Chapter Seventeen
THE NEXT DAYwas, of all things, my birthday.
I woke up feeling deeply homesick.
I’d driven around until midnight the night before, in that hostile way you embrace your independence after you’ve been rejected: Fine. Whatever. I never cared, anyway.
I cranked the music up too loud. I left the windows down. I burned all Charlie’s gas and did not refill the tank. I kept my phone turned off so that if Charlie wanted to find me, I was plainly unavailable.
I didn’t turn it back on until I was crawling into bed.
And then only to check for texts from Sylvie, or my dad, or anyone I actually cared about. Though I did happen to tangentially notice in the process that nothing had come in from Charlie, either.
Not that I was looking.
It was all so odd. Charlie’s saying those things should not have smarted so much. Three weeks ago, I didn’t even know this guy. My life had been fine then, and—for the record—it was still fine now. In the big picture: better than fine, in fact. My dad was in good health. Sylvie was performing her duties respectably. I was in LA living a personal dream I never thought I’d get anywhere close to.
I was KILL N IT, as Logan’s license plate would say.
Whatever it was.
I should be grateful! I should be delighted! I should be happy!
But as the morning light squinted in at me, I was the opposite of those things.
If I’d been home, I would’ve woken up early and gone for a refreshing swim by myself. Then I would’ve come home and made canned-biscuit doughnuts—our family’s standard birthday-morning fare—with homemade chocolate glaze and sprinkles. And my dad would play some nutty rendition of “Happy Birthday” on some random assortment of kooky instruments, and then we’d sing it together so we could do some crazy, improvised harmonies.
Like we did every year.
Not a big thing. Just a pleasant little way to start off a birthday—one I’d never fully appreciated until I was all alone in Charlie Yates’s mansion.
All alone and just a writer.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to wake up Charlie for pool time this morning. He’d actually made a lot of progress—moving down to sit on deeper and deeper steps every time, until he shifted to standing, and then walking. That’s what he was up to now in the mornings—walking waist deep, in the shallow end, edge to edge, back and forth the whole time until I was done with my laps.
I didn’t even mind him being there. Most days.
But not today. Today, my present to myself was a morning swim on my own. If he could go on a date alone with his terrifying ex, I could certainly take a morning swim alone without his bothering me. No grumpy, pool-phobic writers with cattywampus morning hair allowed.
ON MY WAYto the pool, the first thing I noticed was that Cuthbert’s barn was not on the kitchen table. Margaux had indeed taken him back. Which made the day feel even sadder. It had been so weird at first that Charlie had a guinea pig at all—but now it felt weirder that he didn’t.
Amazing how your perspective can shift.
The second thing I noticed was that Charlie wasn’t sleeping in, like I’d assumed.
He was already awake.
And dressed.
And in the kitchen… cooking something.
He had an apron on. And he was heating frying oil on the stove. And there was powdered sugar spilled all over the floor like he’d ripped the bag open with oven mitts on.
“What are you doing?” I asked, walking nearer.
That’s when Charlie turned in my direction, and I realized he was holding a cylinder of canned biscuits.
You know what I mean by canned biscuits, right? They’re not really in a can. They’re wrapped in a cardboard tube that you pop open with the side of a spoon. You’ve seen those? I’m only asking because I always thought everybody had seen those—until I beheld Charlie: tube of biscuits in one hand… and a can opener in the other.
A can opener—impaled in the metal lid of the biscuits.
When Charlie saw me staring, he held up the whole situation with both hands and looked at it, too. Then he nodded, like he was in full agreement. “Who designed these things, right?”
I tilted my head, like I just could not be seeing what I was seeing.
I mean, the instructions were printed on the label.
“I can get the tops off,” Charlie went on, like he was truly befuddled, “but then I can’t get the biscuits out.” He turned to gesture to a counter’s worth of biscuit corpses that he’d stabbed with forks and crushed with tongs—lying mutilated where they’d been slain.
“Is that biscuit dough on the pendant lamp?” I asked.
Charlie looked up somberly. “I had a leverage problem.”
“It’s a bigger problem than just leverage.”
“There’s gotta be a better way, right?” Charlie said—like a person who had no idea that, yes, there was, already, in fact, absolutely a far better way.
Reminder: this man had been on the cover of Rolling Stone. Twice.
He was frowning at the biscuit tube. “Maybe I should get an axe from the garage?”
“What’s happening right now?” I asked.
Charlie paused. “I’m making you breakfast.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s your birthday,” Charlie said.
“How do you even know that?”
“Your dad emailed me.”
“How does my dad have your email?” Nobody had Charlie’s email. I barely had it.
“He got it from Logan,” Charlie said.
“But—why?”
“To send me this recipe. For canned-biscuit doughnuts.”
Wait. Had my dad guilt-tripped Charlie Yates into making birthday doughnuts for me? Didn’t he know that I was just a writer?
I shook my head. “Oh, god. I’m sorry,” I said.
Charlie frowned as I stepped closer. “Sorry about what?”
