London Is the Best City in America

“I know.”

“She told you?” he said.

“She told me,” I said.

We started walking to the counter, and he put everything down—beckoning to the cashier, who had disappeared somewhere in the middle of this. He took out his wallet to pay. As if this was what we did. As if we were there together.

The cashier handed him the bag of food, me the tray of drinks. We walked outside, stopping right in front of the store. I was worried I was going to cry. I was so worried I was going to cry. But I willed myself with everything I was not to. Not even to start. Because I knew—I knew—if I did, I’d never stop.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the rehearsal dinner at your folks’ right now?” he said.

“Kind of,” I said.

He nodded. “Do you have to go back?”

“Do you want me to go back?” I said.

“What’s that?”

I closed my eyes, tears filling them up. I wasn’t willing to ask for it again—what it was that I had started to ask for. But it turned out, I didn’t have to ask again for anything. He reached out and touched my right cheek. First with the outsides of his fingers, then with the insides.

“Stay,” he said.

For the first several weeks after I left Matt, I had the same recurring dream in which he would be sitting on a stool at the coffee shop near his parents’ home in Maine, drinking a Dr Pepper, a large cup of coffee. This was the whole dream. Nothing else would happen. No one would talk to him, the coffee wouldn’t spill, he wouldn’t stand up or leave. It took me a while to figure out that I probably kept having the dream because this was the last thing I was sure Matt had done. I knew he had gone on to his parents’ (what that arrival scene looked like, I couldn’t imagine), and I knew he had, at one point over the remainder of that weekend, gone to that coffee shop and ordered his usual drinks. I could be sure of it. And I must have wanted to hold on to it, that one last thing I knew about him without question. The one last piece of knowledge that made him mine.

After we walked out of the 7-Eleven, the dream came back to me in full force, almost as if it were more real—more actual—than what was happening now. This—the walking to the car to tell Justin what was going on, that I’d call him tomorrow; the walking back quickly to where Matt was waiting for me—had become the dream, and it was like, without knowing it, someone had slipped me one drink too many. Suddenly the world had become hazy, slow-moving, everything appearing to me in faded, incomplete shapes.

But I followed Matt across the street anyway, in my somewhat stupefied state, to the one lone bench down behind the train station. The bench looked out on this great, misplaced waterfall, which ran into a river I didn’t know the name of. A long row of rocks filled up on each side of it. Lots of woods and trees. It was like walking out of suburbia and into the middle of nowhere for a quarter of a mile or so.

We took a seat on the bench, a small space between us, and started to try to talk. I wasn’t even sure how. I really didn’t want to say the wrong thing to him. There seemed to be no safe territory. I doubted Matt wanted to talk about my leaving him that morning. I was scared of discussing that too, scared that he’d get mad and walk away and leave me alone here, which maybe I deserved. But I also didn’t want to cover the time since. What was I going to say, anyway? I didn’t want to tell him I was still living in Narragansett. I was afraid he’d misunderstand. And I was equally afraid he’d understand exactly.

“So I started playing ice hockey again,” Matt said. “Up in Katonah actually. There’s this intramural team. We head up there every Saturday morning. Nine A.M. The goalie’s a woman. Her name’s Betty Lou. She just turned seventy-three.”

“And she’s good?”

“She can kick my ass.”

I shook my head. “You’re making this up.”

“Scout’s honor,” he said, raising his hand.

“So that’s what you’re doing home this weekend? Celebrating Betty Lou’s latest birthday?”

“That,” he said. “And helping my parents get ready to move.” I must have looked at him disbelievingly because he kept talking. “They’re moving to Maine full-time. They like it better there anyway. So . . . I helped them repaint the downstairs, and they needed me to pack up whatever of my belongings I don’t want left behind, and they’re getting the hell out of Dodge.” He lit a cigarette, and offered me the pack.

I shook my head, and he nodded, taking a drag. He did it in that way, though, blowing the smoke out the side, the way he used to, when he was nervous about telling me something. Which is why I’m not sure why I was surprised when he did.

“I’m actually thinking about moving too,” he said. “I’m suppose

d to move. I’m supposed to go to Paris.”

“Paris?” I looked at him. “As in France?”

“As in France.”

I looked away from him, and then straight ahead at the waterfall. The water was doing the heavy lapping farthest away from us, vanishing over the bend. Unbelievable. He could have said anywhere else in the world, and he wouldn’t have conjured up inside of me everything I was feeling now. How could I help but think of that trip to Paris that Matt and I had gone on together? And of course, the trip we didn’t take all those years later, after we’d gotten engaged?

I cleared my throat. Matt hated Paris. Or at least didn’t like it. If there were anything I didn’t have a question about, it was that. Which let me know the first thing I didn’t want to know, sitting here with him tonight. Someone was making the choice now for him.