Henry
“Who’s that woman again?” Ian asks.
“The oldest daughter,” says Grace. “She’s not a major character. She mostly just sits.”
Just an estimate here, but I’d guess that was Ian’s fiftieth question since we pushed Play.
A sampling of those questions includes: “Is there a bad guy in this?” “Was the brother born deaf, or did he become deaf from an accident?” “Are you gonna eat the rest of your M&M’s?
” “Do you think we should tell Bella that I got candy? Probably not. She’d freak out.
” “Are there different kinds of sign language in other countries?” “Is that real snow, do you think?” “Does Harry Styles know this is pretend, or does he think there are little people in the TV?”
He’s next to Grace on the couch with Harry Styles. At first he was upright, fully engaged. A few scenes in, though, he started to slump, and now his head is resting on his mom’s shoulder.
“Did you like your popcorn fish?” he asks me.
I look at my empty bowl. “I did. More than I thought I would, actually.”
“I invented it,” he says, yawning. “It’s my favorite snack. The M&M’s made it even better.”
Grace and Tim’s wedding photo hangs on the other side of the room. They’re outside in a leafy field. Tim is handsome and broad-shouldered, a full head taller than Grace. They look so happy. It’s impressive that she can be here day in and day out with that thing hanging there.
Dermot Mulroney and the actor who plays his aforementioned deaf brother are shopping for a diamond ring together, and it dawns on me that Ian’s nonstop questions have, in fact, stopped. I look over at him.
“Is he asleep?” I whisper.
“Yeah,” Grace whispers back. “You can tell because of how his eyes are closed.”
“Should I wake him up?”
“Do you want me to punch you in the face?” she asks, which I take as a no.
We watch for a while. Grace, who’s kept her anti–The Family Stone rhetoric to a minimum, slides out of her Crocs and puts her feet on the coffee table. Ian shifts in his sleep, mutters something, and Grace asks, “Did you and Brynn ever think about having kids?”
It’s such a personal question, but she’s in her pajamas, rubbing her feet together in their fluffy wool socks, so it somehow feels natural—like we’ve skipped a few steps in getting to know each other.
“We talked about it a lot,” I say. “Eventually we decided we were happy enough being just us.”
Grace slow blinks. “So, you were just gonna spend the rest of your lives bathing in money and doing whatever the hell you wanted?”
“That was the plan.”
“Monsters,” she whispers. Then she tells me that this movie is one of those movies that makes her wish for snow, and it’s funny because I was thinking the same thing.
Her eyes are drooping because she’s fading fast now, as promised, but she perks up again when the dinner scene starts—that dinner scene. She eases Ian off her shoulder and scootches to the edge of her cushion. “Oh jeez,” she says. “Here we go.”
The whole cast is gathered around the table, smiling, and pre-dread rises up from my stomach. Diane Keaton laughs as she talks lovingly about her kids, especially her gay son. “True,” she says. “I did—I did desperately hope that you would all be gay. All my boys, and then you’d never leave me.”
“Don’t say it,” Grace whispers.
We’re powerless to stop it, though. The family banters, Luke Wilson makes a silly joke, and everyone laughs. Then Sarah Jessica Parker says, “You didn’t really hope for gay children, did you?”
I wince, and Grace groans as she sinks slowly back into her spot with Ian and the dog. “What’d I tell ya?” she says.
“I mean, it’s always been cringey,” I say. “But…yeah, you’re right.”
She scratches Harry Styles’s ear and smiles, her eyes back to drooping. “I like that you’re sufficiently horrified,” she says. “We can still be friends.”
Three minutes later, she’s asleep.
Because it’s easier to forgive people in movies than it is in real life, Sarah Jessica Parker totally redeems herself.
Beaten down, made the villain by these insufferable hipsters, she hands each member of her would-be fiancé’s family a gift.
And when those gifts are begrudgingly unwrapped, I see what I always see: framed black-and-white photos of a young, pregnant Diane Keaton.