“My dumb dad,” I said, my throat feeling a bit tight. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“Shouldn’t have—?”
“Guilt-tripped you into making me doughnuts,” I said, taking the canister out of Charlie’s hand. “My dad just—loves me,” I said, “and he assumes everybody else does, too.”
I chucked the biscuits into the trash can. A three-pointer from across the kitchen.
“Hey!” Charlie said. “I’m doing something here!”
“Don’t do anything,” I said. “I’m shutting this down.”
“But I bought three bags of powdered sugar,” Charlie said, like that was some kind of counterpoint.
I was already walking away.
“Where are you going?” Charlie asked.
Um—I was in a swimsuit. Walking toward a swimming pool. But okay. “I’m going swimming,” I said. “Alone.” Then I gave the kitchen a quick glance, and said, “Just leave all this. I’ll clean it up when I’m done.”
CHARLIE DID NOT“just leave all this.”
When I came back in from my swim, bundled in my terry cloth robe, my hair towel-dried and pulled back in a damp bun, and far less refreshed than I wanted to be—the kitchen was worse: sprinkles all over the counter, cocoa powder everywhere like the container had exploded, open biscuit cans and hunks of dough on every surface, and the remains of smoke in the air, as if Charlie might have set a thing or two on fire.
But on the little kitchen table, sure enough, there was a tidy plate of semi-successful doughnuts. With candles in them.
Mission accomplished.
When Charlie saw me walk in, he grabbed a box of matches and bounded over to light the candles—but I stopped him.
“Please tell me you didn’t fish those biscuits out of the trash can.”
“Nah,” Charlie said, stepping over to the fridge and opening the door. “I panic-bought, like, thirty tubes.”
Sure enough, lining the fridge shelves were enough cylinders of canned biscuits to keep us fed on doughnuts for possibly ever.
“Didn’t I tell you not to do this?” I asked.
Charlie paused and studied my face. “You don’t seem very happy. What’s the story? Do you secretly hate doughnuts but you can’t bring yourself to tell your dad and now it’s become a whole thing?”
“I love doughnuts,” I said, shaking my head.
“Is it birthdays you hate, then?”
“I love birthdays, too.”
“So what’s going on?”
“I just…” What to even say? “I just think we should get to work.”
Oh, god—were my eyes tearing up? Over Charlie Yates calling me “nobody”? That couldn’t be right. I had to be homesick. Or tired. Or maybe feeling the emotions that we all feel when we turn another year older and confront the relentless march of time and the inevitability of death. Right? This had to be just normal birthday weeping. Didn’t everybody cry involuntarily on their birthday?
I needed to go pull myself together.
I turned to walk away—but Charlie grabbed my wrist and stopped me.
“Hey—” he said.
I looked up to try to drain the tears back.
“Is this about—” he started, but then he changed his mind. “This couldn’t possibly be about… meeting Margaux yesterday. Could it?”
“I think I’m just homesick,” I said, trying to gaslight us both.
But Charlie kept going, just in case. “Because that wasn’t a date or anything. That was a meeting. It was a check-in. She forces me to do them every few months because she regrets how she left me—not that she left, but the timing. And she doesn’t trust me to take care of myself and not get sick again—which is fair, actually. She shows up and drags me out and we sit at a table and she grills me to assess how well—if at all—I’m taking care of myself. She pulls out spreadsheets of health statistics and confirms that I’ve made all my checkup appointments. And none of it’s about me. It’s about her. Her guilt—and trying to find a way to feel better about her choices. I hate going. I dread going. My ex-wife and the fact that I got sick are the two last things I want to think about.
“But guess what?” Charlie went on. “Yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t dread it.” He shook his head in wonder, like he was telling me something impossible. Then he said, “I completely forgot it was even happening. I was just hanging out with you, strolling around the grocery store and teasing you about never having eaten Frito pie—and then we were putting away canned goods in the pantry in that ordinary comfortable way, and I was just… I don’t know. Happy? I think I was happy. Then she showed up like the buzzkill of all buzzkills. That’s why I yanked you into the pantry. That’s why I hid. And when she came back in and found us, and I pretended like you were just some random coworker—it was only because I didn’t want how I feel about you and how I feel about her to get mixed up with each other. Does that make sense?”
I wasn’t sure. Did it?
Charlie nodded, like not getting it was valid. “I don’t know how to explain it. But one thing’s for sure. I’m not making you birthday doughnuts because your dad guilt-tripped me. I’m making you doughnuts because I’m grateful that you’re here—for whatever you being here is doing to my life. And I genuinely want you to have a happy birthday.”
Ugh. One of those unwelcome tears of mine spilled over.
And Charlie, like a reflex, reached up and wiped it away. Like you might do for someone you cared about.
“Also,” Charlie said, “I burned a hundred canned biscuits before I got the hang of this, so these little guys really are miracles.”
I gave Charlie the wobbly smile that happens when you try to shift emotional gears.
Something was making me feel shaky. Maybe that I wasn’t just a writer to him. Or that he was glad to have me in his life. Or that I was doing things to him—just like he was doing things to me.
