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“It disturbs me that you can lie so easily.” She’s laughing as she says it, but it’s not the first time she’s said it, and I know it’s not a joke. She’s worried that I’m like Rand. I aggressively stir the eggs, wishing it were his face, and set down the spatula.
“I try not to lie in my personal life, Ruthie.” I incline my head toward the refrigerator. “Except when it’s fun.”
“But who gets to decide whether it’s fun?”
“Me, I guess. But you’d make a joke like that too. I don’t lie about important things.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment before nodding. “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I believe you.” She lifts a finger. “But don’t get too excited. I’m a sucker. I believe a lot of things I shouldn’t.”
She turns her back to me to carry our coffee to the small circular table in the kitchen. There’s a dining room, but I don’t often have guests, so I’ve made it into a home office, with a large desk and my computer. A treadmill.
This is a house used by one person. Empty. Quiet. I’ve always thought I liked it that way, but I prefer having her here. Her presence makes it feel less like a storage facility—with me as the one thing it stores—and more like a place you might want to stick around for a while.
I carry the plates to the table and we sit next to each other, Ruthie lifting her coffee cup to mine for a clink.
“I don’t think you’re a sucker,” I say after a moment.
“Yes, you do,” she says with a nose-wrinkling laugh. “You’ve as good as told me so dozens of times.”
“You believe in people even though the world’s given you plenty of reasons not to. A lot of people would say that’s a gift. My mother would.”
“Not you,” she says pointedly, then takes a forkful of eggs and moans in a way that radiates through me.
“No, not me,” I admit. I drink some of the coffee, watching her. “But I still like you that way. We can’t all be cynical bastards.”
She’s studying me as if I’m an equation she’d like to figure out. If she finds the answer, I hope she’ll let me know.
Then my phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. I get up to check it, because most of my friends wouldn’t text this early, and find a message from my mother.
I’m sorry to bother you, honey, but the fire alarm is going off. There’s no fire (ha!). I think the batteries need to be changed, but I’m too short to reach it without the ladder, and I can’t find the ladder.
She can’t find the damn ladder because I hid it. She’s constantly trying to do stuff like this herself, even though her doctor has told her a dozen times she shouldn’t be climbing up ladders with her hip. Especially not when she’s alone in that old house.
Sometimes, in dark moments, I think she does these things because she’s hoping something shitty will happen. That she’ll fall, and that’ll be it. She won’t have to go through any of it anymore. She won’t have to get better only to get worse again. She won’t have to hang on just for me and her friends.
I text back.
I’ll be right there.
Then I glance at Ruthie, still eating her eggs. “What is it?” she asks. “Legal emergency? Did Josie try to convince someone to rough up a rival psychic?”
“No,” I say, my mind working fast.
I wanted to spend the morning with Ruthie and go to Danny’s with her later. That seemed important. Because if I don’t tell him the truth now, I’ll go another day without telling him, and then another, and it’ll only get harder to do the decent thing.
Maybe that’s why I say what I say next, which I’m probably going to regret within half an hour.
“I’ve got to go to my mom’s house to help her with something. Want to come with me? We can go straight to Danny’s afterward.”
She glances down at the shirt she’s wearing. I wish I could tell her to keep it on. I’d like her to wear it all day, but I can see her unspoken point. It’s probably not a great idea to announce to my mother and Danny that she spent last night in my bed, however much I might like the rest of the world to know.
“We can stop at your apartment so you can change.”
I can see her thinking the obvious—it would be quicker for us to go our separate ways and reconnect at Danny’s. But she meets my gaze and smiles, beaming in a way that I feel in my chest. It pulses outward, to the rest of me, and I’ll be fucked if I don’t feel my heart growing two sizes like the Grinch. “Okay, but I’m keeping the shirt as a souvenir of my victory.”
