Chapter 2
The next morning, Danny arrives five minutes early to Our Lady of Perpetual Breakfast and takes a wrought iron table outside. Eve hides at a coffee shop two blocks south so she is close at hand for urgent moral support.
The hostess—someone new, someone whose name Danny doesn’t yet know—asks, “Just you today?”
“I don’t know,” Danny says.
He orders for himself—how is he supposed to know what his mother likes?—and then decides, fuck it, and orders her a coffee and a piece of banana bread.
He sits at the tippy table and leans his elbows against it.
It has finally stopped raining, but the streets still bear the scars—grime scuffed against the walls of buildings, trees stripped of bark, shops with soggy cardboard in the windows.
Danny’s knee twitches as he scans the passersby for signs of the familiar.
Then he sees her—in a wool coat, in sunglasses. She props the sunglasses on her head. Hesitates.
He stands. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says. “God. You look a lot like your dad.”
There’s a moment where it seems like they’re going to hug. Danny sits again instead. She pauses, then takes the seat opposite him.
“I was so sorry to hear about him.”
“I got these,” Danny says. “I don’t know if you like banana bread.”
“Love it,” she says.
“Okay. Great.”
There’s a beat. Danny feels like he should have something better to say, but he also underestimated the vastness of what he would feel in this moment—the anger, the betrayal, the grief, the confusion, the smallness, the possibility. He takes a sip of his coffee.
“If it’s okay with you,” Georgia says, “I’d like to tell you a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“The greatest love story ever told.”
***
It starts when Georgia is eighteen.
***
“Well, not ever told,” Danny says.
“I said what I said. The greatest love story ever told. Do you want to hear it?”
“I’m very uncomfortable,” Danny says. “I’ll listen to this, but I’m going to interrupt a lot.”
“Okay,” Georgia says. “Well, here we go.”
***
It starts when Georgia is eighteen. She’s about to go off to college, so she’s filling out her roommate survey.
Her brother ended up stuck with a guy who smelled of cigarettes and Dorito dust, which sounds hellish, so Georgia has the brain wave to claim in her application that she has bad allergies but the doctors can’t figure out to what.
This means she is not technically lying (she is almost certainly allergic to something), but also that she can lie in the future should she end up living with someone who snores, steals, night screams, and/or has a secret pet rat.
In the end, there is no need. Georgia arrives at her semiprestigious college and meets TJ.
TJ, Georgia learns later, bypassed the fluff of trying to make her ailment remotely believable and said she was allergic to body odor.
So it seems that the housing pairing person decided Georgia and TJ would be annoying in exactly the same way. And they were so right.
That’s what binds Georgia and TJ: their shared sense that they have always been slightly too weird.
They’re not that weird, of course—or, more accurately, we’re all weird and it’s just not that interesting—but what matters is that they feel it, and together, they feel as though they have somehow found their destiny.
TJ makes Georgia louder, bolder, more confident; Georgia makes TJ more creative, more academic, more honest. After a few years, they are so much the same it’s hard to remember who originally seemed like the fun one, the smart one.
After college, they spend the summer traveling together, falling temporarily in love with charming European men.
In the fall, TJ will be starting medical school, and Georgia will be starting a corporate finance job she is dreading with every fiber of her being.
And then, on the last stop of their trip, at a hostel in Oslo, Georgia meets Cal Aagaard.
Cal has spent the last month hiking the fjords, and when they first see him, they think he is a local.
He is mostly hidden behind a summer’s worth of beard, and his muscles are honed from all that time climbing up mountains and subsisting on fish and instant coffee.
He speaks Norwegian with the pretty blonde woman at the desk, and Georgia and TJ shoot each other a knowing look from their spot at the bar.
When Georgia goes over to meet him, she is surprised that he is not just mountain man–ish but soft-spoken, gentle, and American.
He’s on a pilgrimage, he says, to see where his father came from. Then he’s going back home, where he lives in a cabin on the edge of Yellowstone and the air always smells like evergreens.
