking for a deal on Soph’s award-winning rainbow chard. While they haggle it out, I step away from the stand and pick up my phone, which has started buzzing in the front pocket of my apron.
“Hello?”
“Amazing news,” Liv blurts out. “You’re never gonna believe this.”
“Ooooh, exciting.” I transfer my phone from one ear to the other, waving at the book club ladies who are collectively gawking
at me from their usual spot under the awning of the coffee truck. Nancy is among them, and I’ve most definitely pinpointed
that epicenter of all juicy Evergreen goss. I add an uncharacteristically big smile to my wave—something that says, Hello ladies! I fucking see you! “Hit me,” I say to Liv.
“Do you remember Celeste Taldi’s older sister? Long hair, weird nose?”
“Dionna Taldi?”
“Right! Okay! She came into the shop and told me she’s looking for someone to help the dental office with social media—”
I groan. “Oh jeez...”
“ Hush. She’s going on about how she needs help getting followers on social media. They want more patients—younger people. And she’s
not the only one. Turns out tons of people are looking for someone to help with social media. TikTok and all that. I mentioned
you and she lit up. She was like, Nadia’s always been cool . Isn’t that crazy? You could totally start your own business doing this. I told her you’d probably love to—”
“Thank you, Liv, seriously. But I’m just not interested—”
“Why not? It’s basically free money. These businesses run themselves, you’ll just have to post a few times a day or whatever. You can move back to Philly!”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, stuffing back my growing frustration. “It sounds amazing—really. But I’m just not in the headspace
to do marketing stuff again. I’m happy in Evergreen—”
“You’re happy in Evergreen? Doing what, growing mold? Hanging out with Marco?” That stings. It stings badly. Of course Liv would choose
this moment to make fun of me, a time when I’m already feeling slightly battered and bruised, preemptively sad over how Marco
will react when I tell him I can’t come to Rome. Proactively sad about another piece of life I’ll miss out on.
And of course Liv would make fun of me about the one man I’ve chosen to open up to her about—if the one passing conversation
we’d had on the balcony could even be considered “opening up.”
Now I’m pissed and ready to pounce, but I’m not fast enough. I’m never fast enough to get Liv before she gets me. “Rotting
away in Evergreen and fucking some guy who doesn’t even care about you enough to give you a real shot isn’t going to make
you less sick, and it isn’t going to take your life off pause. You’re spinning your wheels and when Mom and Dad—”
A sudden, ancient rage sparks to life in my stomach. Is that what she thinks of me? Of sex? “ Fucking some guy ? Real classy, Liv. Really nice. You know what they say about South Philly girls—”
“What, because you’re not from here, too? I’d rather be trash than be a fucking depressive shuffling around in my bathrobe
all day.”
Oh. We’re both out for blood.
“Real clever. Calling me a snob, once again. It’s the only insult you have.”
“Yeah, snob. You’re a snob. Snobby, lazy, and boring .”
“Oh, I’m boring? At least I’m not marrying the first guy to message me on Myspace.”
The situation is deteriorating faster than either of us can pull the emergency brake. If she was here in person, we’d be pulling each other’s hair and clawing at each other’s necks. We’re too old for this. I know we are. But I don’t care.
Every argument I’ve ever had with Liv has started for the exact same reason—everything has to be on her terms, and if I can’t
match her enthusiasm, then I deserve the worst of her ire.
“You’d die to have a guy like Mike, you cantankerous old cun—”
No. We cannot cross the cunt Rubicon.
“Olivia,” I shout into the phone. Loud enough to get her to shut up and loud enough to turn a few heads from the stands around
me. I turn away from the growing crowd of post-brunch retirees and grit my teeth. “I can not do this right now. This conversation is over. I am at work, at my job. I cannot take extended breaks in order to scream at
you. So, please, shut the fuck up.”
“Work.” She huffs. “You’re playing farmer with your friends. Great use of that college degree.”
It takes everything in me to not bash my head against the stone side of the church. “Look, I’m sorry it is so personally offensive
to you that I don’t want to go from being an art director at one of the most well-respected ad agencies on the East Coast
to making memes for some fucking pill mill.”
“There it is. The truth comes out. You think this is below you.”
“It’s not below me! It’s just—look, it’s not what I want right now, okay? God . I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings. ”
“What do you want, then?” she demands. “If you don’t want to come back to Philly, then what do you want?”
“I have no fucking idea, Olivia! But you know what’s not going to help me figure it out? You calling me in the middle of the
day to berate me.”
“I’m not calling you to berate you. I was calling to do you a huge favor.”
“I don’t need favors! I’m fine!”
“Fine!” she shouts back. “Be an asshole! Goodbye!”
My whole body shakes with rage. My entire skull aches from how hard I’ve been clenching my teeth together. I look down at
my phone, trembling in my hand. My fingertips are pink from how hard I’m gripping the device while my heart hammers against
my rib cage. I still have more fight in me. Why? I want to text her. Why are you acting like this?
But I don’t. Instead, without a third of another thought, I’m calling Marco.
He answers on the first ring. “Nadia?”
“Hey,” I say, but I have to clear my throat to hide the way it cracks, still raw with emotion. “I’m in for tomorrow. You can
buy me a plane ticket.”
“Really?” He’s ecstatic, the thrum of his voice matching the city noise around him. He’s a shooting star of energy, a punch
of alkyl nitrites right up the nose. For the first time in my life, I have someone to call when everything is going wrong.
Someone who can immediately and totally make my pain go away.
“Fuck yeah,” I exhale, slumping back against the church.
“ Fuck yeah,” he repeats. “You’ll be ready to fly out tomorrow night?”
“One thousand percent.”