Matchmaking for Beginners(52)

I realize I haven’t eaten in a long time either. “Okay.”

“Are you really not so angry with me, then?”

“Not so much,” I say. “I think I’m having an Insufficient Anger Response, actually.”

“Yeah. You probably should be mad as hell. But I’m glad you’re not.” He stands up and stretches, giving me a view of his nice flat belly and low-slung jeans. It hurts, the deep long familiarity of him, the badassness of him, and finally I have to look away, so I take the last drink of my beer and look out at the lights of Brooklyn instead.

I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be here. I take a deep, full breath of the new unknown. I should call Jeremy. I have so many feelings that I’ll have to sort out later.

“And hey, while we’re eating,” he says, “you can tell me everything that’s going on with you—and why you serendipitously showed up on Blix’s doorstep today.”

I guess that’s when it really hits me that he probably has no idea that Blix has left me the house. That thought arrives at the back of my neck first and works its way around to the front of my brain, rather like a bug making its way around a nerve-wracking circuitous path.

Just then, the door to the roof bangs open, and a kid who looks to be about ten years old, with a mop of pale hair and a huge pair of round black plastic glasses, comes charging onto the roof, dribbling a basketball and dancing all around. He leaps up onto the edge of a planter, but he doesn’t notice us until he’s making his last mental calculation, and when he does, he’s so startled that he doesn’t quite make the height he needs. The ceramic planter falls over and smashes on the ground, and dirt goes everywhere.

“Sammy, my man! What the heck you doing?” Noah says.

“Oh! Sorry!” The boy stops and looks instantly horrified.

“Nah, it’s okay. It’s just a planter. You scared me, that’s all.”

“I’ll clean it up.”

“No, go get a broom and dustpan, and I’ll take care of it. I don’t want you to get cut.” Noah turns to me. “This is Sammy, our resident lovable juvenile delinquent and breaker of pottery. His mom is Jessica, the one I was telling you about. And Sammy, this is Marnie.”

Sammy says hi to me, and pushes his hair out of his eyes, and then he runs off and comes back with the dustpan and the broom, and Noah and I get to work sweeping up all the shards while Sammy bounces his basketball over in the other corner of the roof. I keep stealing little glances over at him because he’s so adorable—like a serious little owl with good dance moves.

“Hey, Noah, guess what!” he calls after a few minutes. “My dad’s coming to get me tomorrow morning, and we’re going to Cooperstown for the weekend.”

Noah gives a fake growl. “What’s so great about Cooperstown? You don’t care about baseball or anything, do you?”

“Yes, I do! You know I do! And we’re gonna stay in a B and B and have pancakes for breakfast, and he said maybe there’s gonna be a pool.”

His mom appears just then. She’s thin and gorgeous and wearing jeans and a gray cardigan and she sighs a lot. She looks over at Sammy like any minute he might turn into something that’s going to disappear on her.

Noah introduces us—“Jessica, Marnie; Marnie, Jessica”—and she holds out her hand for me to shake.

“Oh, Marnie!” she says. “I’ve heard Blix talk about you! Oh my goodness, it’s so awful what happened—I miss her every single day.” She glances over at Sammy and lowers her voice. “He does, too. He adored her. There was nobody like her.”

Sammy is listening to us talk and dancing over by the fire pit, like a goofy bird ready to take flight.

“Sammy, it’s bath time, and you need to come in and get your stuff packed up,” she says. Her eyebrows are all knitted up in a frown. “Wait. Did you break this planter?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“It was an accident,” says Noah. “No biggie.”

But she is clearly worried about Sammy being careless, and now he’s destroyed this planter that was Blix’s, and those were Houndy’s red geraniums planted inside, and everything, she says sadly, seems to be crashing to an end all around them—and right then, my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, and I would be so deliriously happy to be able to escape from this conversation except that when I look down at my phone, I see the faces of all my family members grinning and waving—all of them, plus Jeremy—wanting to FaceTime with me. It’s as though they’re suddenly right there on the rooftop with me.

I go tearing inside, down the stairs and into the hall and skidding into Blix’s kitchen before they can see where I am and—oh God—who I’m with.

“Hi!” I say, and there they all are, jockeying for position in front of their little screen: Natalie holding up Amelia, who is blowing bubbles—“Look, Auntie Marnie, I talks with spit!” Natalie crows in a baby voice—and my mother and father peeking in from the side, trying to ask me a million questions. All of them at once.

“Where are you right now?”

“Is that really Blix’s house? Show me the kitchen!”

“Is it old? It looks really old!”

“Don’t even tell me those walls are red!”