Page 72 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Can you tell me about her?” I ask quietly. “Something you loved about her.”
Henry’s silent for a long time, the only sound his heartbeat under my ear. “I loved everything about her,” he says finally. He’s looking into the fire, and even as his thumb traces the line of my shoulder blade, he doesn’t meet my gaze. When he rolls me over, dropping his mouth to mine and parting my lips with his tongue, I see it for what it is—a change of subject, the closing of a door. He can let me in, but not this far.
“Henry,” I whisper later, when the lights are all off and he’s half-asleep on the pillows beside me. My brain won’t quiet—this night has turned it to a riptide of my mother, of “Purple Girl,” of Molly. Of Henry most of all.
“Mmm?” His arm is warm around my waist, holding me in place.
“You said I’ve never seemed purple, to you.” I watch his face in the dark. “What color am I?”
Henry’s quiet for half a moment. And then, without opening his eyes, he says, “Yellow.” He pulls me closer, his hands spread warm and wide over my back, his lips at my ear. “Sunrise.”
Twenty-Eight
I wake up to thelow buzz of my phone on Henry’s nightstand. We came upstairs at some point between midnight and three a.m.—Henry’s big hands in the dark, wrapping me in a blanket and leading me to his bedroom. It’s as neat and simple as every other part of his house, like he hardly lives here at all.
I squint at my phone screen:Marigoldie (7). Shit. There are two missed calls, too. A voicemail. Henry’s still asleep, turned toward me with both hands tucked under his pillow like a child. In the half dark he looks young and safe. I think of his tattoo, of the way he quieted me about Molly, and slide out of his bed as carefully as I can.
The throw blanket from last night is heaped on the floor, and I wrap it around myself before slipping out of his bedroom. Goldie picks up on the second ring, like she’s been waiting for me—which, of course she has.
“Finally,” she says by way of greeting. Pale morning light casts Henry’s condo, and all the evidence of our evening, weak blue. Half-full wineglasses next to the picked-apart pie on thecoffee table; pile of pillows and twisted blankets on the living room floor. “Did you listen to my voicemail?”
“No,” I say croakily. I head for Henry’s balcony—I need space from him, from the night we had, to talk to my sister. “I just woke up.”
“Well, Mom’s getting evicted.” I freeze, one hand on the sliding door. I feel Goldie’s words in my body—like punches, bruising and cruel.
I step onto the balcony, sliding the door shut behind me. “Why?”
“Because she hasn’t been paying her rent, obviously.”
“It’s not obvious, Goldie, can you please not condescend to me right now?”
“I’m not—” She breaks off, sighing forcefully into my ear. I lean over the railing, blanket pulled tight around me in the morning chill. Everything is covered in shimmering, crystalline frost. “I’m not trying to fight with you, Lou. I need your help figuring this out.”
“So she called you?” I ask, watching fog shift over the lake. The sun hasn’t crested the mountains yet and everything feels insulated and half-real.
“Yes, last night, lucky me, on literal Thanksgiving. She said you havetoo much going onright now to deal with this. Because apparently getting dumped is more stressful than parenting a five-year-old.”
I close my eyes.It’s not a competition, I want to scream.You chose Quinn.
“What did she say?” I bite out.
“That she needs to back-pay her rent by Monday or she’s out on December first.”
“Can Mark help her?”
“She doesn’t want to ask him, of course. She wants us to deal with it.” In the background, music swells—whatever Quinn’s watching on TV, I’m sure. He only gets screen time in a crisis. “Can you call her? You’re good at these kinds of things. Dealing with her.”
I feel the words like a slap, like an echo of what she said to me in my kitchen just a few weeks ago:You do this, Lou—you take care of other people to avoid taking care of yourself.Which is it? How am I supposed to focus on myself when she always leaves Mom’s crises to me?
My throat burns, bile rising. We’ve always been this way; I know we have—Goldie the logical one, shutting Mom out because it’s notright.Me, the arbiter of feelings, letting her back in because she’sfamily. It’s always me, caring for people. Holding Mei on my couch after her breakup with Andy. Telling Kim her pain is as valid as Bea’s anger. Rushing Shani and Alfie to the vet. Falling for Henry—heartbroken in his own, permanent way.
It’s all I’m capable of, maybe. Being a fixer. It’s what people want from me. I have the sudden, unsteadying thought that maybe it’s the reason I’m on this balcony at all—because Henry, too, is a project.
“This week is crazy without childcare,” Goldie continues, when I still haven’t said anything. “And frankly, I don’t have the money to loan her. I have myownrent due on the first and Quinn’s day care is increasing their prices in Jan—”
“I get it.” My voice sounds icy, even to me. “I’ll deal with it.”
Goldie hesitates. I think, for one hair’s breadth of a moment, that she might ask if I’m okay. If I have the capacity to be “goodat this kind of thing” right now. But she just says, “Okay, great. Thanks.”