And now I’m crying, which Brynn would’ve found hilarious because the first time I ever saw her cry was during this exact scene when we first watched this movie together.
“I’m not crying,” she whispered all those years ago.
“So, allergies?”
“Shut up.”
Harry Styles watches me from his spot between a sleeping Grace and Ian, concerned.
“I miss her,” I whisper, and his thin tail twitches.
When the credits roll, I’m not sure what to do. Waking Grace all teary-eyed just to say goodbye would be awkward. Then again, ghosting with a bunch of popcorn-fish bowls lying around would be rude. The least I can do is straighten up, so I gather our dishes. Harry Styles joins me.
On the way to the kitchen, I stop at the wedding photo, focusing on Grace this time instead of Tim.
Somehow I’d forgotten how pretty she was until she opened the door earlier.
Sweatpants and Crocs be damned, attractive is attractive, and there she was looking up at me with big green eyes and a bored half smile, hands on her hips.
In the photo, though, on her wedding day, she was smiling in full, bright-eyed radiance, and I look away from her body in that form-fitting white fabric because it feels like I’m betraying Brynn.
My hands are full, so I flip the kitchen light on with my elbow.
The first thing I notice is a laminated photo of Harry Styles—the human one—tacked to the wall above the dog’s food bowl, which is funny.
The second thing I notice is a corkboard opposite the fridge.
Pinned up alongside some coupons are maybe ten pieces of artwork.
When I step closer, I see Ian’s signature at the bottom right corner of each one.
There’s a drawing in colored pencil of this house.
There’s a sketch of a raven, too. The eyes are off, because bird eyes are difficult.
It’s nice work, though, and so is the drawing next to it of a bicycle.
Then I see Harry Styles lunge at something.
And when I look down and realize that that something is a mouse, I’m so startled that I shout and drop the bowls.
They’re plastic, so they don’t shatter, but they’re as loud as fireworks against the wood floor.
I shout again when a second mouse darts out from under the kitchen table and makes a break for the fridge.
A third mouse follows the second one, and I yell, “Jesus Christ!” just as Grace and Ian come running into the kitchen.
“What the hell happened!” asks Grace.
“There was a mouse!” I say.
“A mouse?”
“Three, actually.” I look around in case there are more. “You…I think you have mice.”
“Yeah, I know,” says Grace, annoyed. “Why’d you scream? They aren’t tarantulas. Henry, you scared the hell out of me.”
“I didn’t scream,” I say.
“You definitely screamed,” says Ian.
“It wasn’t, like, a scream scream,” I say. “I shouted. I was startled.”
Harry Styles comes out from under the kitchen table, tail wagging just as Grace’s daughter bursts into the room, wide-eyed in orange pajamas. “Why is there screaming?” she asks. “Who are you?”
“Hi,” I say.
“Are you a robber?”
“No, honey,” says Grace. “It’s just Henry again. Remember Henry? From last week? He came over to watch a movie.”
“You guys watched a movie?”
Ian looks at me. “We didn’t have candy, though.”
Grace smoothes out the girl’s bedhead. “Everything’s fine. Henry saw a mouse. He got scared and dropped these bowls and…well, he screamed a little.”
“More like a lot,” says Ian.
“You saw a mouse?” asks Bella.
“Mice,” I say, because that seems important. “There were three of them.”
“Oh wow,” says Bella. “Which ones?”
“What?”
“Were they the kinda-gray ones or the brown ones?” asks Ian.
“I saw a black one once,” says Bella. “But maybe not. It was really dark.”
Now Grace is the one who looks embarrassed. “We’ve sort of been cohabitating with them,” she says. “We usually don’t see more than one at a time, though.”
Bella points at the corkboard. “Ian drew them. See?”
I didn’t notice before. Along with the house, the raven, and the bicycle, Ian has tacked up drawings of a baseball player, an umbrella on a beach, and three mice standing on their hind legs.
“You like to draw, huh?” I ask.
