Page 36 of The Heartbreak Hotel
I look from him to the register, where the woman appears slightly confused and is clearly waiting for me to pay. I shake my head and mumble an apology while digging into my back pocket.
“Here.” Henry taps his credit card across the reader, offering the woman a smile. “Have a good one.”
I jerk my cup of ice cream off the counter and step out of line, clustering immediately into Henry’s personal space in the crowded shop. It’s all black-and-white checkerboard and chrome accents in here; over the speakers, an old Johnny Cash song plays.
“Everyone else got a table outside,” Henry says. I look up at him. We’re close enough that I can smell his soap, citrus, and his chocolate ice cream and something else, too—sweat, the scent of being outdoors in the sun. His eyes move over mine. “What happened there?”
I could lie, easily. I could say I’m dehydrated, or I zoned out, or I could thank him for the ice cream and pretend nothing happened at all. But I think of Henry on the trail, telling me to hold still, and I think of him in my basement, calling meLouisa, and I think of him that first day in his office—the softness that changed his face when I talked about the house. I think of how he’s lost someone, too. I know he has.
“I was remembering something,” I tell him. It doesn’t make sense—not really. But Henry’s eyes hold mine. “And I just got lost in it for a minute.”
He nods, then. Someone passes behind him and he steps even closer to me, close enough that my wrist brushes the buttons on his shirt.
“I understand,” he says. He tips his head toward the window. He doesn’t reach for me to make me follow him, like Nate would have. He only moves, and I follow him on my own. “Let’s get some air.”
Sixteen
“I heard a rumor you’rethe handyman.”
Henry, unfolding himself from the back seat of Nan’s Cadillac, looks over at Bea. It’s nearly four and the sun’s just starting to lower over my driveway. I love the smell of late afternoon: the sandy gravel of the sunbaked landscape, the spicy perfume of pine needles.
“Did you,” Henry says.
“Rashad said you were at the house fixing sinks the other day?”
Henry glances at me before pulling his backpack out of the car. “I fixed one sink, yes.”
“Well, my door sticks.” Bea tosses hair off her shoulder and smiles without showing any teeth. I exhale through my nose, long and slow. “Maybe you could take a look?”
Henry’s become the undisputed star of this hike, of eating ice cream, maybe of this entire project. In his hiking clothes, cheeks pinked up from the sun, he looks like a cross between the Brawny Man and a sexy librarian. I wasn’t the only one whowatched him lick chocolate ice cream off the inner curve of his thumb at Polliwog’s.
“Maybe we should start a list,” I say, gesturing everyone toward the house. “I’ll put out a notepad in the kitchen so Henry can come take care of everything at once instead of us bothering him every other day.”
“Are we bothering you?” Nan asks.
Henry laughs, low and breathy. “Not at all.”
“And for little things,” I say, raising my voice a couple octaves, “you can just come to me. I can take a look at your door, Bea.”
I shoot her a smile, which she returns half-heartedly. I’m already imagining her review:Clean room, good hiking, hot handyman who made me forget about my ex.The last thing I need is Henry shutting this down because he’s somehow become the key component of everyone recovering from their broken hearts.
But he only says, “I’m here now.” And when he walks toward the house, I don’t stop him.
“Lou?”
I turn at the sound of a soft, hesitant voice. I thought everyone had gone upstairs to shower, nap, or—in Henry’s case—investigate a sticky door, but Kim is standing at the entrance to the kitchen with her hands stuffed in her pockets. She and Bea arrived together, a matched set in the Denver uniform of expensive athleisure and corded flat-brim baseball caps. Bea was their immediate voice: they were sharing the Pine Room and its matching double beds for a little over a week and she was the one who’d booked it for them, fresh off the demise of aneight-month relationship with her college sweetheart. The termcollege sweetheartbrought Nate right there into the house’s entryway with us, and I’d pushed him away like an unwelcome specter.
Kim, though, has been quiet. I can tell Bea is her safe place—there’s something about their dynamic that reminds me of Mei. The way they turn in to each other, keep their heads bent inward like a silent dialogue is always passing back and forth between them. She hasn’t made full eye contact with me since showing up at the house, and even now her gaze flickers from my face to the garden windows and back again.
“You okay?” I say. I tip my water bottle upside down in the drying rack next to the sink and reach for a dish towel.
“Um,” she says, and I know that without an immediateyes, the answer to that question isno.
“Here.” I motion to one of the island stools, and she ducks her head as she pulls it out. When I sit on the stool next to her, she picks at a loose thread on her sweatshirt instead of looking at me.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. On the hike?” Kim glances up at me as if to confirm this.
“Which part?”
