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“Emily or Gia?”
“Ha-ha.”
“She thinks you made a big mistake, doesn’t she?” I said. “I mean with me, she’s worried it was the wrong move?”
“I think she’s just a little confused. Confused more than worried. Because, you know, it did happen so quickly with you, after . . .”
“You were with Gia for so long?”
“Yes.”
I paused then, because I might not have liked it—didn’t like being on the receiving end of it—but I did get it. Emily’s question. That was a question that I had, one I was a little afraid to get the answer to, if I were being honest. How could I blame Emily for wondering too?
Which was when I asked. Kind of.
“Why does she think you were able to? Commit to me? And not her? What’s her theory?”
“Look, you can’t take any of it personally,” he continued, as though that was an answer. “My mother . . . she can have very rigid ideas of how things are supposed to be.”
“Really? I didn’t notice.”
Griffin laughed. I couldn’t help but think of when Griffin had met my mother. How kind he was about her, how generous, how he didn’t want to blame her for anything. Part of me wanted to
match that generosity—in terms of Griffin’s mother, in terms of what her unexpected entrance was raising for me.
But I couldn’t. In that moment, a bigger part of me had no desire to be generous at all. Nick’s mother had loved me, had treated me like a second daughter, even before Nick and I had been together. Where was I starting from this time around? Apparently hoping my mother-in-law could figure out how to stand me.
Still, instead of going to a place where I asked Griffin to parse his mother for me further—or asking for that, and then making unfair comparisons (at least out loud) to the mothers of my past, the ones who seemed predisposed to love me from the get-go—I did the best I could do. I looked at the designs on the ceiling, the calming designs, taking them back in.
“Am I crazy,” I said, “or is there some sort of blueprint to it? Like an ordering system?” By way of explanation, I pointed up above me, swirling my finger along the outlines of the designs. “The artwork on the ceiling.”
Griffin froze. Only for a second. But in that second, I could see what he knew and feared was coming. More of the truth. More of how interconnected it all still was. Something like his past, something like our present.
“They’re recipes, actually.”
“Recipes?” I said.
He nodded. “Recipes from the first meal I cooked professionally. When I working for a catering service near Boston.”
“What are they recipes of?”
“Pork confit and peppers, a braised lamb stew. Lemon cake.”
“Lemon cake sounds good right now.”
I looked at the ceiling in a different light, making out the words as ingredients, the numbers as quantities, the designs between them literally like a mixing pot moving them all together. Gorgeous, and incredible.
Then I saw it, the other thing I missed—how had I missed it?—the lilt of the l’s reminding me of something. Reminding me of the lilt of other l’s I’d just recently seen. Reminding me, all at once, of where.
“Gia drew it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Gia drew it.”
“Did your mother help out?” I was joking. Or I was trying to joke when I said that. But then Griffin didn’t answer.
I turned over and went to sleep.
18
