Page 4 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Four

“We’ll find a way for you to keep it.” Mei’s sitting in my kitchen, slicing a peach. I haven’t eaten since before the concert last night. “You have money saved, yes?”

It’s Friday morning, a workday, but Mei showed up a little past nine. I’ll keep an eye on my email , she said, dismissive, when I balked at her skipping work for so depressing an occasion as my breakup.

Now, she passes the cutting board over the table. She’s arranged the peach slices in a perfect fan, their spiky red centers radiating like small suns. It’s so pretty, my eyes fill with tears. Mei has her life so entirely together she even cuts fruit the right way.

“Lou,” she says, and I look up at her. “It’s just a peach. You need to eat.”

“I can’t,” I say, but I pick up a slice anyway.

Nate texted me at seven to say I could keep the house.

I know him well enough to know that those dark morning hours after the show were long enough for his guilt to fester—that by daybreak, he’d have been sufficiently ashamed about what he’d done to throw me a bone.

But it wasn’t until I read his text— You’re right, you should keep the house.

I’ll move out —that I remembered Nate was hardly the start of my problem.

There’s no way I can afford to stay here on my own.

“I’d rather drown in my stomach acid than face this. ”

“Stop that.” I’ve been peeling the fuzzy skin off my peach slice and Mei plucks the whole thing out of my hand, setting it back on the cutting board. “No one’s drowning in their stomach acid. Nate is a monster—we can’t do anything about that. But we can figure out this house thing.”

Mei’s known Nate and me since sophomore year at CU; all three of us lived on the same hall and she was there when I met Nate, when he wrote “Purple Girl,” when we moved to Estes Park and started this life.

She’s not only my favorite person, but Goldie’s, too.

The person Goldie wishes I was: Mei’s had a full-time job since the day after we graduated, coordinating marketing campaigns at an agency downtown.

Her LinkedIn has the word manager on it. She has a LinkedIn.

I haven’t told Goldie about the breakup yet because I can imagine exactly what she’ll say: If you’d figured out a job by now, you’d be able to support yourself. Now what, Lou? Now what, Lou, indeed.

“The rent is ridiculous,” I tell Mei, licking peach juice off my fingertips and feeling my stomach turn.

I look around my beautiful, familiar kitchen: its farmhouse sink below the stained-glass window overlooking the garden; its wide, antique floorboards; the cream-colored Smeg fridge that looks like something out of a vintage fever dream.

The smell of it, like a library: aged wood and filtered sunlight.

“We only live here because Nate has stupid money. You know this, Mei. I’m not even employed . ”

“That can change,” she says. She chopped all her hair off at the start of the summer and it’s this lovely, blunt bob—exactly to her jawbone and shiny as sun on water. My hair’s an unbrushed mess. “Right?”

“Not soon enough.” I look at Mei and cough up the lie. “I haven’t even booked my licensing exam.”

“Okay,” she says evenly. “How long will that take?”

What she doesn’t know—what no one knows but Nate—is that I failed the exam the first time around, back in April.

That it’s only offered at certain times of year, and that I have to wait until the fall to retake it.

My fear of failing all over again has stopped me cold every time I’ve gone to schedule a date, but I’ll have to. Soon, I’ll have to.

I bite my lip. Through the screen door, I see Joss cross the backyard. “A couple months, minimum?”

Mei follows my gaze, tracking Joss’s movement through the garden. She ducks below the sight line of the back porch, and Mei looks back at me. “And how long can you float the rent here on your own?”

My eyes glaze with tears, turning Mei to watercolor. I can’t believe the mess I’ve allowed myself to make of my life. “A month, if I spend most of my savings. And rent is due Monday.”

If Goldie was here, she’d tell me to move.

It’s the logical choice: I can’t afford to stay in this house.

But Mei, my angel on earth, my very best friend in the entire world, just reaches for my hand across the table.

“I know what this place means to you,” she says.

“If you need to stay, pay the rent Monday and then we have a whole month to figure out the next move.”

The truth is, this house is the first place that’s ever been mine .

It took me years to realize that the nomadic lifestyle I grew up with wasn’t typical—that my friends from school didn’t have their pack-it-up routine down to a science; that they couldn’t fit their entire lives into a single, broken-zippered suitcase.

Aside from an eighteen-month stint with one of my mother’s longer-lasting boyfriends, we never stayed anywhere for more than a few months.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I called one address home for longer than it took for me to memorize it.

