Weather Girl(95)

I dig into my bag for a pack of tissues.

Russell Barringer is a gentle, impossibly kind man, and I don’t know how I felt anything other than lucky to have him in my life.

Even if he remains past tense.



* * *



? ? ?

“MAZEL TOV!” I say, lassoing Elodie for a hug. “You were phenomenal. I haven’t had this much fun at a bar or bat mitzvah since . . . well, ever.”

“Perfect. Exactly what I wanted: to ruin all future bat mitzvahs.”

The party, which is at the JCC next to the synagogue, is Broadway themed: red curtains, a marquee spelling out MAZEL TOV, “cast photos” of Elodie and her friends hung around the room. There’s even a mock Tony Awards ballot near the buffet, where they can nominate the night’s best dressers, dancers, and singers.

Russell approaches from one end of the buffet, where he’s been chatting with some of Elodie’s friends’ parents.

This is it. I can do this.

“Hi.” I must suddenly forget how to act like a human being, because whatever awkward motion I’m doing with my hand is decidedly not a wave. Maybe I can’t do this. “Mazel tov!”

“Ari. I didn’t know you’d be here. I mean—it’s okay that you’re here, it’s just . . . a surprise.”

Elodie flutters her fingers, painted the same lavender as her dress. “I may have had something to do with that.”

“Ah.” Shyly, Russell buries his hands in his pockets. Up-close Russell Barringer in formal wear might be too much for my brain to handle.

“What my dearest dad is trying to say is that he’s glad you’re here,” she says, giving him the least subtle eyebrow raise in the history of eyebrow raises. “And I think he’s a shoo-in for best speech. Oh—that’s my song!” Elodie makes a show of holding a hand to her ear. “I’ll just leave you two.”

As she flounces away to dance with her friends, Russell shakes his head. “She set us up,” he says, not quite making eye contact with me. “I can’t believe it.”

“Like father, like daughter?”

“Guess so. You’d think we’d have had enough of people meddling in relationships.”

“Matchmaking is an ancient tradition. A Jewish tradition, even.” As if I need it to hold me up, I grasp the edge of the red curtain draped behind me, fiddling with the fabric. “If you don’t want me here, I completely understand. I can leave if—”

“No,” he says, his voice gentle, his gaze finally catching mine. It warms me all the way down to my toes. “Stay. I want you to stay.”

I try to fight the smile threatening to spread across my face. “Okay. I will.”

“You didn’t have to get her anything, by the way.”

“I wanted to.” I tell him about the charms I found on Etsy that made perfect earrings: one that says STAGE RIGHT and another that says STAGE LEFT.

“She’s going to love that. Thank you,” he says. “And—thank you for coming. I’m not sure I said that yet?” The room has very much turned into a party for preteens, the adults self-consciously bobbing their heads to music most of them don’t recognize. “Maybe we could talk somewhere that isn’t blasting ‘My Shot’?”

“Is that not the ideal background music for all serious conversations?”

This gets a soft laugh out of him, which lifts my heart higher in my chest. We have a chance. I just hope I can be brave enough to tell him everything that’s been swirling in my head for the past few weeks.

After Russell checks in with Liv, we slip out into the hall, away from the music, past the coat check and outside. It’s dusk, and out in Lake Washington, boaters are taking advantage of a rare April day that felt a little like summer, with a high near seventy degrees. I didn’t even groan about it when I delivered my forecasts this week. Now that the sun has set, though, I regret leaving my sweater in the car.

“She did great,” I say as we round the JCC building, settling against the wall outside their gymnasium. “A natural.”

“I didn’t know I could be this proud of her. It’s unreal.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then: “You cold?”

I shrug, not wanting to be so obvious about it. Nevertheless, I savor his heat, his scent, when he drapes his herringbone jacket over my shoulders, taking care not to muss my hair. “I haven’t seen this one before. I like it.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Had to break out something special for the occasion.”

As fond as I am of his jackets, we have to move past small talk. “Something occurred to me recently,” I say. “And it’s that I’ve been a complete idiot.”

The frankness of my declaration smooths some of the awkwardness between us, and Russell gives me a half smile. It’s slight, but god, I’ve missed it. “Well. I wouldn’t go that far. And if we’re being fair, I’ve been a bit of an idiot, too.”

I press my shoulders into the bricks. “I keep replaying what happened after Torrance and Seth found out, trying to figure out why it affected me that way. Why I felt it meant our relationship was doomed. And I think I was looking for a way out. A reason this wouldn’t work.” I’d asked Joanna why I sabotaged myself, and now it’s clearer than the most cloudless day. “I was so convinced you’d eventually end it because I wasn’t who you wanted me to be that I decided to do it before you could. Because I thought that would somehow make it hurt less.”