Page 63 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Oliver

Oliver had been up all night, knowing that Chloe had probably seen that Today Show clip.

He’d only fallen asleep about an hour ago.

But as the sun glared brighter through the cracks in the blinds, he rolled over in bed and reached for his phone, even though he didn’t want to see what new horrors might be on it.

Oliver grumbled. Was she really so brazen to be hitting him up for money again so soon?

He yanked the covers back over his head as he hit play on the voicemail.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry…” Jennifer said.

Oliver’s shoulders tensed immediately. What had she done now?

“I tried to be an upstanding citizen, I really did,” she said, “but I fucked up again. I don’t know why it keeps happening… It’s like I can’t help it. But this time… it was Chloe.”

Oliver inhaled sharply.

“I don’t know if you knew this, but she’s the artist who created the yellow paper roses.

She got interviewed for a big-deal New York Times piece, and she thought maybe she could use the attention for good.

Chloe wanted to start a nonprofit for kids and nursing homes and people who needed the flowers. So I said I’d help.

“But here’s the thing, Oliver. Chloe has always had such a sweet heart, but sometimes she’s not realistic. The money she could afford… it wasn’t enough. I mean, yeah, it would’ve covered filing fees, you know, basic stuff. But I thought I could help her get off to a better, bigger start.”

“Jennifer, no.” Oliver bolted upright in bed.

“So I took her money to one of my contacts in New York. He guaranteed we could quintuple it overnight. I don’t want to get you dirty with the nitty-gritty details because I know you hate that part about me—I’m so sorry—but…

the scheme was not as surefire as I thought.

I lost it all, Oliver. All of Chloe’s money that she was going to use to make people’s lives better.

“I-I tried. I swear to you, honey, I really was trying to help. But I don’t know if I’m cut out for it.

Maybe I’m too old to change. Or maybe I still have a lot to learn.

If you happen to see Chloe… let her know I believe in her and I’m sorry for what I did.

I wish I could be as admirable a person as she is. ”

A growl was growing in the back of Oliver’s throat. How could she??

“The one thing I do know,” Jennifer said, “is that I can’t keep dragging you and Ben and your dad down with me.

So this voicemail is my goodbye. I’m terminating this phone number as soon as I hang up, because I don’t want to taint your lives any longer.

I love you, Oliver.” Her voice trembled.

“I know it’s hard to see, but that much has always been true.

Please give my grandbabies a hug for me. Goodbye…”

The voicemail ended.

Oliver’s entire body trembled so hard, the bed frame rattled.

He wanted to punch something, but at the same time, he was immobilized by the shock of this news.

How had Jennifer gotten involved with Chloe in the first place?

And why, of all the people in New York, did she have to scam the woman Oliver was in love with, the one Jennifer had already torn him apart from in the past?

Ben and Richard had wanted to give Jennifer a chance, and Oliver had been swayed to, as well. But she’d failed them again.

People never changed. He had been foolish to allow himself to hope otherwise.

He beat his pillow over and over.

It was only when he had completely flattened it that something unwelcome—but true—occurred to him.

There was a difference in Jennifer’s behavior this time. She hadn’t taken Chloe’s money in order to screw Chloe over. This time, his mom truly had believed she was helping, even if it did end disastrously.

Oliver slumped against the headrest. Because he had to admit that Jennifer actually had changed, even if imperfectly. Her motivations for what she did to Chloe hadn’t been one hundred percent dishonorable.

Still , Oliver thought, we are done. Not only because she’d cut off her cell phone and decided to leave their family alone.

But also because Oliver had let Jennifer color his decisions for too much of his life.

Ever since she made the family leave Kansas all those years ago, he hadn’t allowed himself to trust people.

He hadn’t been able to believe in dreams, because with Jennifer’s influence on his thoughts, dreams had always meant cons and false promises.

But he could change, too. He could believe in dreams that were his own. He could choose to let old wounds begin to heal if he let her go.

Oliver closed his eyes.

“Goodbye, Mom,” he said quietly.

The house was unusually quiet, but that was because Noah and Davy had gone off to preschool, and Elsa was at her kennel.

Ben was in the kitchen gathering the Japanese ingredients Oliver had brought, getting ready to head out to the restaurant.

“Morning, champ,” Richard said, as he wheeled himself to the fridge to grab a piece of leftover pie.

But when he looked at Oliver, he stopped in the middle of the kitchen. “You look peaked, son. Everything all right?”

Oliver laughed in a way that definitely sounded maniacal and shook his head. “The world has suddenly started turning in the other direction, and I’m trying to get my bearings.”

“That bad, huh?” Ben said.

“Want to tell us about it?” Richard asked. He grabbed three forks and the pie tin and motioned toward the dining table.

So Oliver did. Over very strong coffee and the rest of the pie, he told Ben and his dad everything—from the very first paper rose he saved in the street at the Greek restaurant to running into Chloe in New York, from the grumpy beginnings of their anonymous letter writing to the rooftop at the gala, culminating to now, with Jennifer gambling away Chloe’s money and Oliver’s certainty that Chloe was his pen pal on the other side of the mysterious, traveling paper roses.

Richard’s mouth hung open, a forkful of pie suspended in midair.

Ben whistled.

Oliver sighed. “I know.”

“I guess I was wrong about Mom,” Ben said. “I just… I really wanted Noah and Davy to get to know their grandma. But you were right. Mom’s not…” He shook his head. “Even if she’s trying to change, she’s not good for us. We need a clean break.”

Richard sighed but nodded.

“As for Chloe,” Ben said. “I don’t know what to say except wow. Just wow.”

Oliver sank his head into his hands. “I screwed everything up, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” Richard said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. Joneses aren’t quitters.”

