CHAPTER 5
It’s Monday and Leo’s holding Arthur’s copy of the Oliver Twist script while watching the sunrise. “Hey,” he says without turning his head.
I sit next to him on the porch swing, noting that he seems to have figured out the coffee system in my house. “It’s really nice that you did that with Arthur last night.”
“Don’t tell him, but he’s kind of a natural.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
We’re silent as the sun moves through a dark orange finale.
“Writing today?” he asks.
“Gonna try. What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking about going into town.”
Which is how I end up not writing and taking Leo Vance on a walking tour of Laurel Ridge proper. The town is pretty much one strip of shops, a small grocery at one end and a bookstore at the other. Leo buys cheese and a baguette at the grocery. And a jar of jam in a flavor he’s never seen before. He asks if he can taste the salami and buys a pound of that. He buys berries and kiwis like a kid pulling candy off the shelf by the checkout counter.
“Planning a picnic?” I ask as we walk out, laden with bags.
“Nope. I just liked the looks of it. Let’s go in there.” He motions to an overpriced housewares store that has no chance of surviving the year in this town. In fact, I’ve never been inside, on principle.
Two saleswomen are chatting behind the counter and go silent when they see Leo. So silent, in fact, that it’s awkward. “Hello?” he says.
The older one comes out from behind the counter. “Hello. I’m sorry. I was just so surprised to see you standing there. In my store.” I admire her honesty.
Leo puts out his hand and says, absolutely unnecessarily, “I’m Leo. And this is Nora. I’m staying with her for a while.” Both women look me up and down, probably trying to divine what sorcery I’m using to put myself in this situation. He gets naked in the bathroom across the hall from where I sleep, I want to tell them. Someone needs to know.
Leo looks around the store, fingering every coffee mug, every throw pillow, every set of salad tongs. “I’ll take these,” he says holding up a set of ivory sheets and evoking a gasp from the store owner. Then to me, “What do you sleep in? A king?”
“Queen,” I say in a small voice because (1) it seems like a personal question, and (2) it’s possible I was harboring a fantasy that these women thought he’d seen my bed.
He picks up a set of queen-size sheets and hands them to the lady. “I bet your sheets are crap,” he says to me. When I start to object, he puts up his hand to silence me. “Just let me.” He stares me down until I nod in agreement. “What else? Do you like your coffee mugs?”
“I do.”
“I do too.” He wanders around collecting small items until he finds the towels. “We need new towels. Don’t even start to argue.” Which, okay. He chooses four sets of the most luxurious towels I’ve ever felt. They’re a light aqua, a perfect match to the fading tile in the kids’ bathroom. He hands them to the slightly panting lady.
By the time he’s convinced me that my wine opener is “trash,” he’s got more stuff than we can carry. The ladies happily agree to deliver it all to my house.
“Well, my house feels like it’s had it’s Pretty Woman moment,” I say as we head to the bookstore.
“I don’t get to shop. There’s a woman Weezie hired who chooses my clothes. Someone else picked out everything in my apartment. Same for the other houses.”
“That’s weird.”
“It is. Like, it feels good to choose a towel color, decide which bananas look good.”
“Is that what’s at the heart of this suburban crisis you’re having? You want to make choices?”
Leo doesn’t answer, and I’m afraid I’ve pried. I also haven’t said “thank you,” and now it feels too late. We walk into the bookstore, and I introduce Leo to Stewart, the owner. He asks if he can take a photo with Leo for his Instagram account, and Leo is gracious.
Leo touches the spine of every book, and agrees to pose for selfies with three customers. He chooses a book on French provincial cooking (he doesn’t cook) and a newly released Stephen King novel.
I have to admit I like walking through town with Leo. People I know greet us with surprise and curiosity. Both of these things are better than pity. Everyone knows Ben left me. And everyone knows he sort of used me up and tossed me aside. “She did everything for that man,” they’d say, shaking their heads. Besides Mrs. Sanducci, who is recently widowed at eighty-six, I think I’m the only single woman in town. Look at me having fun, I want to say. Look at me next to something glamorous.
