Chapter 10 Then
It’s a breezy Friday afternoon, I’m already off work, my apartment is no longer a disaster zone of moving boxes and partially assembled bookcases, and Tessa Dare’s deliciously witty banter between the grumpy reclusive duke and the feisty wallflower who’s crashed his castle is a much-needed distraction while I wait for Lauren to show up.
I haven’t seen Lauren since our lunch at Luna’s, and I haven’t heard from her since she texted me on Sunday, asking if we could change her visit from Tacos and Tequilas Tuesday to Fried Food and French Wine Friday.
While I was suspicious last week at Luna’s, I’m now sure something is wrong.
“No loitering,” a gruff voice says. “It’s right there, on the sign.”
I peer up from my perch on my apartment’s front steps, resting my finger on the line I was reading to mark my place. A smile breaks across my face. I recognize the owner of that gruff voice. “Mr. Fleischer, hi!”
Mr. Maxwell Fleischer, a regular at The Bookshop, is by far the crankiest man I have ever met. He’s also my favorite. I’ve read too many books featuring lovable elderly grumps with prickly exteriors to take his surliness to heart.
He narrows his eyes at me, leaning heavily on a metal utility cart filled with groceries.
“It’s Thea,” I remind him. “From The Bookshop?”
“I know who you are,” he grumbles. “What I don’t know is why you’re loitering on my stoop.”
I blink. “Wait, you live here?”
“No,” he says flatly. “I just schlepped all my groceries here and called it ‘my stoop’ for shits and giggles. Yes, I live here.”
“So do I!” I peer over my shoulder at the building’s multi-unit mailbox. “So you’re unit two, ‘M.F. NO SOLICITING!’ I’m unit three, Theadora Meyer.” I turn back and smile at him. “Right above you.”
He scrubs his face. “Dammit.”
“I promise, you’ve got nothing to worry about, I’m a model tenant.”
“It’s not that,” he mutters.
“What is it, then?”
He tips his cart onto its back wheels and shoves it up the first step. “I was hoping you were a going to be someone cute.”
I mime a dagger plunged into my heart. “Ouch.”
He glowers at me. “Someone cute who’s my age. Given the name, I had high hopes.”
“Ohhh. Well, that tracks—I was named after my grandma.” I stand up and reach for the bottom of his cart, lifting it up the last two steps as he pushes. “I’m sorry to have disappointed,” I tell him. “If it’s any help, I’m basically seventysomething inside?”
Mr. Fleischer gives me a withering look. “It does not.”
“I understand; it takes me out of the running romantically, but just think, we could be friends here, too.”
“ ‘Here, too?’ ” His bushy white eyebrows shoot up past his black-frame glasses. “Toots, we are not friends anywhere.”
“Now, I can take a lot,” I say to him, holding the building’s door open for him, “but I can’t take your denying our friendship at The Bookshop.
I don’t sell a signed copy of Alexander McCall Smith’s highly anticipated latest installment of No.
1 Ladies Detective Agency a week early to just anybody.
And I know you don’t split a blueberry muffin with any other staff member on their break. ”
He glares up at me. “That was one time, when I was very hungry, and you took your break with me.”
I smile. “But what a delightful one time it was.”
He pushes his cart inside, grumbling under his breath.
“Good to see you, friend!” I call from the threshold. “And neighbor!”
He waves a hand vaguely, then stops his cart in front of the elevator and presses the up button.
“Close the door!” he hollers over his shoulder. “You’re air-conditioning the neighborhood.”
“Ah, speaking of!” I let the door fall shut behind me. “My air-conditioning isn’t working, and I’m having the hardest time getting through to the property manager about it. I thought I’d try the landlord, next. Any tips for how to reach him?”
The elevator dings, and its narrow door slides open. Mr. Fleischer turns, facing me as he backs into the elevator with his cart. “Yes,” he says. “But be warned, he’s a surly old sonofabitch.”
I grimace. “Well, I’m sure he’s got a lot on his plate.
