Page 8 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Let’s try it for six months,” Henry says, something stilted about his speech—like he can’t quite believe he’s agreeing to this. He clears his throat and sits up straighter on the stool. “Until March? And if it’s not working, that’s it.”
“That’s it,” I echo, nearly breathless. “Thank you.”
Henry slides my rent check back across the exam table toward me, angling it through the maze of my printouts. “We’ll let September be month one.”
It’s a gift I don’t deserve. When I meet Henry’s eyes his jaw is tensed, his eyebrows knit together, his face still flushed. He looks like I’ve confused him so entirely, like maybe he needs to lie down. I have the indecent urge to tip forward and smooth my thumb between his eyebrows, erase the worry from his face.It’sokay. Instead, I lift the check and press it to my chest like something precious.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. “You can trust me.”
Henry swallows. His voice comes as quietly as my own. “I hope so.”
Six
My sister’s favorite time tovideo chat is while she’s making dinner, phone propped against her backsplash to give me a straight shot of her tiled kitchen ceiling and the upper third of her face.
“It’s like they have no concept of a career woman,” she says now. “It’s arunny nose, for god’s sake, not Ebola. I can’t keep him home for producing snot. What am I even paying them for, you know? It’s day care, not maybe-some-days care. I’m not sitting around my house in a caftan, here, waiting for my child to come home at the end of the day. I’mworking. In anoffice. Where I cannottake him.”
“I know,” I say, half an eye on Goldie’s forehead and half on my browser, where I’m building out the house’s rental page. I’m in the attic office, an A-frame hobbit hole of a room with floral wallpaper and a bay window that overlooks the garden. The house is old and thin-walled; something about the architecture makes the sound travel straight up to this room from the first floor—anytime Nate needed me from the kitchen, all hehad to do was lean against the wall and shout. “How’s he feeling now?”
“Oh, he’s fine.” Goldie picks up her phone, giving me a clear view up her nose as she leans in, and changes the angle so that I can see Quinn in the living room. They live in a loft in the West Village, a tiny box with tall ceilings and windows over the Hudson. “Say hi to Lou-Lou, Quinn.” He waves at me, and I wave back.
Quinn is five years old and perfect. It’s criminal that he lives across the country from me, but I’ll get to see him this fall when Goldie comes to Denver for a conference. I told her weeks ago that he could stay with me while she’s downtown at the hotel, and it only occurs to me in this exact moment that I nearly didn’t have a home for him to stay in.
“Anyway.” She sets her phone back on the counter and leans over the stove. Steam rises from a pan to obscure what little I can see of her face. “How are you? You’ve been ignoring my texts.”
I take a long, slow breath. “I’m going to need you to look at me for this.”
She cranes toward the phone like an ostrich. “What is it? Oh my god, are you sick? Is Mom sick?”
“Why would I know that Mom’s sick before you? No, no one is sick.”
“What, then?” I stare at the pixels of her face, and she leans closer. “Hello? Lou, what did you do?”
“Why do you assumeIdid something? Nate broke up with me.”
Her intake of breath is theatrically sharp. She reaches for her phone, whipping it up into the air and storming out of thekitchen so fast I could get motion sick. She waits until she’s shut in her microscopic bathroom—out of Quinn’s earshot—to say, “He brokeupwith you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god, Lou, I told you men are vipers. What a snake. When did this happen? Why did he do it? What will you do? Where are you living?”
“Goldie.” She stares at me, wide-eyed, her familiar face washed out in the bathroom light. “You’re raising my blood pressure.”
“You’re raisingmine, Lou. This guy has sustained your entire lifestyle!”
I rub at the spot between my eyebrows. “Can you be supportive for, like, one minute before laying into me about getting a job?”
“It’s not about ajob, Lou, it’s aboutindependence.” I’ve heard this diatribe two-point-seven billion times. “It’s about setting yourself up so you don’t wind up in thisprecisescenario where your older sister is terrified for your well-being from the other side of the country because you have no means of caring for yourself even though you havetwoentire degrees from accredited universities that cost you enough money to float the entire economy of a small island nation and you haven’t evenscheduledyour licensing exam—”
I glance back at the rental listing on my computer. She’ll run out of steam eventually.
“Lou? Are you hearing me right now?”
“I don’t need you to lecture me.” I pick up the phone and turn in my desk chair so I can look out over the garden. The house has a first-floor office, too, but I’ve always preferred it uphere, where I can see the stone paths through the garden like trails on a map. Nate bought me a desk that fits just right in the trapezoidal nook. “I’m going through a breakup, remember?”
My sister blinks. She never liked Nate, but I was always unsure if it was because of Nate himself or just the idea of him. He grated on all of Goldie’s sensibilities: he was a dreamer, running on blind faith and cheap beer, who’d built his success without any of the things she believed in. Advanced degrees, savings accounts, budget spreadsheets. He came from agentle parentingfamily. He moved through the world like water: taking every dip and turn with grace, barreling ahead even if his direction changed unexpectedly. Goldie was the tree growing from the riverbed. Battered but unmoved, her roots white-knuckled.
Mom made her this way. Just like Mom made me a therapist. Goldie was the head; I was the heart. And still, all these years after leaving home, we’re always trying to tug each other in our own direction.
