She takes another sip of her whiskey, then fixes her eyes on mine. “Look. Ever since this started, ever since you saw Oliver, you’ve been talking in suppositions—what all of this is supposed to mean, that Oliver was supposed to be at this place or that, who you’re supposed to be with. But Mia, that’s not you.”
I tilt my head at her. “What do you mean?”
“When I met you that first week at Moore, you told me your dad didn’t want you to go to art school, because you’d never make any money at it.”
I scoff. “He was eerily prescient.”
She doesn’t crack at my joke. “But you didn’t care what he thought. You went to Moore because you wanted to. You knew in your gut it was your path. And no one was going to veer you from it.”
“But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you! I don’t know what my gut is saying or what my path is. I’m confused.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“What? Of course I am.”
“No. I think your brain’s confused. You keep trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. Like life is some big game show with right and wrong answers. It doesn’t work like that. You have to put all that aside and really ask yourself: What do you want? It’s simple as that. Who do you love? Who do you want to be with? Forget everything else.”
I stare at her. And then I stare at her some more. I replay her words over and over as I lie on the couch trying to sleep and then, when I can’t sleep, on my drive all the way home to Hope Springs. When I walk in the front door of my house, I know exactly what I’m going to do, my mind clearer than it’s been in months.
And I start to pack.
Chapter 26
Sunday morning, I stand on the familiar porch, holding my suitcase.
I knock, and then when minutes go by with no answer, I rap on the wooden panel again, my heart thudding in my chest. Am I too late?
Finally, the door creaks open, but instead of him, it’s her, peering out at me grimly, brown curls hanging loose around her face.
Harrison’s mother.
I have a sudden flash of the first time I met her, on this porch, when we came home for Thanksgiving. I had spent weeks with Rosetta Stone, wanting to speak to his mother in her native language—or at least say a few words. “Hola, Señora Graydon. Encantada de conocerte,” I said, when Harrison introduced me.
She appraised me with an intense gaze that was unnerving. Her face was wide, her cheeks high and full, her eyebrows drawn in with a thick brown line. And then she said: “I speak English—”
“Oh, I know,” I jumped in, slightly mortified. “I was just—”
She held up a hand and stopped me. “Better than you speak Spanish. So we’ll speak English.” Harrison didn’t bother concealing his smile.
“Hi, Del,” I say now.
She examines me, her penciled-in eyebrows arched in judgment, as I hold my breath, waiting. Then she grunts and mutters something in Spanish, and for a moment panic grips me. Is she going to turn me away? Does Harrison not want to see me? I’ve been on the road since three a.m. and can’t bear the thought of coming here for nothing.
But then the stern line of her mouth turns up and she steps out onto the porch, embracing me in her thick arms. “He’s in the back,” she says, after leaving her mauve lipstick print on my cheek.
I walk through the house, marveling at how it hasn’t changed in the eight years since I first came for Thanksgiving, though the laminate tile in the kitchen shows slightly more wear, the fashions in the family pictures hanging on the walls even more out of date. When I reach the sunporch, I see the same brown wicker furniture with pink cushions, bleached even paler by the sun. Harrison is huddled under a quilt on the longer settee, staring at a television in the corner, where Jane Pauley is welcoming viewers to CBS This Morning.
He turns his head, eyes registering surprise when he sees me.
“Mia,” he says, sitting up. “What are you doing here?”
I think of everything I wanted to say to him—sorting through all the thoughts I had on the way here, how I did get distracted by Oliver, how sorry I am, what a terrible wife I’ve been—but there’s time for all of that, so I lead with the most important truth, the one in my gut. “I love you.”
* * *
It wasn’t just the “listen to your gut” advice that struck me when Raya was talking the night before. It was the “supposition” bit. The idea that I kept circling back to—that Oliver was supposed to be there, at Beau’s wedding, the night I met Harrison. And it was on a strip of dark highway somewhere between Philadelphia and Hope Springs early this morning that it struck me: All of the places that Oliver was supposed to be, he wasn’t.
Oliver wasn’t there.
Harrison was.
And then I thought of everything else Oliver wasn’t there for. Every moment in the past eight years that I’ve shared with Harrison: the small ones, like when I have paint in my hair and on my chin and I catch Harrison staring at me, a small smile on his lips; or when someone says “intents and purposes” in conversation and we share a secret laugh, remembering the fight we got into when I swore it was “intensive purposes”; or how some mornings when he thinks I’m sleeping, he hovers over me, gently palming my face between his hands, his face inches from mine, and whispers, “I love you, Mia Graydon,” and then doesn’t let go right away. And the big ones, like how I walked toward him, down a trodden footpath on an old dairy farm just outside of Buffalo in front of a handful of our friends and family to the Peter Cetera and Cher song “After All”; or how his smile stretched across his face when I reached him and he mouthed, “Worst song ever”; or how he vowed to love me even when I ignore him for days in one of my manic artistic episodes and I vowed to love him even when he corrects me on my vocabulary.
And I thought of our first real date.
The night after we met in the art gallery and kissed under a dry cleaner’s awning—I told Harrison what I made clear to all my first dates: I had no desire to ever get married. As a product of divorced parents, I didn’t see the point. Most guys shrugged or even looked relieved, anticipating an easy fling. But not Harrison. “I bet you will,” he said, his gaze clamped on mine, over a pitcher of sangria and a plate of patatas bravas.
Caught off guard by his response, I chirped back: “What do you want to bet?”
He could have shrugged it off as rhetorical, but he didn’t miss a beat. “If you get married, you have to get a tattoo.” It was a nod to an earlier conversation in the evening, when we were swapping dumb things we had done as teenagers: “I almost got a tattoo once,” I told him. “But fortunately I was too drunk and the manager kicked me out.”