Page 67 of P.S. It’s Always Been You
“Like the brush. It was like he wanted us to find it. Don’t you think?”
“Yes. He definitely wanted us to find it. And he disappeared once we had it. Then he came back out, all piss and vinegar.”
“And he said he knew their love story, Hunter. But he wouldn’t say if he’d read the letters. And then he just wanted us gone.” She holds her hands like a scale to be balanced, tipped one way then the other. “But at the same time, he absolutely wanted you to buy this moon-pie sign.”
“Like moon pie is a clue.” I stare at every angle of the sign, but I can’t riddle this five-cent sign. There’s nothing on it, nothing in it, nothing here but an illustration of a moon pie. “It’s official. I’m nominating Pat for the most curmudgeonly eccentric I’ve ever met.”
“Of all the people you’ve met in all the years, he’s worthy of that accolade?”
“He’s up there, wouldn’t you say?”
“He’s definitely salty. But perhaps spending all day with dusty taxidermy mice and spiders in amber has that effect. I was sure he was going to say, Now you whippersnappers get out of my shop.”
“But he was weirdly dropping hints with his little suggestions and specific words, and then all of a sudden—bye-bye, see you later.” We turn into the alley that cuts between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth. There, I hoist the sign above my head like a mirror in the desert, catching the light. “Oh great sun, please reveal unto us the secret trapdoor inside this flat metal sign.”
Presley imitates me, turning her voice into a booming call to the gods of secret compartments and trapdoors. “Or please just send us a case of moon pies.”
She lowers her arm as I lower the sign and tuck it under my arm. “You’re making me sad and hungry. I haven’t had a moon pie in ages.”
“They don’t have moon pies on Everest?”
“Hey, I go places other than Everest,” I say as we stroll across the alley. “Don’t make it seem like I’m such a homebody, hanging out on the same peak all the time.” I gesture to a bench outside a café and we grab it, parking ourselves, and I set the sign on the ground.
“How many times have you climbed it now?”
I look at the cloudless sea of blue above, considering the question.
Her jaw unhinges. “Are you kidding me? You have to think? You’ve climbed it so many times you don’t know the number?”
I arch a brow. “Is four a lot?”
Her sea-blue eyes widen to teacup-size, and she holds up a finger. “One is a lot, Captain Adventure. One.”
I grab her finger, bring it to my lips, and nibble on it. “One time up Everest is a piece of . . . moon pie.”
Yanking her finger back, she laughs then slumps against the bench with a sigh. “Where haven’t you been, Hunter? You’ve seen the world. You’ve visited the sky. Where do you want to go?”
Scrubbing a hand across my jaw, I click through a mental slideshow of the land I haven’t touched. “Socotra Island in Yemen has these weird plants that look like aliens. I wouldn’t mind checking them out. Or maybe Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland. It’s this picturesque, tiny town where you go to see the Northern Lights. What about you?”
“I’m a simpler woman. Take me to Paris and I’d be the happiest camper around. You’d find me lost in the halls of the Louvre or the d’Orsay. Take me to Florence and I’ll spend days in the Uffizi.” Her eyes go a little hazy, and I suspect she’s off in Europe right now, visiting her favorite paintings. She turns to me. “You’d be terribly bored as I stared at art, but I could do it all day.”
I quash that notion. “I wouldn’t be bored, because you don’t just stare. You study it and soak it all in. It’s fascinating watching your reaction to art and artifacts. Even the hairbrush. You held it like it was a thing of wonder.”
“It felt that way to me,” she says, then gazes in the distance. “But so many things do. There’s also a part of me that would love to explore this country. Take a road trip. Stop in small towns. See all the little artifacts and art and collectibles that tell you about the people there.”
The slideshow becomes a movie reel—the open road, a red convertible, the top down. We’d stop in towns with flags hanging above storybook general stores and drive along main streets with fat clocks on green streetlamps. The concrete ribbon would unfurl, and neon signs above diners would beckon from the exit ramp.
“That sounds exactly like your speed. I can picture it. I can picture us,” I say, because I can.
She shoots me a curious look but sidesteps my idea, asking, “But what about you? What would you actually do if you visited the plants in Yemen or the tiny town in Greenland? Don’t you like to be moving, going, doing?”
