This Is What Happy Looks Like(46)

She ran a thumb across the tiny hole where the pencil had gone through the paper when she interrupted him. Behind the drawing, she could see the faint imprints of certain words, and she flipped it over and examined the menu, suddenly back in that shop with Graham, the air filled with the sweet smell of chocolate.

She sat there for a long time, holding the drawing by its edges, her mind drifting. And then she stood and carried it to the back of the shop, where she selected one of the new frames—a sturdy-looking black one—and removed the back. As she slid the drawing inside, she was careful to hide the signature along the bottom, the uneven gray line that might give away the artist.

When she brought it out to the front of the shop, Mom frowned.

“That’s not a poem,” she said, but Ellie didn’t listen. She set down a pink index card that read “Drawing not for sale” and then placed the frame on top of it, propped in the window alongside the others so that it was angled south, where it would face the water and harbor. Where it would face Graham.

“Yeah,” she said, “it is.”

From: [email protected]

Sent: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 11:44 AM

To: [email protected]

Subject: (no subject)

Hey Evan,

Looks like I’ll be home this weekend after all. Hard to believe it, but we’re on schedule with the shoot, and I’m ready to get out of here. If you could just feed Wilbur around lunchtime on Saturday, he should be fine till I get back later that night.

Thanks again, man. Give the hog a hug for me.

GL

Chapter 14

The moment he saw her in the deli, Graham understood his mistake.

He hadn’t forgotten about her. But he had given up.

And now, sitting across the table from Olivia, he felt a quick flash of certainty, a desperate flailing knowledge that he’d done the wrong thing. He should have tried harder. He should have shown up at her house every night, called her every day, e-mailed her every hour. He shouldn’t have taken no for an answer.

He shouldn’t have walked away.

And now it was too late.

She hadn’t even looked at him. Not once.

Across from him, Olivia was squinting at the menu, which was scrawled on a chalkboard above the deli counter. “How can there be no salads,” she said, a whiny note to her voice that she managed to drop only when she was in character.

“I’m sure they can throw some lettuce in a bowl for you,” he said distractedly, and she looked at him as if he’d suggested she eat off the floor.

For almost three weeks now, he’d been imagining what would happen if he ran into Ellie again. But none of those scenarios involved being out with Olivia.

“Excuse me,” she was saying, waving down the woman who’d helped sweep up the candy earlier. “Would it be possible to get some sort of arugula salad? Do you have any pear? Or goat cheese?” She turned to Graham with a dazzling smile. “I could really go for some goat cheese.”

It was clear the woman was trying not to laugh. “We only have what’s on the menu,” she said, gesturing to a board filled with options like roast beef, turkey, and ham. “And you order up at the counter.”

Graham rose to his feet. “I’ll get it.”

“I guess I’ll have a turkey sandwich, then,” Olivia said, pulling out her phone with a sigh. “No bread.”

“Not much of a sandwich,” the woman muttered, moving around the table and back to the counter.

A few people tried to let Graham cut ahead of them in line, but he politely declined. He glanced out the window, where he could see the O’Neills’ shop on the other side of the green, then looked back over at the table, where Olivia was fanning herself with one manicured hand.

Harry had been unrelenting in his efforts to convince Graham that dating Olivia would be the second best thing he could do for his career. The first, of course, would be to pick his next project from the long lineup of scripts that were fanned out across the coffee table in his hotel room, each synopsis worse than the one before it, movies about aliens and robots and vampires. There was a musical version of an old sitcom, one where Graham would play his own identical twin, and a buddy comedy about two high school freshmen who pretend to be in college for a night.

“I know, I know,” Harry would say each time he dropped off another script. “But we need to figure out what’s next.”

Graham realized that too, but he wanted to choose carefully.

For the past couple of weeks, he’d thrown himself into the shoot, approaching each scene with new energy, hitting all his marks, nailing each and every one of his lines. At night, he fell asleep on the uneven hotel bed with a marked-up copy of the script on his chest, and in the mornings, he ran lines in his head while he showered and brushed his teeth.

There wasn’t much else for him to do. Without Ellie, the town had started to feel small, and he was getting tired of eating every lunch in his trailer and every dinner in his hotel room. Harry was wearing on him, and Mick only wanted to talk about work. Occasionally, he played cards with some of the other cast members, but most of them were older, so he usually ended up passing the time on his own. And there were few things lonelier than a blinking TV screen and a half-eaten plate of room-service food on an unmade hotel bed.

Last night, when he turned on the TV, he’d been surprised to discover that To Kill a Mockingbird was on. He hadn’t seen it since he was little, curled on the couch with his parents, all three of them sharing a bowl of popcorn, and he was captivated now as he watched, entranced by the classic feel of it. All of his peers could have their dance movies and raunchy comedies and action flicks. Graham realized that what he wanted was to do something like this. Something that mattered.