“You have to eat one,” Charlie said then, putting his arm around my shoulders and turning us both toward the waiting doughnuts. “So many canned biscuits gave their lives for this moment.”
And now I really smiled. Despite myself.
I sat down at the table. And I let Charlie sing me an off-key, caterwauling version of “Happy Birthday.” And I blew out the candles. But it wasn’t until I took a polite bite of one of the doughnuts that I really felt better…
Because that doughnut… was good.
“Charlie, this is perfect,” I said, mouth full, shaking my head in disbelief.
I wasn’t lying. The outside was crispy, and the inside was fluffy. It was the perfect mix of doughy and oily, soft and crunchy, sugary sweet and bready.
It was like taking a literal bite of comfort.
“Is it?” Charlie asked.
“How did you do this?” I asked.
Charlie looked just as surprised as I was. “Your dad said it was easy,” he said, “and after five hundred tries, it was.”
“You nailed it,” I said, taking another bite.
Charlie sat up straight and watched me chew, like he was very proud of himself. “This is the first thing I’ve ever cooked from scratch.”
I tilted my head. “That’s not what ‘from scratch’ means, but I’ll let it go.”
“Now you have to cook these for me on my birthday,” Charlie said.
“When’s your birthday?” I asked.
“October,” Charlie said.
I shrugged. “I’ll be long gone by then.”
Charlie nodded, like that was a good point. He looked me over for a moment, and then, like he was making a suggestion, he said, “I’ll be cured of cancer before you go.”
I tried to understand that. “You’ll be cured of cancer? Before I go?”
“A few days before you leave is the five-year anniversary of my last treatment,” Charlie said. “And that’s when I can officially call myself cured.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. I hadn’t realized he wasn’t already cured. Five years is a long time.
“Better than a birthday, really,” Charlie went on. “Every time I go for a checkup, I keep expecting bad news—that it metastasized, that it’s back somehow. But I keep on being fine. It seemed impossible that I was sick then, and now it seems impossible that I’m well. That’s what Margaux was here for—to make sure I didn’t miss that final checkup.”
“You won’t, right?”
He shook his head. “I won’t. I’m ready. I’ve been thinking about how to mark it. Some people take vacations. Or plant a tree. One guy I know got a tattoo. I was wondering if I should do something really wild. Go cliff diving. Or bull running. Or shark-cage snorkeling.”
“That’s a lot of choices.”
He met my eyes. “But now I wonder if maybe I just want to hang out here. And eat homemade doughnuts.”
Were we still talking about doughnuts? Something about the way he was looking at me made it feel like he meant something else.
“Oh, god!” Charlie said then. “I forgot the whipped cream!”
He grabbed a can of Reddi-wip out of the fridge and shook it as he walked back to the table. “Your dad said this was essential.”
He popped the top off and brought the nose of the can over the plate of doughnuts.
“That’s not what that’s for,” I said.
Charlie paused and looked up.
I stood and took the can from him. Then I squirted a dollop of whipped cream on the back of my hand and set the can down. “It’s for doing this,” I said, and I brought the hand with the whipped cream up just as I smacked down on my wrist with the other hand. The dollop of cream launched up in the air, and I opened my mouth, positioned myself under it, and caught it as it came back down.
For a second, I swear, Charlie had a look on his face like I was the most amazing woman who ever lived.
And I kind of agreed.
Then he grabbed the can off the table and copied what I’d just done—launching the whipped cream just fine, but overshooting it so it blopped on his ceiling instead of coming back down.
“Softer,” I said.
He tried again and this time got a nice arc, but the cream missed his mouth and hit his cheek instead. He wiped it off and licked his finger.
“Keep your eyes on the puff at all times,” I said, sounding like a coach. “Be the dollop!”
Charlie tried again and missed again—hitting the floor, the counter, the tabletop, and somehow the window before getting close to his face again.
I did a few more demonstrations: “It’s all in the timing,” I said. “As soon as it launches, you need to be moving into position. Head back! No fear! You’re a champion!”
When Charlie finally got one, he was so excited, he hugged me. And then he offered to squirt some straight out of the can into my mouth.
An offer I graciously accepted.
We were sticky, the floor was sticky—even the ceiling was sticky. But we’d clean it all up later. Life felt suddenly impossibly bright—the kind of bright that feels like it’s going to stay that way forever.
It was my first birthday away from home. Charlie had made me doughnuts because he was grateful I was here. He was almost officially cured, and we were covered in whipped cream, and these doughnuts were so much more delicious than anything cooked by a man who thought you opened canned biscuits with a can opener had any right to be. And right there, in a moment of ebullience, with no sense at all that I might ever regret it, I said, “Why don’t we make a whole meal out of it?”
“A whole meal out of what?”
“Your cancer-free-iversary. Why don’t I make a big, fancy dinner to celebrate, and we can eat doughnuts for dessert?”
Charlie picked up his half-eaten doughnut for a toast. “It’s a date,” he said.
So I clinked my half-eaten doughnut to his, and said, “It’s a date.”