Page 52 of Spectacular Things

Gray Owl

“I can’t believe we get to live this way,” Mia tells Oliver as he clicks out of the spreadsheet and closes his laptop.

“We can live any way you want,” he says, picking Mia up, tossing her over his shoulder, and carrying her out of the kitchen and into their room.

Tonight, they have created a budget, and in graphing their financial caps, the future seems limitless.

Each month, if they stick to the plan, they’ll be able to take trips, try new restaurants, and still save for the future.

Mia believes that looking ahead means worrying less, and unlike her former financial partner—her mother—Oliver heartily agrees.

Systems and discipline, not whims and superstition, will guide their trajectory.

Flinging Mia on their bed, Oliver hops in after her, his hands running up her sides with obvious intentions. “Is this where I make that joke about being a tiger in the spreadsheets and the bedsheets?”

“You just did,” Mia points out, breathing him in. “And yet I’m still attracted to you.”

Almost immediately after Cricket left for UCLA, Mia realized she had no interest in going back to school.

Instead, she wants to keep working at the animal hospital, in a job for which she is technically underqualified and overcompensated.

Dr. Wilkins pays Mia what he would pay a college graduate, and Mia reimburses him with her unwavering competence.

There’s no reason to leave Oceanside; it’s predictable, with cute, loveable patients and plenty of opportunities to offer care and support to those in need.

For Mia, it’s everything a job should be: one designated piece of her life, not an all-consuming, wholly defining existence.

Because unlike Cricket, Mia doesn’t want to be wedded to her occupation.

Rather, Mia wants to marry Oliver. She knows she’s still young—only twenty-three—but she also knows .

Since November 9, 2019, Mia has understood that life is fleeting and dangerously unfair.

And since meeting Oliver, she believes her life is both steadier and more exciting with him playing a starring role.

It’s Oliver. Every single day, Mia chooses Oliver.

Together they are making 125 Knickerbocker feel like theirs: blending silverware, donating spaghetti pot redundancies, and filling a raised bed with seedlings purchased from the farmer’s market. Everything is moving forward—or almost everything.

“Can you explain to me how I haven’t officially moved in,” Oliver says the morning after creating their budget spreadsheet.

He asks this with his back to Mia as he FrogTapes the window casings.

Their current project is repainting Mia’s bedroom—now their bedroom—a soothing gray over a garish purple she chose when she was seven.

“I gave up my apartment and I sleep here seven days a week.”

“Right,” Mia agrees, using a screwdriver to remove an outlet cover.

She loves that they are taking the time to properly prep the room.

When she and Liz last painted these walls, sixteen years ago, they did two coats in under two hours—Liz had timed their performance, as usual.

They didn’t even mix the cans or paint a sample strip.

If they had, Mia would have realized that what appeared pretty on a tiny square didn’t look the same when it saturated four walls.

But Mia had endured the purple for all these years, until she had complained to Oliver and he’d insisted they pick out paint that same day.

At Hammer It Home, Mia found Benjamin Moore’s Gray Owl soothing but sophisticated.

Unlike her mother, who deemed all neutrals boring, Mia appreciates how the gradient subtly changes with the sunlight, evolving with the day’s weather.

There is a measured acceptance of ambiguity in Gray Owl, a flexibility to let the room transform in its own time.

“So for example, these were delivered here,” Oliver says, interrupting Mia’s thoughts by holding up a paint roller, “because this is where I live, right?”

“Mm-hm.”

“So why did I hear you tell Dave the mailman that I don’t live here?”

Mia freezes. “You heard that?”

“Yep.”

Standing up to buy herself a moment, Mia shuts her eyes and cracks her neck one way, then the other—a bad habit she picked up from sitting at a desk all day. Keeping her eyes closed, she tells Oliver the truth: “I haven’t told Cricket yet,” she confesses. “And I’m scared of her reaction.”

“What? Why?” Oliver asks, genuinely surprised.

“She’s in California having an amazing time.

” It’s moments like these when Mia wishes Oliver weren’t an only child, wishes he could innately understand a sibling’s shared sense of ownership over everything, from phone chargers and sweaters to DNA to, most definitely, family real estate.

“Because this is our house,” Mia says, spreading her arms wide. The room is small enough that with her full wingspan, Mia’s fingertips can almost graze the primed walls. “This is her house.”

“It’s as much yours as it is hers,” Oliver argues.

“Not Cricket’s,” Mia says. “My mom’s.”

Without a word or a second’s hesitation, Oliver takes the two steps required to cross the room, over the meticulously distributed drop cloths, and enfolds Mia in the same all-encompassing, claustrophobia-inducing hug as the ugly purple paint that surrounds them.

“I know I’m biased, but I truly believe she would support my moving in,” he whispers in her ear.