Landlording can’t be easy, especially with a hard-to-reach property manager and an older building like this.
I do need to get my AC fixed, though. It’s so hot up there, my Jif peanut butter spread is currently more like Jif peanut butter syrup.
I’ll take any help I can get in reaching him. ”
The elevator door starts to close, but Mr. Fleischer juts his cart out in time to stop it. He sighs heavily and says, “Then consider it your lucky day. You just did.”
In a truly epic exit, he yanks the cart back, and the elevator door slides shut.
I rush up the stairs as the elevator dings in the second-floor hallway, stopping when my face clears the floor to call through the railing rungs, “Just confirming, you’re good to get the AC fixed?”
“No need to shout!” he shouts. “I’m old, not deaf!”
“Right, so—”
“Chrissake, yes, the AC will be fixed. I already texted my guy. He’s on it. Now, would you leave a man in peace?”
“Great!” I tell him. “Thanks, neighbor! And friend!”
In answer, Mr. Fleischer’s door slams shut.
“Can I just say,” Lauren calls from the vestibule below, “I want to be that guy when I’m older?”
Lauren stands in the middle of my apartment, white-knuckling a frosty glass of French wine while trying very hard not to glare at my eyesore of a rainbow-sherbet kitchen—pea-green Formica counters, orange cabinets, vaguely coral vinyl floor tile.
“This,” she says, “is delightful.”
I sip my wine to hide my smile. “It’s a dump, and you know it.”
She spins my way, something fierce in her expression. “It is not. It’s… vintage. And cozy.”
I drop into a canvas director’s chair and gesture for her to sit in the other one. “Come on, Lo.”
Lauren eases into the chair, then sets her glass of wine on the round, wooden coffee table between us.
I meet her eyes. “I feel like we have a lot to talk about, but first, I just want to address the state of the place, because I can tell you’re freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out!” she says, plucking at her black tank top. “I’m slightly warm, that’s all.”
I laugh. “Slightly warm?”
“Fine,” she says. “It’s as hot as Satan’s ass crack in here.”
“It is. The AC is getting fixed, though, as you overheard.”
“Good,” she says. “How long has it not been working?”
I sip my wine again, buying myself time. “Since I moved here.”
“What the hell, Thea? In this heat wave? Why didn’t you say anything? You could have stayed with me.”
“I’ve been fine!”
“How,” she says emphatically.
I point to the two open windows letting in hot muggy air, the box fan that whirrs in one of them. “The cross breeze.”
“What cross breeze?” she asks.
“Well, it’s coming,” I tell her.
“Coming?”
“It’ll be here shortly.”
She reaches for her wine and takes a gulp. “Thea—”
“I’m okay, Lo.” I set my wine on the coffee table and lean in, elbows on my knees. “I know my apartment is underfurnished, undecorated, and extremely hot, and the kitchen is a midcentury design horror, but I’m okay with that.
“The AC’s being fixed. I’m going to ask Mr. Fleischer if I can paint the kitchen cabinets something that works better with pea green, and replace the floor tiles with a design that ties those colors together.
I don’t have more furniture or any decorations because I’m taking my time and figuring out what I want.
” I smile, shrugging. “I’m going to make my living space look the way I want for the first time in my life. ”
Lauren smiles, too, and lifts her wineglass. “Cheers to that.”
“Cheers,” I say, clinking my glass with hers, “to a home that isn’t wall-to-wall greige.”
“Ethan and his fucking greige,” she mutters into her glass.
“So.” I ease back into my chair. “Are you going to tell me what’s been going on?”
Lauren pauses midsip, then slowly lowers her glass and sets it on the coffee table. Groaning, she slumps back in her chair, then frowns up at the ceiling. After a beat of silence, she asks, “Am I having a stroke, or is the overhead lighting cutting out every three seconds?”
“It’s the lighting,” I tell her.
I tip sideways on my chair to reach the wall switch and flick it off, leaving the room bathed in molten evening light, gilded dust motes dancing in the air.
