Page 39 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Twenty-Eight

I wake up to the low buzz of my phone on Henry’s nightstand.

We came upstairs at some point between midnight and three a.m.—Henry’s big hands in the dark, wrapping me in a blanket and leading me to his bedroom.

It’s as neat and simple as every other part of his house, like he hardly lives here at all.

The throw blanket from last night is heaped on the floor, and I wrap it around myself before slipping out of his bedroom. Goldie picks up on the second ring, like she’s been waiting for me—which, of course she has.

“Finally,” she says by way of greeting. Pale morning light casts Henry’s condo, and all the evidence of our evening, weak blue. Half-full wineglasses next to the picked-apart pie on the coffee table; pile of pillows and twisted blankets on the living room floor. “Did you listen to my voicemail?”

“No,” I say croakily. I head for Henry’s balcony—I need space from him, from the night we had, to talk to my sister. “I just woke up.”

“Well, Mom’s getting evicted.” I freeze, one hand on the sliding door. I feel Goldie’s words in my body—like punches, bruising and cruel.

I step onto the balcony, sliding the door shut behind me. “Why?”

“Because she hasn’t been paying her rent, obviously.”

“It’s not obvious, Goldie, can you please not condescend to me right now?”

“I’m not—” She breaks off, sighing forcefully into my ear. I lean over the railing, blanket pulled tight around me in the morning chill. Everything is covered in shimmering, crystalline frost. “I’m not trying to fight with you, Lou. I need your help figuring this out.”

“So she called you?” I ask, watching fog shift over the lake. The sun hasn’t crested the mountains yet and everything feels insulated and half-real.

“Yes, last night, lucky me, on literal Thanksgiving. She said you have too much going on right now to deal with this. Because apparently getting dumped is more stressful than parenting a five-year-old.”

I close my eyes. It’s not a competition , I want to scream. You chose Quinn.

“What did she say?” I bite out.

“That she needs to back-pay her rent by Monday or she’s out on December first.”

“Can Mark help her?”

“She doesn’t want to ask him, of course. She wants us to deal with it.” In the background, music swells—whatever Quinn’s watching on TV, I’m sure. He only gets screen time in a crisis. “Can you call her? You’re good at these kinds of things. Dealing with her.”

I feel the words like a slap, like an echo of what she said to me in my kitchen just a few weeks ago: You do this, Lou—you take care of other people to avoid taking care of yourself. Which is it? How am I supposed to focus on myself when she always leaves Mom’s crises to me?

My throat burns, bile rising. We’ve always been this way; I know we have—Goldie the logical one, shutting Mom out because it’s not right.

Me, the arbiter of feelings, letting her back in because she’s family .

It’s always me, caring for people. Holding Mei on my couch after her breakup with Andy.

Telling Kim her pain is as valid as Bea’s anger.

Rushing Shani and Alfie to the vet. Falling for Henry—heartbroken in his own, permanent way.

It’s all I’m capable of, maybe. Being a fixer. It’s what people want from me. I have the sudden, unsteadying thought that maybe it’s the reason I’m on this balcony at all—because Henry, too, is a project.

“This week is crazy without childcare,” Goldie continues, when I still haven’t said anything. “And frankly, I don’t have the money to loan her. I have my own rent due on the first and Quinn’s day care is increasing their prices in Jan—”

“I get it.” My voice sounds icy, even to me. “I’ll deal with it.”

Goldie hesitates. I think, for one hair’s breadth of a moment, that she might ask if I’m okay. If I have the capacity to be “good at this kind of thing” right now. But she just says, “Okay, great. Thanks.”

“Okay,” I say, curling my fingers around the cold railing. I squeeze until my knuckles turn white. “I’m going to go.”

“Yeah,” Goldie says. “Let me know how it winds up.”

I don’t give myself time to think about it before dialing my mother’s phone number—time to brace, or take a deep breath, or play out the potential catastrophes. When she picks up, she sounds as delighted as ever.

“Lou! Happy Thanksgiving, baby. I didn’t think I’d hear from you.”

“Well, Goldie called me.”

Mom sighs, like this whole thing is a trivial inconvenience. “I told her not to bother you with this,” she says. “I know you’re going through such a tough time.”

Hearing her say it, I realize it isn’t true. This time doesn’t feel tough. This time feels precious: the Comeback Inn, two months living with Mei, my week with Quinn. Henry, and every part of my life that’s changed because of him.

But this is how my mother understands the world—one relationship to the next, the desolate wasteland of finding yourself freshly single.

I don’t correct her. I just say, “Tell me what’s going on.”

Her explanation is wandering and illogical, a string of causes and effects that don’t quite add up to the basic truth, which is that she owes her landlord six thousand dollars in three days.

“Why haven’t you been paying your rent, Mom?”

