Page 60 of We Are Okay

She steps toward me and hugs me tight. I close my eyes. There will come a time soon—any second—when she’ll pull away and this will be over. In my mind, we keep ending, ending. I try to stay here, now, for as long as we can.

I don’t care that her sweater is scratchy. I don’t care that the cab driver is waiting. I feel her rib cage expand and retract. We stay and stay.

Until she lets me go.

“See you soon,” I say, but the words come out thick with despair.

I’m making the wrong choice.

The glass door opens. Cold rushes in.

She steps outside and shuts the door behind her.

When I lived with Jones and Agnes, it was their daughter, Samantha, who made me breakfast. Wheat bread and applesauce, every morning. We ate matching meals, perched on the stools in their kitchen. She’d look over my homework if I had questions, but I remember not wanting to ask for much help. She’d always scrunch up her forehead and say how it had been a long time since she learned this stuff. She’d figure it out eventually and talk me through it, but it was more fun to ask about her magazines because she delighted in talking about them. I learned what DUIs were because Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie both got them. The news of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s wedding was everywhere. I learned what to wait for with each new issue’s release.

I rarely saw Jones and Agnes until after school, because they slept late and entrusted Samantha with my morning care. She was always nice to me after that. She always did my nails for free.

I don’t have her number anymore. It’s been a long time since she’s lived with her parents. I wish I had it now. I call the salon, just in case she’s there early doing work before it opens, but the phone rings and rings and then goes tovoice mail. I listen to her voice slowly stating the hours and location.

I pace the room for a while, waiting for it to be ten in San Francisco. As soon as it’s one here, I press call.

“It’s you,” Jones says when I say hello.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“School.”

He’s quiet.

“I see,” he says. “You spending the holiday with some fellow troublemakers?”

He’s probably running inventory of who I could be with, envisioning a few of us here, a scrappy team of orphans and outcasts.

“Something like that,” I say.

I should have prepared something to say to him. The truth is, I only called so that I could remind him—and myself, maybe—that I’m still a part of the world. It feels like now or never with him, and I’m not sure if I want to lose what’s left of the life Gramps and I shared. I used to be sure, but now I’m not.

I’m about to ask how Agnes is, but he speaks before I get the words out.

“I have everything,” he says. “Just so you know. Whether you want it or not, everything is here in the garage waiting for you. Not the beds or the refrigerator or nothin’ likethat. But the real stuff. The owner arranged an estate sale after the place was vacant thirty days. But the guys and I, we bought it all.”

I close my eyes: brass candlesticks; the blue-and-gold blanket; my grandmother’s china with the tiny red flowers.

“We all feel real bad about it,” he says. “Feel like we shoulda done something. For you.”

“What about the letters?”

Quiet.

He clears his throat.

“They’re here. The landlord gave us the, uh, morepersonalstuff.”

“Can you get rid of them?”

“I can do that.”