Madly (New York 2)

“Fair enough. I will do better, but don’t let me get away with it. So, yeah. He’d neg. But not even in a frat boy sort of way where you feel free to tell them to shut the fuck up and carry on, but more in this…insidious way.”

“My sister had a boyfriend like that. It sucked, and she was always stressed and insecure, but didn’t seem to know why.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

A minute passed. Allie watched one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen in real life walk into the Starbucks. A woman wearing a perfectly preserved Pucci dress bought a hot dog from a street vendor.

“The craziest thing that has happened,” Jean said, “is that one night when I was taking the car back to the garage, I passed by a man taking a woman into an alley. And he wasn’t hurting her, or dragging her. But it didn’t look right. I turned around, half a mile past them, and came back.”

“Did you find them?”

“Yes.”

When he didn’t say anything more, when he looked through the windshield at the street but didn’t seem to see it, she could only ask, “Was she okay?”

He sighed. “She survived.”

Allie leaned over and put her head on Jean’s shoulder and held out the bag of Combos to him. Life was a hard thing. It started out rough, it sometimes got rougher. Elvira said that every single time things got rough, mostly what you learned was that you could do hard things.

Allie was trying to do hard things. She was here, in New York, to fetch her mom and mend her family’s fault lines, but she kept running into all these other broken parts of her life, like her neglected relationship with May, or how far things were from settled with Matt.

It seemed futile—this mission, and her being in charge of it.

She wanted to give up, but she was certain there was still so much to save. She knew there was still love between her parents. She’d seen it. And she knew she and May had stories they needed to learn to tell each other. She’d give anything if May could be her mailman.

She pulled her phone from her pocket to just feel the ache of not calling her.

The suitcase she’d brought with her to New York was full of her favorite clothes because wearing some surprising outfit made her feel armored to do things and say things and act on things that she had put aside for too long. Probably because dressing like herself reminded her to be herself. It reminded her that she and life had beautiful things alongside hard things, which reminded her, in turn, to be brave.

She could be brave, and she could do hard things. She had to. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

“You think a lot of Winston,” she said.

“That night I took the woman to the hospital? He gave me a week off, paid. Had to take the subway to work, which he told me later put him into the office at ten forty-five the first day. I don’t think he ever did make it in by nine.”

“It’s not hard to imagine him being kind in that way, but he makes it sound like he wasn’t always.”

“Yeah, when he first came here, he was so quiet. Hardly talked at all, not like that daughter of his. Then a few months in, he calls me from upstate. He’s signed himself up for this canal boat tour, which sounds like it was a disaster—just him and some big church group made up of old ladies fussing over his accent—and once it’s over he’s gonna ride the commuter train back to the city, checked the schedule and everything, only he checked it wrong and there’s no train. So I’ve got to drive out a couple hundred miles to pick him up, and we have that whole ride back together. He started talking more, joked. Only talked about the shows we liked to watch, at first. Then he told me about what had gone down with his brother, how the divorce had spooled all out, after. He had made up with his brother, and they were talking again. That was a big change for him, and made him easier to get to know.”

“I feel a little bad learning all this from you. I don’t actually want to gossip.”

“I think you’re good. I wouldn’t want any woman hanging out with some guy they just met without more than the usual intel.”

“Yeah. Though he’s not hard to trust. Like, right away.”

“Money guys are like that, though.”

“Yeah? Know a lot of money guys?”

“Getting to. Winston’s been helping me with investments. I’m more than a little interested.”

“Nice. That stuff’s my verb, too.”

Jean laughed. “Your verb, eh? You don’t seem like any of the money guys I’ve met. Or money ladies.”

“Don’t judge Wisconsin by its cheese, Jean. We’ve got all kinds.”

“Seems like.”