Field Notes on Love(9)

“It’s not that I’m not happy about it,” he says weakly, looking from Alfie to Oscar to George, who are sitting three in a row across the table, watching him with unreadable expressions. “You know how much I…well, you guys are my…” He turns to Poppy, whose mouth is twisted as she waits to hear what he has to say. On his other side, Isla is looking at her plate. “We’ve always been a team.”

“And now you wish you could be transferred?” George asks. His voice is intentionally light, but Hugo can hear the stiffness in it. When they were little, Dad used to joke that George was like a sheepdog, always looking out for the rest of them, trying to keep the pack together. To him, the scholarship isn’t a duty; it’s a stroke of good luck. A chance to keep moving through the world as they always have: as a unit.

    Hugo shakes his head. “Not at all. It’s just…I can’t be the only one who’s wondered what it would be like to…” He doesn’t finish the thought, though he knows they understand what he’s saying. They always do. But if they agree with him—if they’re even the slightest bit sympathetic—none of them shows it. They all watch him impassively, the looks on their faces ranging from hurt to miffed to annoyed.

Hugo swallows hard, feeling like he’s flailing. But then he thinks of what Alfie said earlier, about pulling a Hugo, and fights his way forward.

“The thing is, I can’t imagine being anywhere without you all,” he says, which is true, the truest thing he can think to say. “But that’s why it feels like I have to try it. Even if it’s only for a week.”

They’re all quiet for a moment, even Alfie, until—finally—Dad nods. “Then you have to go,” he says simply, and at the other end of the table, Mum lets out a sigh.

“Just don’t lose your passport,” she says. “All things being equal, we’d prefer to get you back at the end.”





At breakfast Nana is telling a story about a boy she dated when she was eighteen.

“His father was a prince,” she says as she ladles some sugar into her coffee, “and his mother was a debutante. He was very handsome, and he took me to the most fabulous parties all over New York City. Once, we danced until five in the morning. Then he kissed me on a street corner just as it started to rain. It was unbelievably romantic.”

“Mom,” Pop says, looking at her over his newspaper. “You didn’t date a prince.”

She winks at Mae. “I didn’t say I did. I said his father was a prince. He decided to get out of the family business.”

“Sounds like a swell guy, Mary,” Dad says with a completely straight face, and Nana throws a balled-up napkin in his direction. He catches it and throws it right back.

“Enough, you two,” Pop says with a weary look. Ever since his mother came to live with them this spring, meals—at least on the days when she’s been up to joining them—have turned into sparring sessions, with Nana and Dad trading good-natured jabs across the table. They’re so eerily well matched that one day, while they went back and forth about the merits of green tea, Pop leaned over to Mae and whispered, “I think I married my mother.”

    Mae finishes her cereal and rinses the bowl in the sink. “Well,” she says, her voice light as she turns around again, “I’m off.”

“What about the gallery?” Pop asks with a frown. She’s been working there a few days a week, packing boxes and answering the phone and talking to the more casual customers who come up from the city and act like they’re on the brink of buying a painting, before they move on to the antique shop next door and go through the same routine with an old lamp.

“Yeah, I was hoping I could come in later.” Mae does her best not to meet any of their eyes. “It’s just that Garrett is leaving this afternoon, so…”

To her surprise, they all look thrilled.

“Well, why didn’t you say so,” Dad says with a grin. “Please. Go. We certainly wouldn’t want to keep him. Not even a minute longer than—”

“Give him our best,” Pop says, ever the diplomat.

“I think it’s lovely,” Nana says with the same dreamy look she gets when they watch old movies together. “A dramatic send-off.”

“I’m not sure how dramatic it will be,” Mae tells her. “We always knew we were going our separate ways.”

“That doesn’t make it any less romantic,” she says, beaming. She’s wearing a blue silk robe, and she looks tiny inside it, lost in the folds of fabric. All the chemo she went through this spring—a course so intensive she was in the hospital for over a month—seems to have shrunk her. But it worked, and now, whenever someone remarks on how much weight she’s lost, Nana only grins. “Must’ve been a whole lot of cancer in there.”

It rattles Mae sometimes to hear her joke about it; she knows how close they were to losing her. When Mae was little, some of the kids at school used to ask whether she missed having a mother, and she was always quick to bite their heads off: “I have two dads,” she’d say, eyes blazing. “And I bet they’re both better than yours.”

    But that was only half the truth. The other half was that she had Nana.