And even then, I had a different dorm—a different apartment—every school year.

This house is the only place where I’ve ever let myself exhale, let my guard down enough to actually think of somewhere as a place I belong. To get rid of the suitcase.

The thought of losing the house—its rooms shimmering with light cut by dancing aspen leaves, its familiar sounds, every inch of it curated to be my own idea of home—feels like vertigo. Like the world won’t be right side up if I don’t live here anymore.

“Mei,” I say now. “I love you, but the only move that could keep me here is winning the lottery.”

“What if I move in? And we split it?”

“Stop.” I sniff inelegantly and shove a peach slice into my mouth. “You’re too pure for this world.”

“I’m serious.” She waves one arm around the kitchen.

So much of my life, of my friendship with her, has happened in this room—leaned toward each other over opposite ends of the granite island, sipping wine as we wait for water to boil; Scotch-taping string lights to the tops of the green cabinets at Christmastime; slicing peaches as my world falls out from beneath me.

“This place is amazing. Obviously I would love to live here.”

I shake my head. “We’re over an hour from your office and Andy.”

“Andy loves the mountains,” Mei says. She points through the screen door, where Longs Peak is emerging from behind a cloud. “They’ll visit all the time.”

“No.” Mei met Andy at a bar last spring, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

The healthiest relationship I’ve ever seen her in, and not one I’m going to let her sabotage just because mine has shredded itself like food scraps through a garbage disposal.

Besides…“I can’t even afford half the rent here, so it’s moot. ”

“Morning.” The screen door thwacks open, mewling on its hinges, and Joss pokes her head into the kitchen.

Joss looks like an Icelandic milk maiden: white-blond, blue-eyed, with sinewy arms from lifting heavy planters and bundles of tree roots all year long.

She frowns at the door. “God, it’s still making that noise? Can’t you get Henry to fix it?”

Henry—a name I barely recognize; the landlord I’ve never met. Asking Henry to silence the screen door would’ve fallen firmly into Nate territory.

“I like it,” I tell her, my voice thick. The sound of the door and all of the house’s sounds are strung together like a soundtrack to my life. It’s reassuring to open the door, and step onto the porch, and hear the same squeaked greeting every time.

I swipe roughly at my cheeks, and Joss realizes that something’s wrong. I clear my throat and sit up straighter, but it’s too late.

“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I’m interrupting.”

“No, no.” I flap my hands uselessly. “We’re just, um—we’re just—”

“Lou and Nate broke up.”

I look at Mei. It’s not that I wouldn’t have told Joss—we’re friends, in all the ways that matter.

But hearing her say it out loud makes it feel real all over again, not to mention makes it seem like Nate’s the reason I’m crying over stone fruit, when in reality it’s the thought of my entire life crumbling apart.

“Oh, Lou,” Joss says. Her eyebrows draw together, mouth turning down at the corners. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“We hate him now,” Mei says, turning to Joss. She has a peach slice in one hand. “Just to be clear.”

Joss puts a hand over her heart. “I’ve always been Team Lou.” She nods her head at the empty seat across the table from Mei and me. “Can I sit?”

“Of course,” I say, kicking out the chair with my foot. She steps inside and the door whines shut behind her. “Have some peach.”

“Don’t pawn it off on Joss,” Mei says. She glances at Joss as she sits down. “Lou’s not eating.”

“I’m eating .” I pick up another slice for emphasis. “But the thought of losing this house does not whet my appetite.”

“Don’t tell me you’re moving out,” Joss says, pulling off her gardening gloves. “Is Nate staying? He’s never even here.”

“No,” Mei says emphatically. “Nate’s moving out, and Lou’s staying, and we’re going to figure it out.”

“Maybe,” I groan, slumping into the chair until my socked foot collides with Joss’s under the table. “Sorry. I just don’t see how I can stay.”

“Because rent?” Joss asks. She takes a bite of peach and swipes juice from her lips with the back of one wrist.

“Because rent,” I confirm. “The landlord makes a killing on this place, and I do not have one single killing to my name.”

“I offered to move in,” Mei tells Joss. “But she won’t—”

“Splitting it isn’t enough,” I say. “Joss, you’d have to move in, too.”

She gives a breathless grunt of a laugh and wipes her fingers on the thighs of her work pants. “I can’t do that.”

“Well, Mei can’t, either,” I say. When she opens her mouth to protest, I lift a hand. “You have a whole life in Denver, Mei. A partner waiting for you.”