And so Georgia falls in love with him. Love at first sight, that’s what they call it—the official party line. They are inseparable that week, even as TJ heckles them for being gross and boring and impractical.
They say that they love each other on the second day.
On the third, Georgia confesses that she thinks her finance job will kill her and that all she really wants to do is make pottery.
On the fourth day, Cal says he knows it’s crazy, but he will love her for the rest of his life.
On the fifth day, Georgia says she’s never done anything crazy in her life.
On the sixth day, Cal asks her to come home with him.
And on the seventh day, Georgia says yes.
Sometimes people really do that. For love. They want to be told it works out sometimes, and sometimes it does. The big gesture. The big sacrifice. The big leap. Georgia takes it. And she really does love him: No matter what happens later, there’s no taking that away.
But she also makes the big leap because she has written herself into a life she doesn’t want. And suddenly, like magic, here is another path.
So Georgia moves to the edge of Yellowstone where the air always smells like evergreens.
Cal puts a pottery wheel in the garage and Georgia starts selling her bowls and vases at farmers markets in the stall by Mrs. Weber and her jars of huckleberry jam.
Georgia is pregnant. TJ, who is worried, tells Georgia she can always stay with her if she needs to.
Georgia is hurt, but they forgive each other, as best friends do. TJ is the witness at the courthouse.
And then Georgia’s world goes dark.
It isn’t all at once, and it isn’t Danny’s fault.
For years, Georgia watches the tide of her despair creep in and out, and then all at once she looks at the cliff of her selfhood and finds it has eroded away.
She never wanted to be a mother. She never wanted to live in Montana.
She’s no good, no good at any of it. What if, she finds herself thinking, what if, what if she was not around anymore.
She doesn’t have a plan, or anything. It’s just one of those thoughts, always lurking.
She watches her husband playing with her son and thinks: But this is not my husband.
This is not my son. They belong to someone else.
And then TJ arrives on a red-eye flight.
Georgia sits on the edge of her bed as TJ packs up her life. That night, they fly to New York. At the time, Georgia thinks she’ll be back the next week. What kind of person leaves her family?
She calls Cal the day after she leaves and says she needs time.
She calls again a few days later, with TJ holding her hand, and says she wants a divorce.
Cal says he will not move Danny, who has friends, who is doing well in school, who loves the trees.
Georgia says okay. Cal can have custody.
She has done enough to both of them, she feels, for a lifetime.
She does call Danny a few times. He’s never there. She assumes it’s a lie and that he’s not ready to talk to her. On his thirteenth birthday, Georgia calls to tell Danny she loves him, and Cal says, “He’s out.”
“How can a thirteen-year-old always be out?”
“He’s solving a mystery,” Cal says, “with the dog.”
This seems so transparently false that Georgia does not try to call again. Danny will call when he’s ready. He never does.
And everyone moves on with their lives. The wounds don’t go away, but they get decorated around. It’s like waking up one morning and finding a giant hole in your living room.
“Hey,” you say, “what’s this giant hole doing here?
I can’t possibly stay in this living room until it’s fixed.
” So you spend some time trying to fill it, and it never really works, so eventually you just rearrange the furniture and stick a fern in it and start to forget it’s there.
And then later, maybe years later, when you welcome someone new into your living room, they say, “My god! You have a giant hole in your living room!” And you say, “Oh, that old thing—I hardly notice it anymore.” Which is true, even though none of your furniture would sit where it sits if not for this giant, gaping hole.
That’s what it feels like, coming out the other side of despair.
And so Georgia finds herself living with TJ on the Upper Upper West Side and trying to arrange her furniture in a way that makes her brain feel like a living room rather than a dying room.
She joins a pottery studio. Wonders if she is too old now for a first job in finance.
In her spare time, she makes bowls and vases, which slowly populate every flat surface of TJ’s—then Georgia and TJ’s—apartment.