Page 7 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Six

My sister’s favorite time to video chat is while she’s making dinner, phone propped against her backsplash to give me a straight shot of her tiled kitchen ceiling and the upper third of her face.

“It’s like they have no concept of a career woman,” she says now.

“It’s a runny nose , for god’s sake, not Ebola.

I can’t keep him home for producing snot.

What am I even paying them for, you know?

It’s day care, not maybe-some-days care.

I’m not sitting around my house in a caftan, here, waiting for my child to come home at the end of the day.

I’m working . In an office . Where I cannot take him . ”

“I know,” I say, half an eye on Goldie’s forehead and half on my browser, where I’m building out the house’s rental page.

I’m in the attic office, an A-frame hobbit hole of a room with floral wallpaper and a bay window that overlooks the garden.

The house is old and thin-walled; something about the architecture makes the sound travel straight up to this room from the first floor—anytime Nate needed me from the kitchen, all he had to do was lean against the wall and shout. “How’s he feeling now?”

“Oh, he’s fine.” Goldie picks up her phone, giving me a clear view up her nose as she leans in, and changes the angle so that I can see Quinn in the living room.

They live in a loft in the West Village, a tiny box with tall ceilings and windows over the Hudson.

“Say hi to Lou-Lou, Quinn.” He waves at me, and I wave back.

Quinn is five years old and perfect. It’s criminal that he lives across the country from me, but I’ll get to see him this fall when Goldie comes to Denver for a conference.

I told her weeks ago that he could stay with me while she’s downtown at the hotel, and it only occurs to me in this exact moment that I nearly didn’t have a home for him to stay in.

“Anyway.” She sets her phone back on the counter and leans over the stove. Steam rises from a pan to obscure what little I can see of her face. “How are you? You’ve been ignoring my texts.”

I take a long, slow breath. “I’m going to need you to look at me for this.”

She cranes toward the phone like an ostrich. “What is it? Oh my god, are you sick? Is Mom sick?”

“Why would I know that Mom’s sick before you? No, no one is sick.”

“What, then?” I stare at the pixels of her face, and she leans closer. “Hello? Lou, what did you do?”

“Why do you assume I did something? Nate broke up with me.”

Her intake of breath is theatrically sharp. She reaches for her phone, whipping it up into the air and storming out of the kitchen so fast I could get motion sick. She waits until she’s shut in her microscopic bathroom—out of Quinn’s earshot—to say, “He broke up with you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my god, Lou, I told you men are vipers. What a snake. When did this happen? Why did he do it? What will you do? Where are you living?”

“ Goldie. ” She stares at me, wide-eyed, her familiar face washed out in the bathroom light. “You’re raising my blood pressure.”

“You’re raising mine , Lou. This guy has sustained your entire lifestyle!”

I rub at the spot between my eyebrows. “Can you be supportive for, like, one minute before laying into me about getting a job?”

“It’s not about a job , Lou, it’s about independence .

” I’ve heard this diatribe two-point-seven billion times.

“It’s about setting yourself up so you don’t wind up in this precise scenario where your older sister is terrified for your well-being from the other side of the country because you have no means of caring for yourself even though you have two entire degrees from accredited universities that cost you enough money to float the entire economy of a small island nation and you haven’t even scheduled your licensing exam—”

I glance back at the rental listing on my computer. She’ll run out of steam eventually.

“Lou? Are you hearing me right now?”

“I don’t need you to lecture me.” I pick up the phone and turn in my desk chair so I can look out over the garden.

The house has a first-floor office, too, but I’ve always preferred it up here, where I can see the stone paths through the garden like trails on a map.

Nate bought me a desk that fits just right in the trapezoidal nook.

“I’m going through a breakup, remember?”

My sister blinks. She never liked Nate, but I was always unsure if it was because of Nate himself or just the idea of him.

He grated on all of Goldie’s sensibilities: he was a dreamer, running on blind faith and cheap beer, who’d built his success without any of the things she believed in.

Advanced degrees, savings accounts, budget spreadsheets.

He came from a gentle parenting family. He moved through the world like water: taking every dip and turn with grace, barreling ahead even if his direction changed unexpectedly.

Goldie was the tree growing from the riverbed.

Battered but unmoved, her roots white-knuckled.

Mom made her this way. Just like Mom made me a therapist. Goldie was the head; I was the heart. And still, all these years after leaving home, we’re always trying to tug each other in our own direction.

“I know,” Goldie says. “And I’m sorry, Lou. But there are logistical concerns.”

“And I’ll deal with them. Eventually.”

She pulls the phone closer to her face. “Really? What does that even mean? I barely have room for Quinn and me in the apartment and you’re obviously not moving back in with Mom.”

Obviously. I haven’t lived with Mom since I was a preteen; when Goldie moved out for college, I went with her.

I had friends whose parents worried about this: Was it a good idea for such a young girl to be living at Ohio State?

Exposed to all that chaos, all that drinking?

What I didn’t tell them, of course, was that my mother was the source of chaos in my life—and my exposure to drinking.

During those years, we mostly saw Mom at the holidays.

We’d go wherever she was staying, a short-term lease or friend’s apartment, and do our best to make merry.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love our mother.

Mostly, she tried to be on her best behavior with us.

