Page 21 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Sixteen

“I heard a rumor you’re the handyman.”

Henry, unfolding himself from the back seat of Nan’s Cadillac, looks over at Bea. It’s nearly four and the sun’s just starting to lower over my driveway. I love the smell of late afternoon: the sandy gravel of the sunbaked landscape, the spicy perfume of pine needles.

“Did you,” Henry says.

“Rashad said you were at the house fixing sinks the other day?”

Henry glances at me before pulling his backpack out of the car. “I fixed one sink, yes.”

“Well, my door sticks.” Bea tosses hair off her shoulder and smiles without showing any teeth. I exhale through my nose, long and slow. “Maybe you could take a look?”

Henry’s become the undisputed star of this hike, of eating ice cream, maybe of this entire project.

In his hiking clothes, cheeks pinked up from the sun, he looks like a cross between the Brawny Man and a sexy librarian.

I wasn’t the only one who watched him lick chocolate ice cream off the inner curve of his thumb at Polliwog’s.

“Maybe we should start a list,” I say, gesturing everyone toward the house. “I’ll put out a notepad in the kitchen so Henry can come take care of everything at once instead of us bothering him every other day.”

“Are we bothering you?” Nan asks.

Henry laughs, low and breathy. “Not at all.”

“And for little things,” I say, raising my voice a couple octaves, “you can just come to me. I can take a look at your door, Bea.”

I shoot her a smile, which she returns half-heartedly.

I’m already imagining her review: Clean room, good hiking, hot handyman who made me forget about my ex.

The last thing I need is Henry shutting this down because he’s somehow become the key component of everyone recovering from their broken hearts.

But he only says, “I’m here now.” And when he walks toward the house, I don’t stop him.

“Lou?”

I turn at the sound of a soft, hesitant voice.

I thought everyone had gone upstairs to shower, nap, or—in Henry’s case—investigate a sticky door, but Kim is standing at the entrance to the kitchen with her hands stuffed in her pockets.

She and Bea arrived together, a matched set in the Denver uniform of expensive athleisure and corded flat-brim baseball caps.

Bea was their immediate voice: they were sharing the Pine Room and its matching double beds for a little over a week and she was the one who’d booked it for them, fresh off the demise of an eight-month relationship with her college sweetheart.

The term college sweetheart brought Nate right there into the house’s entryway with us, and I’d pushed him away like an unwelcome specter.

Kim, though, has been quiet. I can tell Bea is her safe place—there’s something about their dynamic that reminds me of Mei.

The way they turn in to each other, keep their heads bent inward like a silent dialogue is always passing back and forth between them.

She hasn’t made full eye contact with me since showing up at the house, and even now her gaze flickers from my face to the garden windows and back again.

“You okay?” I say. I tip my water bottle upside down in the drying rack next to the sink and reach for a dish towel.

“Um,” she says, and I know that without an immediate yes , the answer to that question is no.

“Here.” I motion to one of the island stools, and she ducks her head as she pulls it out. When I sit on the stool next to her, she picks at a loose thread on her sweatshirt instead of looking at me.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. On the hike?” Kim glances up at me as if to confirm this.

“Which part?”

“How it’s so consuming.” Her voice pitches upward at the end of each thing she says, turning her sentences into questions. “Losing someone. And you can’t see the world past it.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. I can tell there’s more she wants to get out; I’ve learned that if you let the awkward silence linger, someone will always fill it. And if it’s not me, it’ll be Kim.

“Bea’s so angry,” she says. She glances over one shoulder, like she’s worried her friend will come down the stairs at any moment.

“We both got dumped on grad weekend and it’s like it lit this fire in her and made her even—I don’t know”—she waves one hand in the space between us—“ more . And I’m not like that.

I can’t—I just, I feel like I’m going to disappear. ”

Her eyes come to mine, red rimmed and watery. “It’s like you said,” she whispers. “The world doesn’t feel the same. I can’t see anything except that he doesn’t want me anymore.”

“I understand that feeling,” I tell her. Kim closes her eyes, drawing a rickety breath. “If anger is working for Bea, that’s understandable, too. But if you can’t access that part of yourself right now, it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you.”

Kim’s nose scrunches up, like she’s holding back a sob. “She’s so much stronger than I am.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I say, and Kim’s eyes break open. “There’s strength in feeling your sadness, too—instead of burying it in anger.”

She shakes her head. “I wish I could be angry, though. I think it would be easier than this.”

“Have you talked to Bea about this? Or anyone?”

“No,” Kim whispers. “I don’t want to bring her down.”

I hesitate. “Bea’s your friend. She probably wants to know what’s really going on with you.”

“I’m kind of sick of myself,” she says. “I’ve been circling this drain for, like, four months.”

“Have you considered therapy?”

