Page 32 of The New Couple in 5B

He’s nervous; he always gets distracted and a little dropsy before a big audition.

“You’re going to slay,” I say, moving over to him and wrapping my arms around his tight middle.

“If only you were in charge ofall the things,” he says, placing a kiss on my head. “I’d be Brad Pitt by now.”

“Bigger.”

I notice an unfamiliar thin band of leather around his neck and push back his shirt to see what he’s wearing. There’s a tiny silver hand, fingers pointing down with a blue-and-white stone in the middle that looks like an eye. I know this charm well, a favorite of my grandmother’s. The hand is meant to symbolize good luck. The stone in the center is the evil eye charm, intended to cast away negative energy and malevolent intentions from others.

Surprised, a surge of anxiety pushes me back a step. “Where did you get that?”

He puts his hand to it as if he forgot he was wearing it. But he wasn’t wearing it last night; I’m sure of that. He must have just put it on as he was getting dressed.

“Oh,” he says, pushing out an embarrassed laugh. “Ella gave it to me last night for good luck today.”

The sizzling of the eggs in the pan draws my attention. I am grateful for a reason to move away from him and turn my back. I slide sunny-side up eggs onto waiting pieces of buttered toast. My heart is racing weirdly.

“What?” he says when he brings the coffee to the table. “It’s not a big deal, is it?”

I’m searching for my words. The sight of it brings me right back home, the place I fled. My father, the healer. My mother, the tarot card reader. They were tricksters, frauds, con artists, preying on the most vulnerable. My grandmother was not like them. She truly believed in her charms and herbal remedies; her dreams were vivid and eerily prescient. If there is a magical layer to this life, maybe she was tapped into it. But not my parents. They took money from the sick and weak, selling cures, dreams and hopes.

I still haven’t said anything, and Chad knows me well enough to know that I need a minute to find the right thing to say. He eats, eyes on me.

“I thought with your grandmother’s charm yesterday and how you put it over the door here, that it was just fun. We can use all the help we can get, right? What’s our deadline? How many months do we have before we have to think about selling this place?”

I didn’t think he was paying attention when we were going over the budget. Chad likes his magical thinking when it comes to money—there will be enough, we’ll make it work, something big will happen. He’s not interested in spreadsheets and timelines, income and expense projections.

The little eye lying in the notch of his collarbone stares at me.

“You’ve gotten really close to them,” I say. That’s part of it, too. It’s not just the charm.

He shrugs, looks down at his plate. “I mean, Iguess. They were here for us when Ivan was sick. If Ella hadn’t been sitting with Ivan that last night while we went to the awards dinner, we might not have made it back in time to be here when he passed.”

That’s true. They cooked for us, stayed with Ivan when one of us couldn’t be here toward the end. It’s a lot to expect of neighbors and friends, but they did it all without ever being asked.

“I think they care about us, you know? They’re not exactly close with Lilian. She’s always jet-setting around, doing her own thing, no children.”

Lilian. The thought of her staring at me in the theater gives me a little shiver. The way she looked at Chad.

“Theyhavebeen good to us,” I admit.

“We don’t have any family,” he says, voice soft. “Now with Ivan gone—”

“I get it. You’re right.”

I feel it, too, the emptiness of having lost or moved away from my family of origin. Chad’s parents gone; he was an only child. Especially at the holidays, when everyone is rushing around, buying gifts for the hordes, stressing about where to go, who to see, traveling home to be with parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and it was just us and Ivan. There’s a deep loneliness there, a feeling of not being held, wanted, expected. It’s a big driver behind our desire to have children. And maybe he’s looking for a kind of surrogate family now that Ivan is gone. A space I suspect Ella and Charles would happily fill.

“This,” he says, putting his finger to the charm, “is just for fun. She has a whole collection of them. She even has one for you, was planning to give it to you at game night.”

“It’s an evil eye charm,” I tell him. “It wards off malevolence, jealousy.”

“So there you go,” he says. “When all those other guys are looking at me, twisting with envy at my talent and good looks, hoping I’ll flub my lines or have something in my teeth,thiswill protect me.”

He holds it out to me like a tiny shield. We both start laughing.

“Okay, okay,” I say finally. “Wear it in good health. But you don’t need luck. Talent and hard work will win out. Always. It just takes time.”

He gives me a wry grin. “If only that were always true.”