We Are Okay(33)

“Like, for laundry?”

“Yeah, but with lots of variations. It went beyond clothes. How to get a stain out of a carpet, when to use fizzy water and when to use bleach, how to test to see if the colors would bleed.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah, but I really learned it. I can get stains out of anything.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says. “Don’t be surprised if you get packages of my laundry.”

“What have I started?”

We smile; the joke settles.

“I miss his face,” Mabel says.

“Me, too.”

The deep lines by his eyes and mouth, in the center of his forehead. His short, coarse eyelashes and ocean-blue eyes. His nicotine-stained teeth and his wide grin.

“And how he loved jokes,” she says, “but always laughed the hardest at his own.”

“It’s true.”

“There are so many other things, too, that are harder to put into words. I could try, if you want me to.”

“No,” I say. “It’s enough.”

I stop my mind from taking me back to that last night and my discoveries. Instead, I play each thing that Mabel said over and picture them all, one by one, until they turn into other memories, too. How it sounded when he walked the hall in his plaid slippers, how clean and short he kept his fingernails, the low rattle of his throat clearing. A soft glow settles in, a whisper of what used to be. It fends off some of the loneliness.

And then I think of something else Mabel said.

“Why were they clearing out Carlos’s room?”

She cocks her head.

“For you. I already told you they redid it.”

“But I thought you meant the guest room.”

“That room is tiny. And it’s for guests.”

“Oh,” I say. A mechanical ding blares. “I guess I just assumed . . .”

The ding repeats. It’s the oven timer. I’d almost forgotten where we were. I don’t know what I’m trying to say anyway, so I check on our corn bread and find it risen and golden.

Something is shifting inside me. A heavy cloud passing. A glimpse of brightness. My name painted on a door.

After searching a row of drawers I discover a worn oven mitt, covered in illustrated gingerbread men. I show Mabel.

“How seasonally appropriate,” she says.

“Right?”

It’s so threadbare the pan’s heat seeps through, but I manage to drop the loaf on the stovetop before it hurts too much. The scent fills the room.

We spoon chili into mismatched bowls from the cabinet and heap them with sour cream and pre-shredded cheese. We spoon out the honey for the corn bread, unwrap the butter.

“I want to hear about your life,” I say. I know I should have told her this months ago. I should have told her yesterday and the day before that.

Mabel tells me about Los Angeles, about all of the name-dropping that goes on around her, about how lost she felt in her first few weeks there, but how lately she’s been feeling more at home. We look up the website for Ana’s gallery, and Mabel tells me about her most recent art show. I scroll through butterfly images, each wing made of fragments of photographs and then hand-dyed in rich pigments until the photographs are unrecognizable.

“I could tell you what they’re about,” she says. “But I’m sure you can figure it out on your own.”

I ask her who she’s heard from, and she tells me that Ben’s liking Pitzer. She says he’s been asking about me. He’s been worried, too. They keep saying they’ll get together one weekend, but that Southern California is huge. Going anywhere takes forever, and they’re both settling into their own new routines anyway. “It feels good to know he’s there, though. Not too far away if I needed a friend from home.” She pauses. “You remember that there are other people in New York, too, right?”

I shake my head. I hadn’t even thought about it for so long.

“Courtney’s at NYU.”

I laugh. “That’s never going to happen.”

“Eleanor’s at Sarah Lawrence.”

“I never really got to know her.”

“Yeah, me neither, but she’s really funny. How far is Sarah Lawrence from here?”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I just don’t want you to be alone.”

“And Courtney and Eleanor are somehow going to fix that?”

“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’m acting desperate.”

I stand up to clear our dishes, but after I stack them, I just set them aside. I sit back down, swipe my hand across the table to sweep away the crumbs.

“I want to hear more,” I say. “We got off track.”

“I already told you about my favorite classes. . . .”

“Tell me about Jacob,” I say.

She blinks, hard.

“We don’t have to talk about him.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s a part of your life. I want to hear about him.”

“I don’t even know how serious it is,” she says, but I know that she’s lying. The way she talks to him at night. The way she says I love you.

I look at her and wait.

“I can show you a picture,” she says. I nod.