Chapter 10 A Reverse Benjamin Button Is Normal Aging
A Reverse Benjamin Button Is Normal Aging
Saturday, Now
Something I learned today that I never dreamed I’d need to know: in Rockland Bay, Minnesota, tow truck drivers will not pull your van out of a muddy bike trail in a public park—which is apparently where Ethan and I have found ourselves—no matter how desperately you plead with them.
“Little lady, you’re not going to find a soul willing to drive a wrecker through a park without Alf’s go-ahead.” I suppress the increasing temptation to chuck my phone into Lake Superior at the words “little lady” and “Alf.”
According to this driver—and the four other drivers who appeared above him in my Google search results—the scenic, unincorporated community of Rockland Bay lives and dies on the say-so of Alf Knudsen, a septuagenarian who’s unreachable on weekends unless he’s eating breakfast at the diner or watching the Vikings in his regular booth at the Pickled Herring.
After Randy hangs up, I kick pebbles into the water, imagining each rock catapulting directly into Alf’s face.
The fantasy is immediately pulverized by an anvil of guilt because Alf is probably a nice old man who loves this beach and wants to protect it from people like me—someone who barreled a mobile home down the lake’s adjacent bike path.
Now that I’ve contacted every tow truck in the surrounding area, I try Laurel, but the call goes straight to her voicemail again.
My thoughts spin like a top on the edge of a table, already starting to fall into an anxiety spiral.
What if I can’t find a way out of this? What if I get there too late and she’s already married?
When it comes to Petey, Laurel doesn’t know how to protect herself from heartbreak.
She dives in headfirst every time and a little piece of her shatters when it falls apart.
When this ends, I’m worried it might break her.
For a second, I wish I was still with Rich. Not because I miss him or love him or would even enjoy standing on this beach with him, but had he not left, I might still believe there’s hope for the Beekman women.
Ignorance is bliss.
I stuff my phone in my jean shorts and stare hopelessly into the hypnotic swells of the water.
It’s hard to explain the vastness of Lake Superior to people who’ve never seen it, but whenever I stand on the rocky, imposing shoreline and peer into the unending water, something changes inside me.
My molecules rearrange themselves, and for a split second, I’m certain the dark waves will reach onto the shore and yank me under, as though I’m a bird or a boat or a shell.
I’m an object that lacks the capacity to think or feel or perseverate on my full inbox and the echo of my living room.
I’m just a thing, capable of being swept away.
I close my eyes, focusing only on the way the breeze hits my face and strands of my hair fly into my lip balm. I’m on the edge of the world, and the notion of that almost quiets the anxiety prowling around my mind.
A familiar hand meets my shoulder, and I let myself press against it. “Any luck?” Ethan asks. His mouth drifts to my ear to compete with the deafening crash of waves.
I shake my head. “Tony Soprano has nothing on the way Alf Knudsen has northern Minnesota by the neck. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I could reach Laurel to tell her to hold off the wedding.”
He purses his lips. “They must not have enough reception for a call. Petey read my text, so at least we know that they know we’re not making it tonight.”
I inhale through my nostrils. “Can this day get worse?”
He takes my hand but doesn’t turn us away from the water. “Do you need to do ‘dark side’ or ‘bright side’?” he asks, reintroducing one of our other old games: the “talk anxious Charley off the ledge” game.
I almost say, She’s already trapped , but even that’s not the “dark side” I’m most afraid of. Breathing in deep, I opt for the thing I can’t always do on my own. “Give me the bright side, Powell.”
He wraps his arm around my shoulder and ushers me from the shore like an adult coaxing a toddler away from a hazard. “So we’re stranded on the side of the road—”
I cut him off with a snort. “You’ve gotten worse at this.”
“I’m ramping up to it,” he huffs, knocking my elbow with his. “So we got stranded— beached , if you will—”
“Hilarious,” I deadpan.
“But that part’s over now. We’re done with the bad part, and now I’ve made dinner, and then we get to fall asleep next to the largest freshwater lake in the world. This isn’t some rinky-dink Lake Lewellen.”
“And I have a lead on Alf’s whereabouts tomorrow morning,” I add, finally feeling the effects of Ethan’s trademark bright side. “On Sundays, he eats waffles at the Grey Duck after church.”
He gives my shoulder a squeeze. “See? Everything’s coming up Beekman. Let’s eat and worry about the rest of it tomorrow.”