She was loving, and loud, and when you told her a story, she really listened to you.

But she was unpredictable, naturally, and only more so when she was drinking.

Her moods were a game of roulette. One that always felt, to me, worth playing.

Because sometimes I’d get her rasping laugh, her hand clutching mine, an entire evening where all she wanted was to cuddle me on the couch while we watched old movies.

But just as often—more often, if I’m honest with myself—I got her anger.

Her fury at Goldie for taking me from her, though we all knew she didn’t want to manage my care, or my education.

Her rage at the injustice of the world, at how men treated her, at how her bosses didn’t value her.

In her worst moments, the thinly veiled threat that we’d all be better off without her.

There was nothing that bothered our mother that she wouldn’t share with us—even when I was nine. Even when I was younger.

Goldie loved me and resented Mom in equal measure.

Her college years were consumed by parenting me—a sacrifice that she never complained about, but one that I knew wore on her.

How could it not? When I left for college, hightailing it to Colorado, she moved to New York and didn’t look back.

We didn’t communicate with Mom much after that; without us close by, she rarely reached out.

Goldie and I spent holidays together, or with friends.

I missed my mom, and I felt stupid for it—the shock of her disinterest in my life still hasn’t worn away, not even seventeen years after I first moved in with Goldie.

Goldie stayed in Ohio all that time for me. It’s clear, in retrospect, that it wasn’t what she wanted, but what she felt she needed to do. And while my feelings toward our mother are an inextricable knot of longing and fear and loss and love, Goldie’s are simpler. She’s angry.

Now, down in the garden, Joss swings open the gate. I tell my sister, “I’m staying in the house.”

“With what money?”

I take a breath and test out the words. “I’m turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. The landlord’s letting me stay for free in exchange for managing it.”

Goldie’s lips part. “You don’t even know how to scramble an egg.”

I look at my sister. Remind myself that this is how she loves me. “I’ll learn, Goldie.”

“Okay, no.” Mei pulls the plate out of my hand and dumps the eggs back into the pan. “These are too soupy. No one likes a wet egg.”

I shudder. “Don’t say ‘wet egg.’?”

“Don’t make a wet egg.” Mei jabs at my mess of scrambled eggs with a spatula. Morning light dances in through the stained glass over the sink, sending small rainbows over her cheeks. “The only runny part of a scrambled egg should be the melted cheese. Wet eggs give people the ick.”

It’s Sunday morning, a week later, and Mei slept over to give me a crash course on breakfast prep.

There are six bedrooms upstairs, but Mei passed out in the king bed with me—her breathing soft and even, steadying me as I struggled to fall asleep.

When I showed her the recipes I’d printed out for Henry—eggs Benedict, ricotta-stuffed French toast, ginger-lemon muffins—she’d looked me square in the face and said, “I admire your beautiful, ambitious soul, but this is not going to happen.”

So far I’ve mastered dry, crumbly blueberry muffins and oven-baked granola. The eggs are a work in progress.

“Lou?” Joss’s voice sails through the front door. She usually comes through the back, but it’s unseasonably cool for early September and I’ve left the door open for a cross-breeze. It carries down the front hall, smelling like pine and soil and sun. “You’ve got a package—want me to bring it in?”

“Yes!” I crane away from the eggs, and Mei catches my wrist before I yank the pan off the stovetop. “Thank you!”

Joss comes into the kitchen, blond hair hidden under a wide-brimmed sun hat. “Investing in some new security?”

The box she slides onto the dining table is peppered with DefenseLock logos.

“Oh, good. No, those are my—”

“Okay,” Mei says, guiding my hands to slide the pan off the heat, “they’re probably done.”

“—new bedroom locks. To convert the rooms for the vacation rentals.”

Joss’s eyebrows shoot up. “So he said yes?”

“Yep.” I shoot her a smile between shoveling eggs back onto the plate. “At least for a six-month trial.”

Joss had been worried Henry would veto the rentals— grouchy was the single word she’d used to describe him. Now, she grins. “You must’ve made a good pitch.”

I think of my printouts on the exam table.

Of the paper towels Henry handed to me when I teared up.

Of the bemused look on his face when he agreed to this, like even as he said the words, he couldn’t quite believe them.

With the rent check he passed back to me, I have enough money to manage things here for the next six months—updated décor, new locks, food—if I’m scrappy.

“I guess?”

“Well, I’m glad.” Joss cuts around the kitchen and gives me a warm, one-armed hug. “Let me know if you need help with anything, yeah? I’ll be outside continuing my futile quest to get rid of the dandelions.”

“We’ll be on our own futile quest,” Mei mutters, and I gasp.

Joss barks a laugh and makes for the back door. “Smells good, at least.”

“ Thank you,” I say indignantly, raising my eyebrows at Mei. She watches me pepper the eggs and accidentally dust the entire counter with a shower of black specks, then raises her eyebrows right back.

My phone trills from the table. My heart does this hot, painful clenching thing, like it’s trying to squeeze out from between my ribs.

I’m always ready for it to be Nate, admitting that he made a mistake.

Not because I want him back—because I want to be someone with enough gravity for him to regret losing me.

But it’s only Henry, a few simple words.

Have an update on permits. Can I come by 2pm?