I will never stop trying.
Every day Molly makes us lunch, and every day it’s exactly the same thing: a giant mound of dark, curly kale generously massaged with a pungent garlic-Parmesan dressing, topped with avocado, grapes, pepitas, and grilled chicken breast. She calls it The Salad, and eats it directly out of the bowl with her fingers. She claims The Salad is meant to be consumed with one’s bare hands. I find this point of view questionable, and consume my portion on a plate with a fork, but I like watching her daintily pick out just the right piece of kale and lick the dressing off her fingers.
After lunch, we grab towels and sunscreen and books and walk down to the beach. Molly always wears an enormous sun hat embroidered with the wordsBEACH MILFin hot pink cursive, which she stole from her mother in Florida. We go into the lake together and frolic. If there aren’t too many kids around to scandalize, we’ll wade deeper and make out—just like we did in the ocean in high school. Molly is naughty and touches me below the waist. I do not allow things to become too hot and heavy, because we are in the landof decency, but I enjoy her daily efforts to tempt me to submit to a public hand job.
When I go back to shore she goes for a swim, and I watch her figure cutting back and forth across the water in the distance and thinkwe have five days. Three more days. Still one last night.
Usually, when we get home… let’s just say I get something better than a hand job.
When I don’t have more work after our siesta, we play gin rummy. It was Molly’s suggestion—it’s her mom’s family’s vacation game of choice—and at first, she beat me every hand. Then, after humiliating myself two nights in a row, I googled “Gin Rummy Strategies” and realized I was committing to my cards too early. Now we are evenly matched, and she is outraged every time I win. Beating Molly Marks at something has always been one of life’s great pleasures.
We make dinner together and drink good wine from my friends’ little shop in town. (The two owners, Meg and Luz, quit their jobs in Milwaukee to be local booze purveyors, and sometimes I wish I had thought of it first.) Molly is fantastic at assembling sides and salads. (But never The Salad. The Salad is only for lunch.)
I’m so in love. I’m so happy. I try to play it mostly cool, because Molly gets anxious when I’m emotional. In a way, it’s worse than high school, because she’s had two more decades to perfect her defenses against love. But when it happens—when she gets panicky—she lets me hold her.
She lets me stroke her hair and help her breathe.
She trusts me.
And I’ll take that.
Because I don’t want this to be a fling. I don’t want this to be another one of Seth’s Doomed Impulsive Love AffairsTM. I don’t want it to be the thing that makes Molly finally stop talking to me for good.
Before we go to bed, I make her join me in writing in a gratitude journal.
I’m thankful for the sunshine that warms our skin.
For lullabies that soothe my girl to sleep.
For the lake that helps us relearn each other’s bodies.
For a chance never to stop learning Molly Marks.
And I’m grateful for this hope.
This chance to hope, and hope, and hope.
PART SEVEN
November 2021
CHAPTER 32Molly
It’s two days before Thanksgiving and I’m scouring my perennially unkempt house. It always takes everything I have to prepare my home for Seth, a man who folds his socks into stackable rectangles and has a toothbrush just for grout. After five months of going back and forth between each other’s houses I am mostly inured to his shrieking at the appearance of stray crumbs and his habit of bleaching my sink. But this is the first time we’ve spent a holiday together, and I want it to be perfect.
I take a break to check my email. I’m waiting to hear back from my dad and his director on the latest draft ofBusted.I sent it weeks ago and haven’t gotten any notes. The director, Scott, usually responds right away. The radio silence is making me uneasy.
But there’s nothing—just some emails about other, smaller projects I’ve been working on—so I commence the dreaded task of steam-mopping my floors.
My phone rings—Dezzie—and I pounce on it, eager to wail to a sympathetic ear about my fear of being judged dirty by society’s most hygienic man.
But she’s sobbing.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Babes. What is it?”
She doesn’t say anything. She makes a noise like she’s suffocating.
The first thing I think about is Seth. They’re both in Chicago. Maybe something’s happened to him, and she’s been tasked with telling me. Every day, now that we’re so close, visions flash before my eyes of losing him. A plane crash. A car wreck. An undiagnosed heart defect. So many things that could strike at any moment to take this unexpected joy away from me.