I follow him back to the van, pretending that hunger is all I have to worry about.
He’s set up a pole behind the back door, and a single strand of café lights.
Behind it are two camping chairs and a tiny propane grill.
There are plates—actual matching plates with a navy stripe around the rim—filled with some kind of white fish, grilled broccolini, and a creamy rice thing that smells incredible.
“Are those slices of lemon butterflied into the fish?” I ask, pointing at the rest of the charred fish head still nested in a wad of tinfoil atop the grill. Its menacing eyeballs stare back at me.
“Branzino,” he specifies.
I rear back. “You had a whole branzino hanging out in your camper fridge? And is this a risotto?” I lift my plate from one of the two camping chairs and inspect it. “How did you make risotto?”
He sits and shoves a forkful of rice into his face. “The Instant Pot,” he informs me with a full mouth and pink cheeks. “It’s tomato and Parmesan.”
I sit, plopping the plate on my thighs, stunned.
“Here.” He hands me an insulated tumbler of white wine.
“I’m stranded off a bike path, eating grilled branzino, broccolini, and tomato Parmesan risotto. This was not the way I expected my Saturday to go.”
“I bet,” he says, smirking. “Who’s going to organize your freezer now that you’re out here having the best meal of your life?”
“You think you’re making fun of me, but that is my dream Saturday night.” I bite into the perfectly flaky, expertly seasoned meal and let out an indecent moan. “My god, Powell. This is amazing. This tastes exactly like that Italian place you took me to in LA.”
“Velluto,” he offers, correcting me.
“You have all the ingredients to Velluto’s branzino dish sitting in your van? What is your life?”
He glances at me and then away. “You caught me on the day I happened to go to the store.”
“What store? Does Aldi carry whole branzino now?”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s just a fish, Beekman. Do you like it?”
“I love it. I want to marry it, have its babies, and buy a cabin we complain about not visiting enough.”
“Good.” He laughs. “Then mission accomplished.”
We talk comfortably about nothing, eating the most exquisite meal anyone has ever served next to a mud-bogged camper van. I drink the wine with small, tentative sips. My hangover might be gone but an aura of sensitivity continues to circle my skull.
I peer over at him under the gleam of the café lights and soak in all of his Ethan-ness. His easy posture, his dimples, the hard cut of his jaw, that laugh and how it ripples over my skin like a rock in a pond.
The breeze off the water flutters his hair, exposing the tiny silver scar along his hairline from when we collided on our saucer sleds in the eighth grade.
At a house party in college, a girl asked him about it.
He said it was from a bike accident. Easier to keep people in the dark , he’d told me the moment she walked away.
Not everyone needs to know that my friend Chuck is a secret daredevil.
I nestle my wine into its cup holder, realizing all at once that this is the Ethan that the women in this van experience.
Café-lights Ethan. Branzino Ethan. A man so beautiful it hurts and you’d do anything to keep him even after he’s warned you he can’t be kept.
A perfect projection of a carefully curated, nomadic sexual fantasy as directed by Sofia Coppola.
I almost want to take a picture of it, but this Ethan isn’t mine.
“So is this how it usually goes?” I stretch my elbow over my chair and relax my head into my palm.
Beads of sweat collect on my neck from the heat of the low sun.
I’m warm and loose and feeling a little bolder than usual.
“You grill her an entire fish…?” Something swims in his expression at my prodding.
“Set up these cute little twinkle lights? You say ‘Just one night,’ but do the absolute most, and then pick her stepdad up from the airport the next morning just to really confuse her?”
He plucks a fishbone from the tip of his tongue and tosses it into the grass. “I’ve only driven one stepdad to the airport, thank you very much.”
“Powell!” I balk. “You’re ruin-your-life attractive.
You can’t be this noncommittal while still doing your whole ‘Ethan thing’ and love-bomb them via acts of service.
It deludes otherwise intelligent women into believing they can transform you into a monogamous grown-up with an immovable house like some sort of reverse Benjamin Button scenario. ”
The corners of his mouth tilt upward as a tiny ember of embarrassment flushes my cheeks. “I’m sorry. I stopped listening after you called me ‘ruin-your-life attractive.’?”
I wince. “I’m immediately regretting that choice of words. It’s clearly going straight to your head.”
He narrows his eyes, undeniably pleased. It’s probably been ages since someone’s both criticized and complimented him with such specificity. “You know, a reverse Benjamin Button is normal aging.”