Page 21 of Maybe in Another Life

“Yep!” he says, and then he kisses me deeply. “You’re not very good at this game.”

That’s the joke we came up with Sunday night. What would it take to derail this thing between us? What could ruin this great thing we have going?

So far, we’ve established that if I became an Elvis impersonator and insisted that he come to all of my shows, he’d still want to be with me. If I decided to get a pet snake and name it Bartholomew, he’d still want to be with me. Perpetual halitosis, it looks like, isn’t a deterrent, either.

“What if everything I put in the washing machine shrinks?” This one isn’t hypothetical. This one is very real.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says as he moves off me and gets out of bed. “I do my own laundry.”

I lie back down, my head on the pillow. “What if I mispronounce the wordcouponall the time?”

“Clearly, that’s fine, because you just mispronounced it.” He picks his jeans up off the floor and pulls them on.

“No, I didn’t!” I say. “ ‘Cue-pawn.’ ”

“It’s ‘coo-pawn.’ ” He slips on his shirt.

“Oh, my God!” I say, sitting upright and outraged. “Please tell me you are joking. Please tell me you don’t say ‘coo-pawn.’ ”

“I can’t tell you that,” he says. “Because it would be a lie.”

“So this is it, then. This is the thing that stands in our way.”

He throws my pants at me. “Sorry, but no. You’ll just have to get over it. If it makes you feel better, we will never use coupons for the rest of our lives, OK?”

I stand up and put my pants on. I leave his shirt on but grab my bra from the floor and slip it on underneath. It’s such a bizarre and uncoordinated thing to do, to put on a bra while you still have a shirt on, that about halfway through, I wonder why I didn’t just take the shirt off to begin with.

“OK,” I say. “If you promise we will never talk about coupons, then fine, we can be together.”

“Thank you,” he says, grabbing his wallet. “Get your shoes on.” I pull my hair down briefly so that I can redo my bun. He stares at me for a moment as it falls. He smiles when I put it back up. “Where are we going?” I ask him. “Why are we leaving the bed?”

“I told you,” he says as he puts on his shoes. “You haven’t had a cinnamon roll in three days.”

I start laughing.

“Hop to it, champ,” he says. He is now fully dressed and ready to go. “I don’t have all day.”

I put on my shoes. “Yes, you do.”

He shrugs. I grab my purse and head out the front door so quickly he has to catch up. By the time we get down to the garage, he’s narrowly in front of me and opens my door.

“You’re quite the gentleman these days,” I say as he gets into the front seat and turns on the car. “I don’t remember all of this chivalry when we were in high school.”

He shrugs again. “I was a teenager,” he says. “I hope I’ve grown since then. Shall we?”

“To the cinnamon rolls!” I say. “Preferably ones with extra icing.”

He smiles and pulls out of the driveway. “Your wish is my command.”

My dad is sitting to my right, holding my hand. My mom is at the foot of the bed, staring at my legs. Sarah is standing by the morphine drip.

Gabby came in with them an hour ago. She’s the only one who looked me in the eye at first. After giving me a hug and telling me she loved me, she said she’d leave us all alone to talk. She promised she’d be back soon. She left so that my family would have some privacy, but I also think she needed some time to pull herself together. I could see as she turned to leave that she was wiping her eyes and sniffling.

I think I am hard to look at.

I can tell that my mom, my dad, and Sarah have been crying on and off today. Their eyes are glassy. They look tired and pale.

I haven’t seen them since Christmas the year before last, and it is jarring to see them in front of me now. They are in the United States. Los Angeles. The four of us, the Martin family, haven’t been together in Los Angeles since I was a junior in high school. Our yearly family reunions have since taken place in their London apartment, a space that Sarah very casually and unironically refers to as a “flat.”

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