Why We Broke Up (22 page)

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah. I saw you getting busy at the Ball.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s true. You show up with your basketball superstar and then dance with your ex. Little did I know when we
got into
Hands of the Clock
last year that you’d take those soap-opera lessons to heart.”

“It was just a dance.”

“Just a dance that made Gretchen leave early. And that’s not even counting the Al drama. Min, I really wish you guys would, you know, kiss and make up.”

“He knows where to find me,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said sharply. “Basketball practice.”

“He’s my boyfriend,” I said. “That’s what he does.”

“That and take money from my purse.”

“
Lauren
,” I said. Lauren and her Bible-sized grudges. Maybe she was the wrong one to ask, I thought.

“I just want you two to be friends again. How are you going to have this movie-star birthday party if we’re not invited?”

“
You’ll
be invited,” I said.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t divide and conquer. Al or nothing. Just call him, Min.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Sure, you’ll think about it.
Call him
.”

“OK, OK.”

“It’s bumming him out and screwing him up. Bonnie Cruz asked him out, and he said he wasn’t in a space to think about it, and he hasn’t dated since—”

“I know, that girl in LA.”

Lauren paused for a sec. “Someday we’ll get to that too,” she said, like a second-grade teacher about algebra. “But
tonight I guess you called to hear me guilt-trip you, right? I mean, there’s no other thing, right? Couldn’t be.”

“Well, I also wanted to hear you sing,” I said.

She has this great voice mocking someone at church camp when she was ten.
“Jesus is my dearest flow’r….”

“OK, OK, mercy. I need a favor.”

“His love sustains me through the hours—”
“Lauren!”

“Promise to call Al.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear it on your mom’s Saint Peter statuette.”

“Swear it on something holy to
you
.”

I wanted to say you. Hawk Davies. “I swear on
The Elevator Descends
.”

“OK. Good choice, by the way. Now, what do you need?”

“I need you,” I said, “to invite me to sleep over this Saturday.”

“Of course,” she said, and then “oh.”

“Right.”

“Like, you won’t be here.”

“Right.”

“But your mom—”

“She’ll know I’m with you the whole night.”

“Staying over,” Lauren said. The line was quiet like an error.

“You’ll do it, right?”

“Sounds like
you
will,” she said.

“Lauren.”

“And answer me this: If I get busted for this—”

“You won’t,” I said quickly.

“Says
you
, warden.”

“You’ve snuck out before. With
me
. Your parents sleep early and then leave for church before anybody normal gets up.”

“And if your suspicious mom calls with some suspicious last-minute thing to check on your suspicious story—”

“She won’t.”

“Where might I find you when I quickly call you to call her and save my stupid self?”

“She’ll call my cell.”

“What if she’s smarter than a monkey, Min? What then? Where will you be?”

“You can just call me then.”

“Min, you want me to be a friend and I am. So tell your friend what is happening.”

“Um—”

“Jesus’s light always in bloom—”

“Asterisk exclamationpoint,” I said, and then told her.

“Oh,” she said, slowly, shakily, like she was doing something painful.
Ouch
. Like letting someone down. Like biting her tongue. Like pushing a square egg out of her body. “Oh Min,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

The pen’s dying now
. I’ll leave it at Leopardi’s when I’m done—no, why curse them with my litter? I’ll throw it into the box when I’m through with you, like movie thugs who run out of bullets and toss the gun. These last faint pages will be like this photo, a lost and blurry piece of old-fashioned magic capturing an image of a thing unclear, almost legendary. Nobody else made one probably, no matter what the stars say, and now there’s only this bad trace of ours I’m reminding you of, in fading ink. It’s like we never had anything.

We got off the bus early and bought the eggs and cheap caviar and the British cucumber and one big tough lemon.
You told me a story of Joan buying a lot of cucumbers years ago, by mistake, to make zucchini bread, and that reminded me to ask you and
your whole household
, her words, from my mom to Thanksgiving. I didn’t add all the things
she
said, how the holidays must be so difficult etc., but I told you Joan could come cook. I told you we had to do it sometime, get you and your mom and me and my mom in the same room. I said maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, nice even. We talked about which Thanksgiving foods absolutely had to be made the same way every year, the traditionals, and which had room for experimentation and improvement. We didn’t agree much, and for some reason this time it was weird.

You said maybe.

At your house you showered and I boiled water. I lowered the eggs in like I’d learned from Joan with the Burmese soup, but Joan wasn’t there to approve. So it was just silent, the water off upstairs and no music in the kitchen because I knew you didn’t like Hawk Davies and you’d already been a good sport with the Blue Rhino, so I put on nothing and waited for the eggs. You came down fully dressed and started slicing the cucumber and kissed me on the top of my head. I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn’t point to. I tried to perk up reading enthusiastic from the cookbook, but it was actually a very simple thing to do. Instructions were superfluous. We smiled stuffing the eggs
into the cubers but didn’t laugh, put everything in the fridge, and then it was time to wait. We lay on the sofa. The TV clicked and flopped. We got up, put the second batch in, sat back down. The afternoon stayed saggy. My stomach felt in a fistfight, even with your hands around me and the kisses at my ear. The timer went off again and we got to work, me eating the hard-boiled scraps as we assembled, which didn’t help my stomach any. You had it drawn out already in a Calc II sketch, your lines straight and protracted, your knife-work sharp on the curves. And then we had it, pushing the last touches into place. We beheld it like astronauts, our hands afraid to get any closer. It was magic, but it was weirder than it was magic, exactly what we’d planned, the perfect thing I’d found in the book actually there in the smooth white flesh, but still so strange. I thought, I couldn’t help it, of what Lauren said. Did we know what we were doing?