Ian looks at his board. “Yeah.”
“You’re really good.”
I mean this as a factual statement, the way I give shout-outs to the young designers at work. Ian, though, beams with pride.
“Say thank you, Ian,” says Grace.
“Thanks.”
“Wait,” says Grace, scrutinizing my face. “Have you been crying?”
“What? No. Well, yeah, but not beca—”
“Um, mommy,” says Bella. “I think Harry Styles got one again.”
Grace squints at the dog. “Oh man.”
Now we’re all squinting at the dog. Harry Styles has been uncharacteristically subdued for the last few minutes. Then I see why. A wispy, pinkish tail hangs from his mouth, waving slightly, like a worm marooned on cement.
“Oh my god,” I say.
“Harry Styles,” says Grace. “Drop it.” The dog stands his ground, so she says it again, lower and slower. “Drooooooop it.”
When Harry Styles finally opens his mouth, a terrified, slobber-covered mouse hits the floor with a wet thud. As it scrambles to its feet and dashes for the spot beneath the fridge, despite trying really, really hard not to, I scream again.
“Just to be clear, I’m not afraid of mice, like, per se. I’ve just never been confronted with them like that, like they were coming after me.”
“Oh, I totally get it,” Grace says. “Mice are famously violent in this part of town.”
We’re outside standing by my car. The weird Thanksgiving heatwave broke, so it actually feels like fall tonight. Grace has a big jacket over her shoulders, clearly Tim’s.
“How many do you think you have?” I ask. “I feel like three mice means more than three mice.”
“I know how it looks, us living with vermin. It’s complicated, though.”
“Let me talk to my brother,” I say. “He’s a competent person. Maybe he could help you get rid of them.”
“I know how to get rid of mice, Henry. That’s not the complicated part.” She looks out at her neighborhood. The people across the street have three lit-up reindeer in their yard. “We can’t kill them. That’s the problem.”
“Why?”
“The kids like them. And…well, they know what death is. They know what it means.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right. Shit.”
From the front door, Harry Styles and the kids watch us. I wave, but only Ian waves back. “This was fun, by the way,” I say. “Thanks for having me.”
Grace laughs. “What was your favorite part, me passing out or the rodent attack?”
I laugh, too. “The popcorn fish, probably. Plus, I went through a few of your drawers while you were asleep. Found some pretty good stuff.”
The neighbors’ reindeer turn off just then because it’s getting late. Leaves skitter by along the sidewalk.
“You cried at the end of the movie, didn’t you?” she asks.
“Maybe a little,” I say.
“Mom?” It’s Bella. She’s on the front stoop now holding my empty M&M’s wrapper. “Did you guys have M&M’s without me?”
“Oh shit,” Grace whispers. She tells Bella to go back inside because it’s cold, and Bella does, but not before glaring at both of us.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “Just bring a bigger bag next time.”
I should go but I don’t want to just yet.
Those two words, “next time,” were maybe the nicest anyone’s said to me in a long time, like I’m welcome here.
Plus, aside from the crying and then all the screaming, this really has been fun.
“You ever do that?” I ask. “You know, cry when you think of him?”
She hugs her dead husband’s jacket across her chest. “Who me? Never. Definitely not one time at Whole Foods when they played a goddamn Neil Diamond song.”
It’s not funny, but it is.
Then she asks if I’ve ever thought of leaving, and I’m mortified.
“Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was just about to take off. Thanks again for—”
“No, dummy,” she says. “Not leaving now. I mean…leaving.”
“Oh.”
“I was thinking about it the other day.” She leans against the fender of my car and nods at her front door.
“Don’t get me wrong. I love those little weirdos.
Edgar Allan’s is killing it. And Baltimore’s cool.
Our life here is good, all things considered.
But if it were just me, nothing keeping me here… ”
“It’s funny you say that,” I say.
“Yeah, why?”
I look at the now-dark reindeer, sad suddenly, because I haven’t said this aloud in a while. “I’m moving to L.A.”