Page 110 of Happiness for Beginners

“Duncan told me. He tells me everything.”

Duncan told her everything?

“Jake will still have that vision, you know,” she said then. “Even if he can’t see.”

I nodded. She was right, of course.

“It’s his heart he sees with, sweetheart.”

At those words, my eyes stung with tears. I wiped them away fast, but too late. More followed. Thinking of Jake and what he was facing, and how he was facing it, made me feel ashamed. My troubles looked awfully small in comparison. I was self-pitying and self-centered and self-indulgent. No wonder he’d gone to the mountains. No wonder at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I always like you best when you’re a mess.”

“You do?”

She nodded, and said in a softer voice, “You’re going to be okay.”

But “okay” seemed far away. “I’m not sure I know how.”

GiGi leaned across the table to take both my hands. “You never liked the boys who liked you. You know that about yourself, right?”

I shook my head.

“You always ignored the boys who liked you in favor of the ones who didn’t.”

“That’s not true!”

“What about Dave from high school? He left you for your best friend.”

“He liked me!”

“But not enough. And you had that cute little poet boy who wrote you all those sonnets, but what did you do?”

“I ignored him.”

“That’s right. And the same thing in college when you had to choose between the rugby player and that boy with the stupid little car.”

“A Dodge Dart.”

“You should have gone for the Dart! He adored you. But what did you do, instead?”

“I went to rugby games.”

“Exactly.” She nodded. “It was like you only wanted the ones who didn’t want you. Like you needed the challenge of getting their attention.”

She wasn’t wrong. “And then I married Mike. The alcoholic.”

GiGi nodded. “Who loved you—”

“But loved drinking more.”

GiGi nodded again.

She was right. I let it sink in. “Why didn’t you ever point this out before?”

She shook her head. “You can’t tell people their lives.”

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