Page 50 of We Are Okay

I found my way to the love seat. I wanted a lecture about anything. The correct name for a coffee establishment. The duplicity of nuns. The difference between carnal desire and the love for someone’s soul.

I wanted to touch knees under the table.

I wanted him to tell me about my mother.

Night fell and he didn’t come out. He didn’t make dinner. I sat on the love seat, perfectly still, until my back got sore and my feet fell asleep and I had to stand to get the blood rushing again. I got ready for bed and then I went to my room in the front of the house, where nobody ever went but me.

chapter eighteen

“MARIN,”she says. “Please talk to me.”

I guess I’ve gone silent. I didn’t even realize it.

“I miss him,” I whisper. It isn’t what I expected to say; it just comes out. I don’t even know if it’s true. I do miss him, but then I don’t.

She scoots closer.

“I know,” she says. “I know. But you’re trying to tell me something. I want to hear it.”

Her knee is so close to mine. She isn’t afraid to touch me now that we’ve held each other all night. I love her, but there is no going back. No bonfires on the beach. No mouths pressed together. No hungry fumblings. No fingers through her hair. But maybe I can go further back, to a less complicated time whencutewas an accuratedescription of my grandfather and Mabel was simply my best friend.

I want to tell her, but I can’t do it yet. The words are stuck.

“Tell me something,” I say.

“What?”

“Anything.”

Tell me about heat.

Tell me about the beach.

Tell me about a girl who lives in a house with her grandfather, about a house that’s full of easy love, about a house that isn’t haunted. Hands covered in cake flour and air that smells sweet. Tell me about the way the girl and her grandfather did each other’s laundry and left it folded in the living room, not because there were secrets, but because that’s just the way they were: simple and easy and true.

But before she can say anything, the words come.

“None of it was real,” I tell her.

She scoots closer, our thighs touch. She takes my hands in hers like we used to do on the beach, like I’m freezing and she can warm me.

“None of what was real?”

“Him,” I whisper.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“He had a walk-in closet behind his room. It’s where he really lived. It was filled with all thisstuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Letters, to start. They were all written by him. He signed her name, but he wrote all of them.”

“Marin, I don’t...”

chapter nineteen

AUGUST