“I already like him more than Dan,” he said. “And I don’t see anybody making this my business.” He looked at May. “You’ll tell me if you need something, right, Scooter?”
May’s heart nearly burst. “Yeah. You can go watch the game, Dad.”
He nodded. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Ben’s expression was unmistakably envious as he traced Bill’s progress from the room.
“Biiiill,” her mother moaned at his back.
“Let her go, Nancy,” he said without turning around. “She’s a big girl.”
“But she’s not … That is, May isn’t really …”
Allie scooted over and put her arm around their mother’s shoulders. She laid their heads together, squishing her baseball cap into Mom’s hair football. “I feel you, Mama,” she said. “I spent most of the week saying the exact same thing inside my head. But it turns out May’s maybe got a little more Wild Amazon Jungle-Conquering Turbobabe in her than we all thought. I’m going to take a guess and say she got it from Dad.”
Their mother whimpered, but May had to smile. “Definitely from Dad,” she said. “And if it makes you feel any better—though I can’t imagine it will—I was going to move to New York whether Ben came back or not.”
Allie nodded her agreement. “So even if it’s a reckless, immature, spur-of-the-moment decision, at least it’s not penis-based.”
Nancy buried her face in her hands, either laughing or crying—or, as was so often the case when Allie got involved, a little bit of both.
“Can I talk to you somewhere?” Ben asked. “In private?”
May wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Let’s go to the porch.”
He spun off the wall and led the way, and she found, as she followed him through the living room, that she was barely even angry anymore. That she kind of just wanted to tackle-hug him, pushing her hands into the pockets of his familiar gray hoodie to cover his fists and rubbing her face against the back of his neck.
I love him, she thought. He loves me. Why not?
So she gave it a whirl. She missed his pockets completely, and their legs tangled together badly enough that they both fell down. Ben rolled to take the brunt of it, then rolled again until he was braced above her.
“You all right?” he asked, breathless.
“Yes.” She’d missed his face. At the reception, she’d drawn it on a napkin. She’d have to find it and give it to him. Fulfill her promise to make him a picture. “That didn’t work the way I thought it would.”
“You were trying to kill me?”
“I was trying to hug you.”
The smile lines around his eyes deepened. “Oh,” he said. “Carry on, then.”
May hooked a leg around his hip and pressed her face into his throat and pulled him down closer. “Don’t do that again. Don’t leave.”
“I won’t.” His voice got muffled against her hair.
“If you ever do, I’ll find your knives and steal them and cover them with nail polish.”
“What an awful thing to say.”
“Then I’ll grind the blades on a rock.”
“Technically we already do that when we sharpen them, but I get the point.”
“And then I’ll buy you new knives from Ikea.”
Ben fake-shuddered and let more of his weight sink onto her, lowering his head until he was breathing in her ear. “I promise,” he whispered. “I promise I won’t.”
May guessed, from the way that the last little pile of pebbles rolled off her heart and clattered uselessly to the floor, that those had been the words she needed to hear.
She smiled, and she kissed him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
They sat side by side on the front porch swing and took turns being the motor, rocking slowly from toe tip to heel cusp and back again—first May’s pajama-pant-clad leg and slippered foot, then his own leg in jeans and sneaker.
The weather was perfect—sunny, the temperature somewhere in the sixties—but he was sweating through his T-shirt. When he wiped his hands on his thighs, indigo lint stuck in the grooves of his palms.
“So,” he said. Because they had to start this conversation somewhere, even if they’d kind of done an end-run around it on the living room floor. “New York.”
“It’s not because of you,” she said quickly. “It’s because I like it there.” She let a moment pass, considering. “And sure, that’s because of you. But I like it independently of you. The main thing, though, is that I want to find out who I am, and New York seems like the best place to do it.”