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Cass had been the biggest, brightest star around which his life had revolved, at least until he’d kissed Hannah for the first time or eaten the first meal he ever cooked by himself. She’d introduced his parents, given them their life’s work, been their closest friend and co-conspirator. She’d felt unfulfilled by the life her family assumed she’d lead, so instead she’d struck out on her own, making a life wildly outside the confines of what anyone could have imagined for her. At every turn, she’d figured out how to be free in whatever way she was able, and how to do it without cutting ties with anyone she loved. In fact, she’d loved more people than anyone else Levi had ever met.
It had hurt him in the deepest, most secret part of himself that she couldn’t seem to lovehim.
To his young, worshipful self, her approval—or lack of it—had seemed like an absolute, unquestionable judgment on his worth. She was so much bigger than life, had lived so much and done everything she ever wanted: Who was he to question her opinion of him? It had never once occurred to him to ask if she could be wrong.
If she, a fallible human, could have looked at him and drawn the wrong impression. If he hadn’t helped her do it, a little, by asserting loudly, over and over, that he was all the things she thought him to be, even if, as the adult in the situation, she should have seen through his childish, defiant posturing.
“How do you deal with this, Miri?” he finally asked when he could speak again.
She shrugged, staring at the grave marker. “Am I dealing with it? I just put one foot in front of the other. The enormity of the years I gave up with Cass will swallow me whole if I look at them straight on. So I try to keep her baby from going bankrupt, love the girl she picked out for me, and hang out with your parents and listen to stories about her. I don’t know what else to do.”
“I love the only girl she ever wanted me to stay away from, and I’ll lose my whole self if I try to stay here,” he said. “Where does that leave me?”
“Doing the exact opposite of what your family told you to do, which is the most Cass legacy imaginable,” Miriam answered.
He chuckled. She wasn’t wrong.
“What if Cass was right all along? Not about me, but that the two of us can never be happy together? What if we’re bad for each other?”
There it was—the fear that had kept him from being able to move forward toward a concrete plan for their future. What if Cass had been right, all along?
He was saying it now, out loud, to Cass as much as to Miriam, or maybe to the wind.
Miriam sat next to him on the ground and curled her tiny body underneath his long limbs. “Maybe you were, Blue, but you’re not now. Who are younow? Who are you together, now? Because I see two people who understand each other, have fun together, collaborate brilliantly together. I see two compatible people who happen to know all of each other’s history, want each other badly, and love each other passionately. Do you know how rare that is?”
“Hannah accused me recently of being a melodramatic jerk who loves misery,” he said, sniffling. “It’s possible I’m being hyperbolic right now.”
Miriam wiped some eyeliner from his cheek where it marked a path from his tears. “You’re both melodramatic jerks who love misery, which is part of how you ended up together. But you’re also not blockheaded enough to throw away a once-in-a-lifetime love because of something Cass said, or because it took you some practice to get good at relationships.”
“You exploded your entire life because of something Cass said,” he pointed out.
“I exploded my entire life because it wasn’t working, and a pretty girl turned my head,” she corrected. “Cass was the excuse.”
“Do you really think we can ever make it work?” he asked.
She reached an arm way up and patted his hair. “I do. I mean, I never knew you as a couple, but I’ve known you both all our lives, and I’ve never seen something you couldn’t get through together. I see you together now, and you seem incandescent with happiness, honestly. Like a very beautiful cactus night-light glowing away.”
“How am I going to convince her that we’re right this time?”
“Did she tell you what she needed to be convinced?”
Levi sighed. “Yeah, but I don’t know how to give it to her. If I knew how to fix the problems between us, I already would have. I feel like she wants an answer before we have a chance to work together on the problem. My messed-up brain, and her messed-up brain, got us where we were before, and maybe as a team we could figure it out, but I feel like we need—”
Miriam stood up, brushing leaves and grass off her paint-spattered overalls. “You have your plotting face on, which is great, but it’s starting to rain again.” She pulled him up beside her. “Can I recommend you continue to plot whilst buying me a hot dog? I cried too much and now I’m hangry. Plus, you can tell me about hanging out with Laurence! Is he coming to visit? I miss him.”
He went with her because she wasn’t wrong. He probably would plot better after a hot dog.
“Are they kosher? Because you know for them to be kosher—” he jokingly started to explain.
“GET IN THE TRUCK, BLUE.”
Hannah, Age 31
You’re a fucking coward,” Blue snarled, his hands fisted, knuckles turning white.
He’d come to their room at the end of a perfectly normal day, where they’d split a bagel and talked about redoing the Carrigan’s menu, and then he told her he’d been offered a job cooking on a cruise ship and had negotiated so she could come as well, and when did she think she could leave?
“When do I think I can leave?! I fucking don’t think I can leave. Cass is sick, Blue. I can’t miss the last years of her life. I’m finally being given actual responsibility. This is what I’ve worked for all my life!”
