Page 63 of It's a Love Story

“Thank you, but I can make myself something after my run.”

“You don’t want to miss breakfast,” she says.

“Most important meal of the day, I hear.” I hold my coffee in both hands and take a sip.

“Love happens over breakfast.” Cormack smiles at Reenie. “If you want to know the secret to a happy marriage, that’s it.”

Reenie places her hand over his for just a second. And I wonder how much information transfers between them through a single touch like that after all of these years.

“What does that mean?” I say. “If you don’t mind me asking. ‘Love happens over breakfast.’”

“It’s just something Cormack said when we were first married. Romance happens over dinner. The candlelight, the wine.”

“Everyone looks a lot better than they usually do,” Cor- mack says and laughs.

Reenie rolls her eyes. “Well, yes,” she says. “That’s the romance of it. But at breakfast everything’s just as it is, in the light of day. No one wears lipstick to breakfast. And this is where you talk about your day and the part of the roof that might leak this fall. You bring your real self to breakfast.”

“Warts and all,” says Cormack.

“No one has warts,” Reenie says and shakes her head. “Now how about you skip that run and I make you some pancakes?”

I think of the way she melts the butter and warms the syrup in that tiny yellow pan on the stovetop. And I decide not to run.

CHAPTER 28

REENIE WANTS TO READ THE SCRIPT, SO I GIVE HERmy laptop. We’re sitting side by side in the backyard looking out at the potato field through the ivy arbor. Ruby’s brought out a box of beads, and we’re making bracelets. “You did a great job last night,” I tell her.

“I did,” she says. We are in full agreement.

She’s stringing beads together in an order that can only make sense to her. Blue, then blue, then green, then clear. Mine is in an alternating pattern of three beads per color, and I think of Louis from the pier with his string bracelets that are nothing at all. And Dan wears them anyway, little bits of nothing that are everything.

I watch Reenie out of the corner of my eye. I watch for a smile on page nineteen when they meet. I watch for her hand to grip her heart at the end.

The main characters in this script see each other for the first time in a hotel lobby. Their eyes meet and there’s a spark between them. I think this spark will be conveyed by a tight camera angle and a ping, some kind of music. It’s insta-attraction, but not insta-love. I’ve never felt an immediate ping. I try to remember my first impression of Dan, and I just remember him being highly focused on photographing a hawk for no reason. He was handsome and disarming in his directness, but I did not feel the ping. “What’s funny?” Reenie asks.

“Did I laugh?”

“You did.” She smiles at me.

“Dan’s always losing his driver’s license.” I turn to her to see if I’ve given too much away, if she can see on my face that this is a piece of information I gleaned just before I had sex with her son. Twice. Her eyes give me an all clear. “I can’t imagine doing that more than once. I mean, I’d just make a point to put it back in my wallet.”

“You’d think,” she says. “He’s all heart. And I think that somehow his focus on the beautiful thing distracts him from the practical thing.”

“Well, he’s terrible at crossing the street.”

“Oh, I know,” she says. “Keeps me up at night just thinking about it.”

I laugh, and she smiles at me.

“Grammy, can you help me tie this?” Ruby asks.

“I can help you,” I say.

“No, but it’s for you,” she says. “You can’t tie your own bracelet, you only have two hands.”

“True,” I say. My heart is in my throat. I want this bracelet like some people want a Tesla. Ruby hands the two ends to Reenie, who adjusts her reading glasses and ties it around my outstretched wrist. It’s so quiet, I notice. Like a church kind of quiet where you’d notice someone clearing their throat.

Reenie snips the ends, and I admire the tiny beads of every color laid out in no order at all. “Thank you,” I say to both of them.

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