She laughs, though there’s nothing funny about it. “I just lost track of it, Lou, it was a silly mistake. We’ve been in Florida, and then I’ve been so worried about you, it’s just been slipping my mind.”

I bristle at the casual insinuation that this is even a little bit my fault. “How much money do you have right now?”

Mom makes a high, wavering noise, like she’s trying to remember. “About seven hundred dollars?”

I press my eyes shut. I have two thousand dollars in my bank account. I could give her maybe half of that without fearing for my life. Which gets us to $1,700. A slight $4,300 shy.

“Can you borrow some money from Mark?”

“Oh, honey, no—I don’t want to bother him with this. If I need to leave my place, though, he’s offered for me to stay with him until—”

“No,” I say, cutting her off. Mom moving in with one of her horrible boyfriends has always been the worst-case scenario. If there’s one thing Goldie and I agree on, it’s that she can’t be dependent on a man for the roof over her head. “Is there anyone else who could loan you some money?”

Mom hesitates. She has the grace to sound embarrassed when she says, “Well, maybe my daughters?”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“But with you and Goldie together?”

“And then what?” I ask. On Lake Estes, a kayaker puts in near the parking lot—sending ripples over the still water. “How do you pay your rent next month, once you’re caught up?”

“I’ll pick up more shifts at the store,” she says. “I’ll figure it out, if I can just get out of this hole. I promise.”

She means it—I know she does. She’s meant every promise she’s ever made to me, maybe most of all the ones she didn’t keep.

“Give me today to figure it out,” I say. I count the kayaker’s strokes through the water, trying to ground myself. “I’ll call you back.”

“Oh, thank you, honey. I can always count on you, Lou, my sweet girl.”

The door slides open behind me and I jump.

Henry fills the doorframe—sleepy eyed, his hair a ruffled mess that so begs to be touched I feel it in my fingertips.

He’s in a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants that hang low on his hips.

I’ve thought of waking up to Henry, but I never thought of it quite like this; in the exact same breath, I want to run from him and reach for him.

“Come inside,” he whispers, holding an arm toward me. “It’s freezing.”

“I have to go,” I say into the phone, stepping toward him. “I’ll call you.”

Mom’s still thanking me as I hang up, over and over, the grateful tone I’ve heard from her all my life. Every time she messes up. Every time I fix it.

“Are you okay?” Henry closes the sliding door behind me.

He looks half-awake and confused, blinking rapidly like he’s trying to get me in focus.

I’m wrapped in the throw blanket like a mummy—it’s pulled tightly enough around me to cut off my circulation.

Now that I’m off the phone I can feel the blood rushing back into my body, feel all my limbs again.

And Henry’s right: it was freezing out there. I start shaking almost immediately.

“Come here,” he says, guiding me to the couch.

He picks up the extra blankets from the floor and tucks them around me until I’m cocooned like a bug, my teeth chattering and my phone still clenched in my hand.

Henry sits next to me and holds his arm out.

I tip into him without thinking, pressing my head into his shoulder. He’s so, so warm.

“What happened?” he asks, one hand sweeping up and down my arm. It’s quick and firm—the way you’d chafe your hands together in the cold, the way you’d rub a newborn puppy to help it breathe. The movement grounds me, reminds me of my body. I take a long breath and hold it.

“It was my mom,” I say, trying to still the shaking. I can’t quite tell if it’s from the cold or the panic. “She’s going to get evicted.”

Henry’s hand doesn’t stop moving. Outside, the sun crests the mountains, and his living room fills with yellow light; it all feels quiet and soft and I have the strange thought that I’m home sick from school.

“Why?” he asks. I hear Goldie: Because she hasn’t been paying her rent, obviously .

But I only say, “I need to send her some money by tomorrow.”

Henry’s quiet. When he shifts away from me, it’s to turn on the couch so we can look at each other. I miss his hand on my arm immediately. “How much?”

I rub a fist between my eyes, working out the beginnings of a headache. “More than I have.”

Henry reaches for my fist and uncurls my fingers to thread them through his own. My hands are stinging and pink. “Louisa, has she done this before? Asked you for money?”

Only every year since I left home , I think. “A few times.”

“And do you feel like you—” He hesitates, eyes scanning back and forth over mine. “Do you feel like you need to give it to her?”

I can hear the questions he’s really asking: Is this your job? Is this a fair sacrifice for her to ask you to make? How much of yourself will you give to her?

But Henry doesn’t know the depth of it. The weak place inside of me that my mother presses on every time. The boundary I’ve never been able to build between us.

“Yes,” I say, unable to look at him. I want to be alone, suddenly—I want to hide. I don’t want him to see this, the way I can’t stop with her.

“Okay,” Henry says. I pull my hand from his and twist my fingers back into a frigid fist. “How can I help?”