We were still standing Frankenstein looking at it when Joan came in clutching textbooks and artichokes. “Hey,” she said. “What is that in my kitchen?”

“
Our
kitchen,” you said.

“Who’s making dinner tonight,” she said, taking off a scarf I loved, “and every night?
Us?
In
our
kitchen? Or
me
?”

“This,” I said, enough of the Slaterton Sibling Bickerfest, “is—”

“Wait, I know what it is,” Joan said. “This is the igloo thing you told me about, Min. You actually made it.”

“It’s Greta’s Cubed-Egg Igloo on an ice floe of lemon-pickled cucumber with a caviar surprise.”

Joan put down her bags. “What’s the caviar surprise?”

“There’s caviar in it,” I said.

“Inside there?”

“Inside the igloo, yes.”

“And it’s all—
eggs
?”

“We cubed them and then set them up. What do you think?”

Joan cocked her head at it. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I mean, it’s sort of awesome.”

“Good for a party?” I asked.

“The guests would have to be tiny to get inside.”

“
Joan
,” you said.

“And what are those things lined up drying?”

“Egg cubers,” I said. “We had to buy a bunch.”

“I’m sure that’s an investment you’ll never regret,” she said.

“Joanie.”

“Well, we’ll make another one for the real party,” I said. “This is just a trial run.”

“The birthday party thing, I’m remembering,” she said.

“
Real Recipes from Tinseltown
,” I said. “It’s Will Ringer’s recipe, inspired by
Greta in the Wild
.”

“You said you were going to make an igloo for Lottie Carson’s eighty-ninth birthday,” she said in wonder, “and then
you did, just like you wanted. Just like you said, I mean. Wow.”

You stood there grinning in a small way.

“Let me get my camera,” she said. “Can I take a picture?”

“Sure,” I said.

“This sort of thing,” she said, her voice serious with lingering disbelief, “should be documented.”

She bounded upstairs and we were alone in the kitchen. After a stretched-out silence we both started talking. I was going to say something stupid and you said—

“Sorry, what?”

“No, you go.”

“But—”

“Really.”

You took my hand. “I was just going to say that I know it’s been weird, this afternoon. Awkward.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But I think it’ll be better, you know, after,” you said. “Tomorrow, I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Sorry.”

“No, I think you’re right.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“And you know,” you said, “you can, it’s not a big deal if you change your mind.”

I leaned against you, hard, like I’d forgotten how to stand
for just a sec. “I won’t,” I said, and it was true. But it was just true
then
. “I’ll never change my mind.”

We stayed like that listening to Joan close a closet and come down. Ed, it’s ridiculous, but I loved her too. And could goddamn kill her for not saying something. Though what she could have said that I could have heard I cannot for the life of me see.

“I’m using the Insta-Deluxe,” she said to Ed. “Remember? We have shoe boxes full of us from this. Old-fashioned I know, they probably don’t make them anymore. But digital didn’t seem good enough for something like this.”

“They still make them,” I said. “They got trendy for a while after that scene in
Sinister Development
.”

She took the picture with a whir and the gears of antiquated stuff. The picture came out of the slot, and she shook it so the fog would clear quicker. “So what are your big Friday night plans?” she asked us,
shake shake shake
. “Ooh, I know. Eating a big igloo.”

I shook my head. “Can’t. I have sort of a family thing.”

“Oh,” Joan said, with a sideways look at you. You’d told me you had better stay home, Ed, if you fucking remember. “Well, I’m celebrating my last midterm on the sofa with fried artichokes and garlic aioli and
The Sand on the Beach
.”

“That’s supposed to be amazing,” I said, but you were already taking my hand, so I didn’t say what I wanted,
Wish I could stay
.

“And when I’m gone tomorrow night,” Joan said sternly, “I expect only a limited amount of hanky-panky from you two.”

“Min already has a mother,” you said. “Don’t be hers, Joan. Plus, we’re just going out.” This was not a lie.

“OK, OK,” she said. “You’re right. Her mother will make sure, from what I hear. But I had to say something, Ed.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” you said, like you did too. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

“I love you,” I said, in front of your sister, and you kissed my cheek.

“Don’t forget your picture,” Joan said quickly, so you wouldn’t have to say anything, I guess. She put this in my hand. We all walked toward the door and stopped for another sec to look at the igloo and then the photo and then the igloo again. It was better in real life than looking at it now, bigger in the kitchen, more grand, like a fantastic something you could walk into, a princess castle, a dream come true. Here it just looks strange. It was strange. But I loved it too.

“Why do
I
have the picture?” I said. “You’re the one who said it should be documented.”

“You keep it, Min,” Joan said quietly. She said, “You dreamed it up,” or something. She said it was my idea. And then she said something like, keep it in case it doesn’t work the next time. Keep this, in case it doesn’t work when you try it again.