Page 92 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“I like cupcakes,” Nigel said, unperturbed. He swept a quick glance around the mess of my living room, his gaze eventually falling on the only tidy spot: Greg’s corner. The hospital bed had been made up so neatly it looked as if it were awaiting its next surgical patient, and his small shelf was organized with the five earthly possessions he seemed to own.

Those five meager things reminded me a lot of when Hannah had moved out, storming out of the house after a particularly bad argument about her plans for the future. I’d wanted her to live at home with her as-yet-unborn baby, raising him in the only home any of us had ever known, but she’d laughed at that. Laughed and left, and with little more than the clothes on her back. I’d been sick for months after she’d gone, my whole body racked with guilt and worry about what would become of her.

Maisey knew something of that pain. It was why I left the front door unlocked, why I’d been leaving it unlocked all this time. Hugs weren’t my style, and she hardly needed the benefit of my advice, but until that girl of hers reached out, Maisey was in for a rough ride.

She’d survive, though. We all did.

“We’re alone?” Nigel asked as he returned his attention to me. “No one else is here?”

“Afraid to be trapped with me without the benefit of witnesses?” I snorted. “Don’t worry. I don’t have the energy to murder you.”

“Do any of us?” Nigel laughed, and damn it all if that sound didn’t take me back through the years. “I barely have the energy to tie my shoes anymore. Loafers are a gift from God.”

I fought against the urge to agree to this—and to all other conversational gambits he might be willing to throw out in hopes of winning this round. I wasn’t here for a friendly chat about the vagaries of age; I was here because I needed help. And Nigel, sanctimonious popinjay that he was, was the exact man to give it to me.

“Sit down and stop pretending you’re here for any reason except to thwart me,” I said as I fell into my favorite armchair. The spine of a thin, leather-bound volume—Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I presumed—jabbed into my back, but I didn’t care. In fact, I welcomed it. The less comfortable and settled I got around this man, the better. “I’m having a personal crisis, and I need you to fix it.”

Nigel didn’t sit. He didn’t blink or show any other signs of life—a thing that might have scared me a few months ago, but I knew better now. Men like us were a lot harder to kill than we looked. Long when the world passed on, when nothing was left but concrete and despair, we’d be here scrambling around like the nuclear cockroaches we were.

“And stop staring at me like that. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.” A sharp, sudden pang clutched me by the heart. “And Iamdesperate, Nigel. She’s going to leave. It took me thirty goddamn years to find her again, and she’s leaving.”

For the longest moment, he appeared to be on the cusp of leaving anyway. His breath hitched, his body arced toward the door, and his eyes took on a glimmer of panic that I recognized well. It was the panic of incoming sentiment, of being locked inside someone else’s emotional pain with no hope of release.

But he sat. He hitched his slacks first, precise to a pin even under these circumstances, but he sat. That counted for something.

It counted for a lot.

“This is about the girl?” he asked.

I nodded. “Sloane. Sloane Parker. Up until a few months ago, she was the only friend I had in the world.” I couldn’t help smiling at how far I’d fallen since I’d, well,fallen. “As you already pointed out, I’ve got them coming out my ears now, but that’s not the point. Shegave them to me. She did this. Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

“Where’s she going?” he asked. With a show of sapience I could have done without, he added, “Or should I ask,whois she going with?”

Ah, old friends. A blessing and a curse, a boon and a bane. No one understood my pain as much as this man, and I hated him for it. But it also saved me a long-winded explanation I was in no mood to give.

You see, many years ago, when I’d been as young and naive as Sloane, I’d stood in the exact same spot, facing the exact same dilemma—and the exact same man. I could still feel the sharp agony of those days, when the love of my life, my own precious Genie, had packed up everything she’d owned and followed Nigel to New York to start their life together. There was no loneliness on earth quite like that of knowing that your life—yoursoul—was happily settled on the other side of the country, out of your reach but not even remotely out of your mind.

“She’s leaving with achiropractor,” I said, the word a sneer.

“Oh dear.” He chuckled. “As bad as all that?”

“Laugh all you want, but this is serious. He’s taking her to Boston, the birthplace of American literature. How am I supposed to compete with that? What do I have to offer that can serve as counterpoint?”

Nigel sat back against the cushions of the couch, his gaze moving quickly back and forth across my face. He was a speed reader and always had been; even with so many years at his back, his extraocular muscles were in phenomenal shape.

“You love her?”

I waved an impatient hand. “Not like that—not the way you’re thinking. This has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with…” I let the words trail off, unsure how to finish.

What I’d been about to say was that I’d died the same day that Genie had, that my heart had shriveled and shrunken until Sloane had brought it back to life again, but it wasn’t true. Ihadn’tdied when I’d buried Genie, even though I probably should have. Hannah would have been far better off as an orphan than living with a shell of a man filled with nothing but pain and rage. At least then she might have had a chance at happiness.

Nigel was waiting patiently for me to respond, so I drew a deep, painful breath and tried again.

“‘Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think,’” I quoted. It was pathetic for a fully grown man to struggle to say something that had been tripping off the tongues of little girls for over a century, but there was a reason Sloane had chosenAnne of Green Gablesfor our next book-club read. That girl had more wisdom than she knew.

So did Nigel. He nodded and finished it for me. “‘It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.’”

Silence descended for a long moment, broken only by the sound of the kitchen door slamming shut and the heavy tread of my grandson’s footsteps. Nigel risked a quick peek at me, ready to take my cue at how to react, but all I felt was gratitude—gratitude for this strange young man who’d taken up residence in the corner of my living room, gratitude to my daughter for sending him to me just when I needed him most.