Nora Goes Off Script(18)

He sips his wine and leans back into the sofa cushions. “Explain.”

“I write movies for The Romance Channel.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Those two-hour movies that are mostly commercials?”

“Well, I’ve written a lot of them. That’s what I do.”

“Hilarious.” He pours us each a little more wine, killing the bottle. “So why is it math?”

“Maybe not math. Did you ever play Mad Libs as a kid? Where you have to fill in the nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and then there’s a story?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Give me a gender, a location, and a career.”

“Okay . . . female, Chicago, real estate developer.”

“Okay, easy. Stephanie, a young urban real estate developer, takes a trip to rural Illinois to look into buying a dairy farm and turning it into a corporate retreat center. The young handsome owner of the farm doesn’t want to sell, and they butt heads. But as she spends more time on the farm, she sees how important it is to the community and they fall in love. In fact, she’s helping him organize the annual Founders’ Day festival later next week. They kiss. The night before Founders’ Day, she gets a call that she needs to shut down the farm immediately or lose her job. She leaves for Chicago. He is heartbroken.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes. But wait, now it’s Founders’ Day, and you can pretty much insert any community event here—Christmas tree lighting, soup kitchen opening, children’s recital—and he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!”

“Yes!”

“She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm. The end.”

“That’s so stupid. Is it always the same?”

I down the rest of my wine. “Pretty much. I change the names and the kind of farm, for good measure. And I flip the genders. Half the time the guy leaves.”

“But he always comes back?”

“Always.” A moment passes between us, where I’m pretty sure we’re both thinking about Ben. For some reason I need Leo to know that I don’t want Ben back, that I’m happy and whole with him gone.

He goes ahead and says it. “But Trevor left, end of story.”

“Yep,” I say. Leo’s giving me this look, like maybe I’m a puzzle he’s about to solve. “Well, now you know all my secrets. I’m going to bed.”





CHAPTER 6





Leo isn’t up for the sunrise. I should be glad to have the swing all to myself, but I’m not. This alarms me on the deepest level. I’m getting used to him and how he follows me around. I like how he listens to me when I talk. I like how he looks at me.

Ben used to sit at the kitchen island and talk about real estate and what’s wrong with people while I made dinner. “You know what’s wrong with Mickey?” Or “You know what’s wrong with that guy at the bank?” These were rhetorical questions, and the only real variety to them was which person had wronged him that day. He liked to keep the TV on at all times, background noise while he moved the papers outlining his newest scheme around on the kitchen table. Ben took up a lot of space.

The night he told me he was leaving, he slept on the couch with the TV blaring. I lay in bed trying to process what was happening. The whole thing was so confusing. I remembered Penny’s face the first time I told her I was seriously dating him. “Oh. My. God,” she’d said. “Don’t blow it.” Ben was kind of a catch. He went to prep school and moved through life like a knife through soft butter. Ben was the kind of guy Penny would know.

Penny and I grew up in Chesterville, Connecticut, a medium-size town that had previously been two small towns—one affluent, one working class. When things were rezoned in the 1950s to create a single town with a single public high school, the result was a town divided like you’d see in a John Hughes movie. If you lived up the hill, your parents were likely professionals. If you lived down the hill, your parents worked a trade. If you were me, your dad was in the business of cleaning all the professionals’ pools.

The divide in our town was something I almost never thought about. I took the bus to school with the kids in my neighborhood, and we played in one another’s yards after school. We spent our vacations at the public pool, which my dad also cleaned. In high school, my friends and I made fun of the hilltoppers’ pretentious clothes and sweet-sixteen convertibles that were invariably crashed and replaced within a month. I felt comfortable in my little house, in my faded jeans, where I knew exactly what to expect.

But not Penny. She wanted to be up that hill. Starting in middle school, she emulated the hilltop girls and the way they put themselves together. When they bought new skinny jeans, Penny spent the weekend on my mom’s sewing machine tapering the legs of her Levi’s. When they cut bangs, Penny followed suit. This never would have gotten her anywhere, but in the tenth grade Penny tried out for the spring musical and landed a leading role along with a handful of the hilltop girls. After prolonged exposure to Penny’s giant heart and passion for fun, they became her real friends. The transition was seamless, making me think that Penny had always been a hilltopper just biding her time in our twelve-hundred-square-foot ranch.