Mia laughs as she feels her tears wet the front of Oliver’s painting smock, which is an old Stallions T-shirt, soft and thin with a nickel-size hole in the shoulder.

She’s long since stopped wondering why she cries when she does because it’s ultimately always the same reason—she misses her mom.

It’s impossible to hold all the sorrow when it blindsides her like it did just now, this tremendous ache of not getting to talk to the one person she really, desperately needsto.

“Liz is as excited about us getting together and living here as she is about Cricket playing at UCLA,” Oliver posits.

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have already been struck by lightning or swallowed by one of those sinkholes if she had any doubts.”

Mia snorts her agreement, and Oliver remembers aloud that her mom was also a laugh-snorter.

He has been trying to help Mia live with her grief by speaking often and fondly of Liz.

Last week, when the sisters were apart for the first time on the anniversary of Liz’s death, Oliver joined Mia on the beach for the New Year’s Eve polar plunge.

He held the phone up while Cricket and Mia FaceTimed at midnight Eastern Time, screaming, freezing, cursing, crying, and laughing together through the dark and distance.

“Call Cricket and tell her I’m moving in,” Oliver says, putting down the roller and crossing his arms. “The paint can wait.”

As Mia calls from the privacy of the front porch, she hopes this will be one of those times that Cricket is in class, or at practice, or just in the middle of a good old-fashioned college shenanigan that makes answering the phone impossible.

No such luck. She picks up on the second ring, impish giggles in the background of her hello.

“Honestly? I figured he already had,” Cricket says calmly after Mia reluctantly shares her news.

Listening to the intermittent smacking sounds on the other end of the line, Mia can picture her sister taking too-big bites from her pretraining peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“I figured you guys went straight from dropping me off at the airport to the U-Haul rental place.”

“Huh?” Mia asks, squinting to discern how many people are with Cricket. The giggling has returned to full volume. “So you’re not mad?” she asks.

“I guess I’d say I’m resigned,” Cricket answers. “And on that note, I wanted to tell you I’m dating someone—she’s a girl, by the way, and her name is Yasmine, but everybody calls her Yaz.”

A pause stretches between them before Mia asks, “She’s sitting next to you, isn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Am I on speaker?”

“I didn’t say you were, and I’m not a sociopath, so no.”

“Wow!” Mia is beyond relieved that Cricket is okay about Oliver moving in, but it comes out as clumsy enthusiasm for someone she’s never met as she gushes, “I’m so happy for you—tell me everything!”

“Can she visit over winter break?”

“Absolutely!” Mia says, rushing back into the bedroom and trying to mouth to Oliver the big news. “This is so exciting!”

“I know,” Cricket says. “And I’m sorry I was such a dick about Coach, but now I get it.”

“Get what?”

“Love,” Cricket says, without an ounce of self-awareness. Mia scrunches her eyes shut from the immediate bout of secondhand embarrassment. Her sister is besotted.

“It’s crazy, but I really get it now,” says Cricket, sharing a laugh with the woman next to her, this stranger Mia is suddenly dying to know. “And the nice thing is, now that I get it, I feel like we can be on the same team again.”

“We’re always on the same team.”

“Yeah, but it’s like what you said before I left—now it feels easier for me to cheer for you, too.”

After Mia hangs up with Cricket, she smiles at the purple walls and realizes that life has begun to right itself.

With Oliver by her side and her room extensively prepped, they roll out the first coat.

The Gray Owl provides the perfect backdrop to make Oliver’s green eyes pop as Mia fills him in on Cricket and Yaz.

“That’s fantastic!” Oliver says, stepping back to examine his work. “I thought she seemed different on our last FaceTime—like a different kind of happy than I’ve seen.”

Painting over what was, Mia listens to Oliver sing along to her playlist and imagines him as her husband, as the person to whom she’ll always be bound.

In her mind’s eye, she sees him become more vivid in this new form, as will she, a partner for life, and then co-parents, a family of their own, kids her mother will never meet, never kick a soccer ball to, or polar plunge with, or shop for at Goodwill.

The speed of her racing thoughts suddenly makes it difficult for Mia to catch her breath.

“Deep inhale,” Oliver says, crouched down beside her and rubbing her back. “I’m right here. Let’s do it together.”

Ever since the ninth of November four years ago, Mia has struggled to keep her footing in the chaotic tornado of heartbreak, financial stress, Cricket’s adolescence, and a pandemic. If she’d known what she would be forced to endure, Mia isn’t convinced she’d still be standing.

But here sheis.

What good fortune to be spared one’s fortune.

On the floor of her childhood bedroom, Mia breathes with Oliver.

She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin.

It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony, grief and delight, spinning in the air, waiting on time and luck to determine not when this chapter ends but how the next one begins.