Truly(77)

“Good weird or bad weird?”

“The very best weird. My mother would die.”

After they finished at the museum, he took her to the beer garden in Astoria. It was almost four, and he was hungry and thirsty, tired of walking. They split a pitcher of beer and ate sauerkraut and bratwurst. She didn’t blink when he ordered headcheese.

He thought she might actually be the perfect woman.

Had it been like this with Sandy? He tried to remember dates they’d been on. Whole days they’d spent together this way, sharing food, entertaining each other with jokes and wry observations. But all his mental images of Sandy were kitchen images—the restaurant where they’d met, then Sardo. He didn’t have a single memory of Sandy like this. She had never been this easy.

May sat next to him with her back to the picnic table, leaning on her elbows and gazing at the late afternoon crowd of revelers. She’d crossed her boots at the ankle, and her top toe bounced gently to the music being piped through the restaurant’s speakers. The sun hit the crown of her head, turning her hair gold-red and making her glow.

He felt the same glow inside his body. A fullness in his chest. A gratitude—that he was alive, that he was with May. He took a bite of his brat, savoring the pop of his teeth through the casing, the rich, fatty taste of seasoned meat. The world tasted good. Smelled good.

She’d done this to him, somehow.

He hoped that when she left, he could keep this feeling. Maybe he’d figure out what to do with it.

Maybe he’d even figure out what to do with himself.

She must have felt his scrutiny, because she looked sideways and smiled at him over her shoulder.

“This was a good day,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She held a beer stein in one hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and drank deeply. He watched her throat move. She’d taken off her sweater, and beneath it she wore a black T-shirt that hugged her breasts and highlighted the curve of her waist. He thought that if he touched her, her skin would be deliciously warm, the heat amplified by the sun soaking into dark cotton. “I think you were right.”

“About what?”

“I was doing it wrong,” she said. Her voice was low and beer-mellow. “I like New York.”

“What do you like about it?”

The question shouldn’t have felt so fraught. He shouldn’t have been so jittery all of a sudden.

May tipped her head back to look at the sky. “I think I wanted it to be … a destination. The endpoint I’d been trying to force myself to reach with Dan, where we could finally choose to live together, and that would fix everything that was wrong with our relationship. I wanted to move here—or, not here, but to New Jersey—and feel totally triumphant and complete.” She turned to look at him. “Does that make any sense?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not like that. I mean, the whole Dan thing aside, you could never live here and feel done with it, like you know everything there is to know. It’s so stuffed full of people and stories and life, I could never see more than a small part of it. I think … I think it’s like an attic. My attic back home isn’t very big, and I’ve only been in my house a few years, so all I’ve got up there is, like, eight plastic totes full of Christmas decorations and pants that don’t fit me. But New York is like an attic from the movies, huge and badly lit. You go in, and your clothes get streaked with dust, looking around. Your nose starts to tickle from all the accumulated smells and mess. But there’s so much to see. So many stories in that attic, just waiting for you to find them. And they don’t all make sense right away. You open a trunk, and it’s full of … I don’t know, dolls’ heads, or lightbulbs, or dishes you’ve never seen before. But that’s part of the fun. Figuring it out.”

“Discovering the stories.”

“Yeah. And discovering which boxes are meaningless junk to you, and which ones are full of treasures in disguise.”

He thought about that. Whether he’d shown her any treasures. Whether he’d discovered any.

“I haven’t fed you any honey yet,” he said. “Speaking of treasures in disguise.”

“For thirty-five bucks, it better be a treasure.”

“It is.”

The saucy lift of her lips echoed the cocky smile he could feel on his own. “I’ll bet.”

He lifted the pitcher, topped off his glass, and leaned sideways to fill hers. Then he lifted his stein. “To New York,” he said. His smile felt lopsided, but that fit. She’d knocked him off-kilter, and when she smiled back, it only got worse.