Page 83 of Guy's Girl
“Don’t go home.”
This comes from Adrian, who sneaks up behind Ginny when she’s packing the last of her bag. She turns around to find him leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.
“What?”
“Don’t go home. You’re not ready.”
Ginny sighs. “I have to. My ticket is for tomorrow.”
“Extend it.”
“But my job—”
“Do you not have vacation built up?” Adrian pushes himself off the frame. “Tell them you need more time. Tell them you’re having a health emergency. Because you are, Ginny. You can’t just go back to normal life and pretend everything will be all right.”
She bites her lip because she knows he’s right. But she also knows she can’t stay here. She can’t continue to intrude upon his grandparents’ hospitality.
“I’ll figure it out,” she says, tucking shirts into the corners of her suitcase. “I’ll get Clay to keep me accountable. I’ll call my mom and start the process of finding a treatment center. I promise. But I can’t—”
Just then, Eszter appears in the doorway, cutting her off. As usual, she doesn’t speak. Her eyes travel the room. Take in the sight of Ginny’s half-filled suitcase, the shirt dangling from her hand. Eszter clucks once. Marches forward and brushes Ginny aside. Ginny steps back, watching as Eszter pulls things out of her suitcase and puts them back into Beatrix’s dresser.
When Eszter is finished, she turns and stares at Ginny. She’s such a tiny woman that Ginny has to look down to meet her gaze. She points up at Ginny and says, in English, “You not go.”
Then she turns around and marches back out of the room.
So, she’s staying. She’s staying not one but two extra weeks. “Just take the same flight home that I’m taking,” Adrian says. So she does. LX 2251, BUD to JFK, connecting in Zurich, departing at 9:40 a.m. She has no idea if it’s a good or bad decision. She also doesn’t know how she’s going to explain this to her mother.
She’ll think of something.
***
A few days later, Eszter proposes they take a trip to a farm owned by friends of theirs, where they collect eggs and fresh honey and wild berries to make into jams.
“They don’t even have to be home when we get there,” Adrian translates on Eszter’s behalf on the drive over. “We’re allowed to just waltz onto the farm and pick things as we like.”
“Did she seriously just say waltz in Hungarian?”
Adrian smiles. “No. That was some artistic liberty.”
“Look at you.” Ginny nudges him with her shoulder. “Who’s the wordsmith now?”
Laszlo Farms is owned by distant cousins of the Silvas family, a childless couple who devoted their lives to raising crops and tending bees and goats. The farmhouse sits on a remarkably green stretch of land, far different from the cornfield farms of theMidwest. If anything, the area reminds Ginny of the greenest parts of the Upper Peninsula—the few fields left untouched by corporate farming.
They stop by the farmhouse—a grey stone building with a red roof—to say hello to the Silvas’s cousins, a man and woman, probably in their forties, named Áron and Klara. They welcome their visitors with cups of tea and coffee. Klara holds out a jar filled with opaque white liquid and asks Ginny a question in Hungarian. Ginny looks to Adrian for translation.
“Goat’s milk,” he says. “For your coffee.”
“Oh.” Ginny smiles and shakes her head. “Nem, köszönöm.”No, thank you.
Klara doesn’t give up. She shakes the bottle, talking excitedly.
“She knows that Americans find it weird to put goat’s milk in their coffee,” Adrian says. “But says it’s delicious. She really wants you to try.”
What Ginny can’t say is that she didn’t refuse the milk because it came from a goat. She refused it because she never takes milk with her tea or coffee. Too many additional calories.
But she doesn’t want to be rude, so she holds out her cup and waits while Klara pours in a splash. Then she raises the cup to her lips and takes a sip. “Mmm,” she says.
Klara nods with satisfaction, then turns to speak to Eszter and Imre.