He was right. Oliver needed to apologize. For this, for the gala rooftop, for hiding his identity, for refusing to talk about the past.

“I don’t trust myself to call her, though. The words will avalanche out of me and sound unhinged.”

“Write to her then,” Ben said. “It’s what you two have always done.”

A flame of hope flickered in Oliver’s chest. Writing. Yes . From the very start, that had been their way.

“What do I say, though? How do I even begin?”

Richard was quiet for a moment. Then he scooted away from the table. “Come with me. I have something I think you’ll want to have.”

Oliver pushed the wheelchair to his dad’s room, Ben following. When they got there, sadness knifed through Oliver as he took in all the orange pill bottles on the nightstand.

But Richard ignored them and rolled to his closet, pointing up to the back corner of the top shelf.

“I didn’t know if you’d ever want this again,” he said. “But I saved it just in case.”

Oliver reached up into the closet and came back with a dusty shoebox.

It was decorated in beads and sequins and a patchwork of mismatched wrapping paper scraps, and in the center of the lid in glitter glue was a single word in all caps: CLOVER.

“Oh my god.” Tiny ripples of electricity shivered over Oliver’s skin. “It’s the memory box that she made for me in high school. But how…?”

The box was one of two (Chloe had made a matching one for herself), and it contained mementos of their history—pebbles they’d found and painted one summer at Lake of the Ozarks, a mini notebook that documented all of the Ice Creamery flavors they had come up with together, Chloe’s class pictures in every grade from first grade and up.

The memory box was one of the “essentials” that Oliver had packed when the family fled Kansas.

But almost a year later, Oliver had purposely left it behind at a homeless shelter. It had been months and months since he’d spoken to Chloe, and continuing to carry around their memories made losing her even harder to bear.

“Ben saw you walk away from the box that day,” Richard said. “I knew that you needed to do it, then. But I thought there might come a day in the future when—with enough distance—the hurt would have healed enough that you might want this again. So I kept it and hid it, for when that day came.”

“Oh, Dad.” Oliver wanted to say something more, but an iron band had clamped itself around his throat.

“Take it with you,” Richard said. “Maybe the answer to what you’re looking for is inside.”

Oliver gave him a tight hug. “Thank you,” he said. “Both of you.”

In the guest room alone, Oliver opened the box and set each item individually on the bed.

There was a crooked candle they’d made on a trip to Lecompton’s Bald Eagle Rendezvous, a historical re-creation event.

A mini Slinky Chloe had won for him in one of those carnival booths where the odds were so bad, you weren’t ever supposed to walk away with a prize.

Ticket stubs from when the Vans Warped Tour came through Kansas City.

He touched each item reverently, reliving the stories behind them. As implausible as the paper rose correspondence was, it didn’t seem as improbable when he sifted through all of his and Chloe’s history.

And then Oliver’s breath caught as he saw something else in the box. The ceiling light glimmered off their surface, and he almost didn’t believe they could be real until he wrapped his fingers around them.

“Yes…” he said. “This.”

He knew now exactly what to say to Chloe.

His flight back to New York was soon, though, and he had to leave for the airport.

Yet, Oliver couldn’t wait a second longer.

He grabbed a pen and wrote on the square of gold-foil-striped origami paper.

Then he placed what he’d found in the memory box in the center and refolded the yellow rose around it.

But then he realized that wasn’t enough. He had so much more he needed to say.

Oliver would need more origami paper to do it.

As soon as he landed in New York, Oliver went to seven different stationery stores, but none of them sold origami paper. Finally, he found one in Little Tokyo that online reviews said had a great supply.

It was on the same street where he’d run into Chloe a few weeks ago.

But when he arrived, the shopkeeper was flipping the sign in her window from Open to Closed.

“Wait!” Oliver shouted as he ran to the door.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. She was petite—barely five feet—with black hair interwoven with snowy white. “I’m closing for the evening.”

“Please,” Oliver said. “Do you have origami paper? I’ve been all over what feels like half of New York, and I desperately need some.”

The woman looked him over from jiu jitsu T-shirt to practical athletic shoes, amusement crinkling the corners of her eyes. “This isn’t because of the whole paper rose thing, is it? You don’t strike me as the flower-disciple type.”

But that’s where she was wrong. Because he was a disciple—Oliver would follow Chloe to the ends of the universe.

“It is because of the paper roses, but not what you think,” he said. “The woman behind them—Chloe Quinn—she’s my childhood best friend. We lost touch because of mistakes I made, but I want to fix them now. I love her… I always have.”

The shopkeeper pressed her hand to her heart. “Oh my. That wasn’t what I expected at all. But I don’t understand why you need origami paper?”

Oliver reached into his wallet and pulled out the folded paper rose with its gold foil stripes.

“These flowers have been traveling back and forth between us. I don’t know how.

But we wrote notes to each other in them—not knowing who it was on the other side.

Now I know it’s her, though, and I need to write her back.

“But I have too much to say to fit onto the small space that’s left here.

I need more yellow paper to make more roses.

Because I need to tell Chloe what I’ve held back for the last sixteen years—everything I should have told her then.

Everything I should have told her in between. And everything I want to tell her now.”

The shopkeeper smiled. “Romance isn’t dead.”

Oliver shook his head. “I would never have bet that I would be the one to keep it alive, though. Will you help me?”

“It happens that I have a new shipment of yellow origami paper that came in this afternoon. I’ve had a hard time keeping that color in stock, precisely because of this paper rose sensation.

Come in and take your pick. Anything you want is on me.

It’s the least I can do for love… And for the woman bold enough to try to make the world a better place. ”