Page 20 of Friends with Benefits

“Tahoe,” Pep says, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. “We’ve never been, if you can believe it.”

Evie laughs. “I can.”

Her grandparents were never the best at understanding the concept of a vacation. Pep had her radio show and Mo bounced around from studio to studio, overseeing the set construction for various films and television shows. Sometimes, the work meant traveling. But never—at least in the first twenty-four years of Evie’s life—had her grandparents traveled totravel, until Pep put down the mic three years ago.

“It turns out there’s a whole world outside of LA County,” Mo teases.

Pep shrugs. “Who knew?”

Mo’s nose crinkles when he smiles at Pep, an expression that single-handedly assures Evie that love is real. Her grandparents are coming up on forty years together. Pep was a single mother to a ten-year-old David when she stumbled onto one of Mo’s sets on the Paramount lot. Before her radio career bloomed, she was a sound editor for the studio, nursing a crush on a set designer.Need some help?she asked in her best (terrible) transatlantic accent. Mo, focused on the flower details he was painting on a gazebo, didn’t register the question, herpresence, until she dropped the schtick and used her actual voice. Pep helped him put the finishing touches on the gazebo—or delayed him, depending on who is telling the story. After, Mo asked her how she felt about food.I eat, Pep said with a laugh.

Forty years later, it’s how he still asks her if she’s hungry.

They’re adorable, her grandparents. Still so in love, though they never married. Perhapsbecausethey never married. Failed first marriages and messy divorces had dulled their desire to tether themselves together with a piece of paper. Evie doesn’t just respect the hell out of their love; it’s a love that she wants for herself.

“Tahoe is unreal,” Theo says.

Evie nods. “You’re going to love it.”

“Sure hope so! Ready to hit the road?” Mo asks.

“I left something in the van for Evelyn,” Pep says as she makes her way toward the RV parked on the street. “Come on, Sweets.”

Evie follows her grandmother down the driveway and up the steps into the decked-out mobile retirement home. Pep and Mo truly pulled out all the stops, hiring an interior designer to gut and renovate the RV, installing quartz countertops, Smeg appliances, and a Klipsch sound system—an aesthetic that screams,There will be no roughing it in the woods on our adventures.Pep sits on the cream leather couch and pats the empty cushion next to her. Evie takes a seat, prepared for a story and wondering what recipe or tchotchke or vintage accessory will be gifted to her before this goodbye.

Pep reaches for a box on the quartz countertop. “From one audiophile to another.”

She takes the box from her grandmother, feels the weight of it in her hands and…is it?

She opens it.

It is.

Inside the box is a vintage RCA 77-DX. A microphone. Not just any microphone, but the one that her grandmother recorded with during the thirty-year run ofSome Pep in YourStep. It’s Peppy Bloom’s most prized possession, a symbol of the trailblazer she is and everything Evie wants to be. She swallows a lump in her throat because it’s so much, Pep letting go of the mic and passing it on to her.

“Genny may have mentioned the fellowship,” Pep says, her voice lowering in tone to something serious. “I wish I heard the exciting news fromyou.”

Evie shrugs. “I can’t do it.”

“Why is that?”

Of course, Imogen left that part out. “No benefits.”

“Ah.”

Her expression shifts to instant understanding. Growing up, it was Pep who’d been Evie’s most fierce advocate, the adult whobelieved her. Pep who obtained legal guardianship in order to put her granddaughters on her union health insurance. Pep who took Evie toso many doctors. Her adolescence was one sterile office after another, a paper gown chafing her skin as the doctor-of-the-month pressed on her tender, bloated stomach, then went over her normal (alwaysnormal) lab results and attributed her pain to stress, to anxiety, to Naomi.That gut-brain connection is a powerful one!After she fell, the on-call trauma attending did a thorough workup, ordering imaging for the obvious injuries and bloodwork based on her accounts of the ever-present pain and accompanying fatigue that threw her balance off in the first place. She didn’t know in that moment that this would be the beginning of receiving an answer with so many questions, that she would soon have validation that her pain wasn’t in her head, that Pep and Mo would be so supportive emotionally—and financially—through numerous trial-and-error treatments until a combination of luck and medical alchemy got her into remission.

Evie doesn’t know, cannotfathom, the cumulative cost.

Pep won’t tell her.

She still struggles to accept this gift, that she’s merely swimming in medical debt and not drowning in it. Because Crohn’s is expensive to manage even in remission, even with insurance—requiring biologic medications, biannual colonoscopies, and so much bloodwork that she’s on a first-name basis with the phlebotomists at her local lab. It is not dramatic to say that Evie’s quality of life depends on the quality of her health insurance.

So.

She can’t do the fellowship.

It’s that simple.

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