Kim’s eyes come to mine. “Isn’t that what this is?”

“Oh.” The word punches out of me, sharp and surprised. “Um, no, I meant—I meant, a dedicated therapist that you can work with on a regular basis. To help you understand what’s holding you here, and how to take care of yourself through it.”

“But that’s why we came here,” Kim says. “To talk to you and work through it.”

“I’m a therapist,” I say, feeling the near lie grate on the way out.

“But I’m not your therapist. It’ll be so much more beneficial for you to work with someone one-on-one.

” When she looks helplessly up at me, I add, “I’d be happy to help you find someone, if you like.

Before you go. I know it can be intimidating to get started. ”

Kim sniffles, nodding once. “Okay,” she says softly. “Yeah, that would help. Thank you.”

When she starts to stand up, I add, “Hey, Kim.”

She looks at me, swiping one sweatshirt sleeve under her nose. “Remember the other thing I said, about how heartbreak isn’t apples to apples? The same goes for reacting to it. It’s not better to be angry or better to be sad. It’s just different. But it’s all valid.”

She manages a smile, frail and fleeting. “Thanks, Lou.”

I watch Kim go, rounding the corner toward the dining room in the direction of the first-floor bathroom. When I stand from the stool, turning toward the front hall, I nearly jump out of my skin.

Henry’s in the doorframe, one shoulder leaned against the wallpaper. There’s a rag in his hands, smudged with oil, wrapped between a few of his fingers like he’s been wringing it out. He got some sun, today; the tops of his cheeks are the faintest bit burned.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“A few minutes.”

“Are you spying on me?”

“Yes,” he says seriously. I have a flash of his eyes in the woods, dipping to my mouth. “I’m spying on you.”

I squint at him and he shakes his head, dropping his gaze to the floor as the shadow of a smile tugs at one corner of his mouth. “I fixed the door.”

“Great,” I say. “Thank you. And I’m sorry everyone’s so, um—” I break off, and he looks back up at me. “Obsessed with you.”

I think he’ll brush it off, tell me it isn’t true. But Henry’s nothing if not a surprise, and when he says, “Everyone?” I feel it under my skin like a sunburn. I think of my palm on the smooth skin of his jaw, that night in my kitchen, and make myself turn away.

“I’ll leave this out for other repairs,” I say, reaching into the kitchen’s junk drawer for a notepad. “And wait to text you until there are a few you can come take care of at once.” I glance up. “So you don’t have to keep stopping by.”

Henry holds my eyes, still working the rag between his fingers. Leaned into the doorframe, sleeves hiked up to his elbows, he looks like he lives here. It occurs to me that this is the first time he’s looked relaxed in the house.

I understand , he told me at Polliwog’s. Without knowing why, I believed him.

“If that’s what you want,” he says.

We stare at each other. “Isn’t that what you want?”

Before Henry can respond, the garden door whines open.

“Hey.” Joss pokes her head into the kitchen, blond ponytail peeking from beneath a baseball cap. She shoots me a wave, then says, “Henry, I saw your car in the driveway. Can I talk to you for a minute outside?”

He looks at me again, righting his weight in the doorframe before nodding at Joss. The door closes behind her and Henry moves toward me, the rag twisted in his fingers, his eyes flicking over mine.

When he speaks, his voice is so low I nearly miss it. So quiet I could have made it up. “Not necessarily,” he says.

He drops the greasy rag onto the kitchen island and steps around me, reaching for the screen door.

I’ve been holding my breath for too long to say anything; when the door grouses open, Henry teeters it back and forth a few times.

The familiar pitch of it—high but musical—fills the kitchen as he looks up at me.

“Add this to your list,” he says.

I swallow. I feel very, very warm. “I like it like that.”

Henry’s eyes hold mine, his fingers still bracketed around the doorframe. “You like it squeaky?”

I shrug, pulling the rag he dropped into my hands just for something to do. I twist it between my fingers. “I like it how I’m used to it.”

Henry’s lips twitch—not quite a smile, but something that wants to be. When he finally steps onto the porch and lets the door fall shut behind him, I let out a shuddering exhale that makes my throat hurt.

Through the window above the sink, I watch Joss lead Henry through the woven arbor toward our grove of yellowing aspens. Just far enough away to be completely out of my earshot before she turns to him, frustration on her face, and starts talking.

Henry’s back is to me—I can’t see his face, only the increasingly rigid set of his shoulders.

He was different today: not the Henry who moved so woodenly through my house, but the one who smiled at Custard in that shady spot in the grass.

The one who laughed when Rashad called him delectable.

But all this way across the garden, through the kitchen window, I watch him start to change again.

When Joss glances up at the house, I look quickly away. Like I’ve been caught spying; like I’ve seen something private that I wasn’t meant to.

Like there’s something going on in this house that I don’t understand.