Page 40 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“No,” he chides, grabbing my face in both hands to hold me still. We look at each other, eye to eye. “There was a man in the window seat and Mom said I couldn’t bother him.”
“Ah,” I say, reaching out an arm to fold Goldie into our hug as she arrives at the top of the stairs. “Men are the worst.”
“I’m a man!” Quinn protests, his face flanked by our shoulders.
“You’re a boy,” I say, plopping him down on the landing. “And one day, you’ll be the best of men.”
“Yeah, the best,” Quinn says as he shuffles past me into the house. Goldie puts the Werther’s Original in my palm.
“Why are you giving Quinn grandpa candy?”
“They’re his favorite,” she tells me on a sigh. “ ‘Your children come through you, not from you,’ or whatever the saying is.”
“Well, you can keep this.” I drop it back into her pocket and look up at her. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says. Her hands land on my shoulders, grounding me. Goldie and I are the exact same height: five feet, three and a half inches. But she has Mom’s blond hair, wispy waves that frame her face like a halo, and her pale blue eyes. I carry the darkness of a man I never met: dishwater hair, not quite brown, and hazel irises that change in the light. “You look tired.”
“So do you.”
“I just flew across the country with a five-year-old. What’s your excuse?”
I wave a hand through the front door. “I run my own business now, remember?”
Goldie lets out a sigh, long and withering. It speaks sentences all on its own:Yes, I remember this batshit idea of yours. Yes, I remember this inadvisable scheme. Yes, I remember that I’m leaving my pride and joy in a house full of strangers.
“I want complete details on everyone staying here before I leave Quinn tomorrow,” she says. She’ll head to Denver in the afternoon for her conference, leaving Quinn and me with a week of our own. “Especiallyany men.”
“No men at the moment,” I tell her, though Henry’s face pops, unbidden, into my mind. Rashad left yesterday, with a lung-flattening hug and a promise to call me at five thirty in the morning when neither of us can sleep. “Just a group of incredibly delightful—if sad—women.”
She levels me with her gaze and sidesteps me into the house. “We’ll see. Quinn? Where’d you go?”
“I found Mei!” he shouts from the living room. “Remember Mei, Mom?”
“Of course,” Goldie says. Mei is Goldie’s favorite: the person she wishes I was. When we join them in the living room, Quinn’s perched next to Mei on the couch, her work laptop open on the coffee table in front of them. Last I checked, Kim and Bea were upstairs doing a puzzle with Nan.
“Hey, you,” Mei says, standing to give Goldie a hug. “Love the overalls.”
“Oh,” Goldie says, accepting the hug and then waving her off. “They’re ancient. But thank you.” She pulls away and dropsher hands onto Mei’s shoulders, just like she did with me. “I was so sorry to hear about Andy.”
I resist the rigidity that nags at the base of my spine, threatening to freeze me up. Our whole lives, it’s been like this: the warmth Goldie’s capable of with others and never with me. Mei’s sadness makes sense to her; mine is a problem to solve.
“Who’s Andy?” Quinn asks before Mei can respond. She squeezes Goldie’s elbow in thanks and then sits back down next to him, tipping her head into the couch cushion.
“Andy was my partner,” she says. “But we broke up.”
“What’s ‘partner’?” Quinn asks, leaning closer to her. He’s so unbelievably delicious: shiny blond hair, Goldie’s blue eyes magnified by little-kid glasses, tiny fingers that curl around Mei’s forearm like he can’t help but get closer to her.
Mei glances at Goldie before saying, “Do you know what a girlfriend is? Or a boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” Quinn says, giggling again like the word itself is a scandal between them.
“It’s like that,” Mei tells him. “Except Andy is non-binary, which means they aren’t a boy or a girl. So we call them my partner, instead of my boyfriend or girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Quinn says, nodding. He looks up at his mom, then at me, and I think there’s a clarifying question coming. But he just says, “Are you sad, Mei?”
She hesitates, and when she lets out a laugh it’s halfway to a sob. “My god,” she says, pulling him in for a hug. “You’re too much. I’m sad, but I’ll be okay.”
He looks at me over Mei’s shoulder. “Do you live with Lou-Lou now?”
