Page 96 of In Love with Lewis Prescott
“I’m sorry I’m makingyoucry.”
A sad, snotty chuckle sounds from his end of the line. “I deserve it, though.”
Maren rests her hand on my shoulder and hands me a tissue. I mouth “thank you” to her.
“Did you ever open that box in your garage?”
It takes me a minute to figure out what Lewis is talking about. Then it dawns on me: right before we fought and broke up and he left, he mentioned surprising me with something in the garage.
“No, I never did.”
“Will you please open it? You don’t have to do it now, but there’s something in there that I made for you. You don’t have to do anything with it. And I... Honestly, now that I think about it, I probably should have asked you first before I did it. But I wanted to surprise you.”
“Okay. I will.”
A long silence follows.
“I’m sorry. For everything,” Lewis finally says.
“Goodbye, Lewis.”
“’Bye, Harper.”
The second I hang up, Maren pulls me into her arms.
“It’s okay,” she whispers in my ear as I let out a string of weak sobs.
“He says he’s sorry, that he wishes he could go back and make things right so we can be together...but I just... I just don’t know...”
I can feel Maren nod her head in understanding in response to my snotty babble.
“I’m so confused,” I mumble.
When I finally pull away, she grabs a tissue and helps me dab at my face.
“He left me something in the garage,” I mutter.
“Do you want to go see what it is?”
When I nod, she grabs my hand in hers, and together we walk to the door leading to the garage. Just a few feet away sits a sealed cardboard box. I point to it, and Maren whips out her car keys to rip it open. Together we crouch down next to it. I yank away the flaps to reveal a brass lamp with strings of crystals as a lampshade. It takes a few seconds of me staring at it before I recognize them as the crystals fromApongVivian’s collection.
I cup my hand over my mouth as I gasp.
“This is really beautiful,” Maren says. “He bought this for you?”
I shake my head. “No, he made it. Out of myapong’s crystals.”
I tell Maren about the chandelier and how devastated I was when Lewis told me that even with the ceiling reinforced it wouldn’t be strong enough to support the light fixture with all the crystals on it.
“I was pretty sad about it.” I can’t stop gazing at the endless strings of crystals draped over the brass fixture and how they look like mini prisms whenever the sunlight beaming through the garage window hits them.
I lift the lamp out of the box.
“Oh, wait.” Maren picks up a small brown envelope that was under the lamp.
She hands it to me, and I rip it open.
I know this isn’t as impressive as a chandelier, but I hope that when you look at this, it reminds you of your grandma. I love you, H.
