He leans back.

“Honestly, it’s nice to hear you talk this way about art,” Phoebe says. “I’ve actually been a little down on art.”

She tells him how lately she worries she always read books just for the feelings they gave her in the end, and she’s not sure how this is any different from reading porn.

“Weren’t you the one who told me you were impressed by those people?” Gary asks. “Those people who will read four hundred pages just to get off?”

“Oh, you mean like you?” she says, and he smiles.

“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Gary says. “How much work we’ll do just to feel something. I don’t think there is anything more human than that.”

Phoebe agrees. She feels such tenderness for him, but she doesn’t know how to say that, so she says, “I’ve missed talking like this.”

She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her—shape-shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.

“I’ve missed talking like this, too,” Gary says. “It’s very easy to tell you things, you know. Is this the effect you have on everybody?”

“Historically, no,” she says. “Often I’ve been known to make people more uncomfortable than they were before they started talking to me.”

“I can’t imagine it,” he says. “I feel like I could tell you anything.”

The honesty of his comment cuts right through her, and she can hardly bear it.

“You’re drunk.”

“It’s not just that,” he says, and looks hurt.

She should stand up. Go back to her room. But then she thinks of Lila standing on her bed, shouting, “I don’t want to marry Gary.” She thinks, this wedding is over. This man deserves to hear something true.

“I know,” she says. “I feel it, too.”

He scratches his beard, something he does, she notices, when he gets a little nervous. Once the wedding is called off, she thinks, Gary won’t have to shave it. It’s the first time Phoebe allows herself to fantasize about the wedding being called off. About a future where she can reach out and touch his face.

In some other version of this story, she would. And they would kiss. Then wake up and feel awful about it in the morning. But Phoebe knows too much to do that now. Phoebe has had too many awful mornings for a lifetime. So Phoebe just stands there, admiring his face, even the gray at the edges. Especially the gray. She didn’t understand that this is what happens as you get older—that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the same exact thing that draws her near now. There is something incredibly sexy to Phoebe about Gary’s gray hairs, his exhaustion, his genuine confusion about life, and she’s not sure she even understands why. She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life, to the man who has loved deeply and then lost suddenly and carries on. A man who has buried his wife and walked away and woke up to peel potatoes for dinner. A man who has lived through enough to appreciate the stones beneath his feet.

“So when did Lila tell you it was a naked painting of her mother?” Phoebe asks.

It’s good to see him laugh.

“Three months,” he says. “For three months I took a shower next to my naked future mother-in-law.”

She takes his hand and squeezes it. Gary looks surprised by her touch, but not confused. Sort of the way he looked when she stood before him in the hot tub and told him she wanted to fuck. As if he wants it, too, but cannot bring himself to admit it.

“I should go back to my room,” he says.

“Good night,” she says.

Gary leaves, and Phoebe gets in Lila’s bed. This time, she doesn’t fantasize about her husband or Mia or the girlies at Joe’s wine shop. She just thinks of Gary, how warm his hand felt, how the entire time she held it, he didn’t look away.

FRIDAY

The Blending of the Families

“You cleaned,” Lila says, standing over Phoebe the next morning. “I’ll try my best not to take that as an insult.”

Lila drops her new room key on the nightstand. Phoebe sits up. She sees Lila’s dresses, neatly hung in the corner of the room, and all at once, she remembers last night. The cleaning. The crying. The holding of Gary’s hand. Lila, jumping on her bed, shouting about how she no longer wanted to marry Gary. But this morning, Lila seems as she always does just after she barges into a room.

“You didn’t happen to stumble upon any Motrin during your cleaning spree?” Lila asks.

“Not feeling your best, I take it?”

“That’s an understatement. This might be the worst hangover I ever had in my entire life. Worse than church wine.”

Phoebe waits for Lila to say something else, to address her confessions from last night. But someone’s at the door.

“You were supposed to meet us at nine in the lobby for surfing,” Juice says, standing in the middle of the doorframe in nothing but a swimsuit and towel.

“Right,” Lila says. “Surfing.”

Lila closes her eyes like she’s already tired from it.

“We’re late,” Juice says. “Dad’s already down there, in the car.”

“Give me a few minutes to turn back into a real human being and I’ll be down,” she says.

“You’re coming, too, right, Phoebe?” Juice asks.

Phoebe feels the tug to join. But she also knows she needs to give them alone time. There are things that need to be sorted out.

“No, I don’t know how to surf,” Phoebe says.

“Nobody does!” Juice says. “They’re going to teach us. It’s a lesson.”

“I’m going to sit this one out, kiddo,” Phoebe says.

After Juice leaves, Lila won’t quite meet Phoebe’s eye. Phoebe waits, but Lila opens a bottle of Motrin.

“How does Motrin know where the headache is?” Lila asks. “I’ve never understood that.”

“I think it just reduces pain all over the body. Head included.”

Lila turns on the shower.

“You’re taking a shower before surfing?” Phoebe asks.

“Oh no, there will be absolutely no surfing today.”

“You just told Juice you’d surf?”