Turning toward her, I say, “Lo—”
“I know, I know, I’m being avoidant.” Lauren groans again as she sits up. “Okay.”
I nod. “Okay.”
“Okay. I’m going to tell you two things I’ve been… holding on to.”
“Okay?” I say quietly.
Lauren springs up, dashes over to the fridge, and pulls out the Viognier she brought. After topping off our glasses, she says, “First.” She wedges the cork back in the bottle and sets it on the coffee table. “Just going to leave that there. We’re going to need it—”
“Lauren.”
“Okay! Sorry!” She takes a gulp of wine, then blurts, “I hate my birthday.”
I ease back in my chair, perplexed. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she sighs. “We have to stop saying ‘okay.’ ”
“Sure,” I tell her. “Let’s try, ‘Why?’ ”
“Yes. Why.” She draws in a deep breath, then blows out. “Because,” she says quietly, staring down at her wineglass, “my birthday is my mom’s death day.”
“Lo,” I whisper. Tears fill my eyes. “God, I’m so sorry.”
A sigh leaves her. “Yeah, me, too.” She takes a gulp of her wine. “And now you know why I get trashed on my birthday.”
I absorb that, silence lingering between us.
Lauren gives me a pleading look. “Say something? Besides that you’re sorry for me.”
I open my mouth and shut it. This feels fragile. Lauren feels fragile, and she’s never felt that way to me. I have no idea what to do.
“Thea,” she says, her pitch almost sharp. She looks desperate. “Anything, seriously, whatever is in your head.”
I rear back. “That’s a dangerous demand, Lo. You know that. My mind is a strange, unfiltered place.”
Lauren picks up the bottle of Viognier and sloshes wine into her glass. I have a feeling she plans to fill it to the brim.
I jerk forward and pluck the bottle from her. “Okay, fine, I’ll say something!”
Lauren meets my eyes, her grass green gaze glassy with unshed tears. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I mutter, as I pour wine into my glass, then set the bottle safely beside me. I swig some wine then say hastily, “You told me your mom was ‘out of the picture.’ ”
Lauren gulps some wine. “Well. Death does take you out of the picture.”
“Right, but obviously I interpreted it more literally. As in, alive but absent, and thus villainous.”
She glances out the window, toward the sunset, and a heavy sigh leaves her. “It would be a hell of a lot easier, if she had been.”
I turn and peer out at the sunset, too, thinking of my mother.
Of how I both love her and hate how she’s made me feel most of my life.
Of how strange it would be, losing that anchor, the person who brought me into this world, the grief that might come both for what we never had and for what we did.
I wonder if I’d feel guilty or relieved, to be free of knowing only love laced with disappointment; if it would finally ease the ache that’s never left to be someone worth loving for who I am, not who someone wants me to be.
Lauren reaches for my hand and clasps it, squeezing tight. Her gaze stays fixed on the sunset as she says, “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“It’s okay, Lo.” I squeeze her hand back. “I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m glad she was someone worth grieving.”
Lauren swallows thickly. “Me, too.”
For a moment, we sit in silence. Then Lauren reaches for the wine bottle. “Time to finish this sucker off.”
She pours our wine truly to the top, and we both take a few spill-preventing sips, watching the sunset dip lower on the horizon.
“I just remembered,” I say to her, “that you said there were two things you’d been holding on to.”
She swallows slowly, and when she speaks her voice comes out thick. “Yeah. I did.”
“It can wait,” I tell her. “If that’ll help. If today’s been enough emotions. I mean, it probably shouldn’t wait forever. But maybe you could tell me sometime this month, say, by the time we go to Savoureux for your birthday?”
Lauren freezes, mid-sip, then lowers her glass. She looks my way, and her eyes are filled with tears.
“Lo.” I clasp her hand. “What is it?”
Lauren stares down at our hands. “It’s going to have to be sooner than that.” She bites her trembling lip as she meets my eyes. “Because, in a month… I won’t be living here anymore.”