We stop at the hardware store to check in on Mr. Mapleton, and Leo buys a spray nozzle for my hose because he thinks they’re fun. I argue that I use my thumb and get the same effect, and now Leo and Mr. Mapleton have ganged up on me. “This woman lives like the Unabomber,” Leo says. “Have you been to her house?”
“That’s her, just the basics. And she’ll use and reuse something until it crumbles in her hands,” Mr. Mapleton tells Leo.
“You should see her bath towels,” Leo says and laughs.
“I can only imagine,” says Mr. Mapleton. “But not the husband. That guy was in here all the time, buying a slightly newer version of something he already had. I used to tell my wife, ‘That Ben’s got everything but a job.’ ”
I’ve heard this a thousand times, but I laugh because it’s true and also because I like how he’s always been on my side. “And he took it all with him,” I say. “I like to think of Ben wandering around the globe with six sets of torque wrenches.”
Leo adds the spray nozzle to his bag with the cheese, and we say good-bye. “Enjoy your stay,” Mr. Mapleton says. “I’ll have my eye on you.”
“What happens now?” I don’t even know how many times he’s asked me this today. Last time the answer was: I put the kids to bed. Before that it was: We watch Wheel of Fortune. Preceded by: We have dinner. Between school and dinner was two hours of Fagin training. I’m not entirely sure if Arthur did his homework.
I pour a glass of wine and head toward the sunroom.
“Can I come?” I also don’t know how many times he’s asked that today.
I grab a second glass.
My sunroom is only big enough for a small couch, an armchair, and a coffee table. There are two ferns at all times, one dying and one getting started, on a regular rotation of grief and replacement. It looks out over the lawn to the tea house, where I can see Leo has left the door open to welcome him back.
Leo sits on the couch, so I take the armchair. He’s in a button-down shirt and shorts. He looks like he should be in the Hamptons or Malibu, any place but on my sagging beige couch. “Will you write tomorrow?” he asks.
“I think so; I need to start something new.” I take a sip of my wine.
“Let’s hope it’s not a musical.” He smiles an ironic smile. I’ve seen this smile before.
“African Rose,” I say.
“Stop it,” he says. “So, what’s the inspiration for the next script?”
“It’s not inspiration, it’s more like math.”
He sips his wine and leans back into the sofa cushions. “Explain.”
“I write movies for The Romance Channel.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Those two-hour movies that are mostly commercials?”
“Well, I’ve written a lot of them. That’s what I do.”
“Hilarious.” He pours us each a little more wine, killing the bottle. “So why is it math?”
“Maybe not math. Did you ever play Mad Libs as a kid? Where you have to fill in the nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and then there’s a story?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Give me a gender, a location, and a career.”
“Okay . . . female, Chicago, real estate developer.”
“Okay, easy. Stephanie, a young urban real estate developer, takes a trip to rural Illinois to look into buying a dairy farm and turning it into a corporate retreat center. The young handsome owner of the farm doesn’t want to sell, and they butt heads. But as she spends more time on the farm, she sees how important it is to the community and they fall in love. In fact, she’s helping him organize the annual Founders’ Day festival later next week. They kiss. The night before Founders’ Day, she gets a call that she needs to shut down the farm immediately or lose her job. She leaves for Chicago. He is heartbroken.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. But wait, now it’s Founders’ Day, and you can pretty much insert any community event here—Christmas tree lighting, soup kitchen opening, children’s recital—and he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!”
“Yes!”
“She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm. The end.”
“That’s so stupid. Is it always the same?”
I down the rest of my wine. “Pretty much. I change the names and the kind of farm, for good measure. And I flip the genders. Half the time the guy leaves.”
“But he always comes back?”
“Always.” A moment passes between us, where I’m pretty sure we’re both thinking about Ben. For some reason I need Leo to know that I don’t want Ben back, that I’m happy and whole with him gone.
He goes ahead and says it. “But Trevor left, end of story.”
“Yep,” I say. Leo’s giving me this look, like maybe I’m a puzzle he’s about to solve. “Well, now you know all my secrets. I’m going to bed.”