If I were truly a mint–chocolate chip lover, I would have picked up on the foreseeable tarnish, but I didn’t. Besides, there was something familiar that reeled me in. I was in the bubble of early infatuation. Those afflicted only see what they want to see.
We continued down the crowded street. “You know I thought she was your lover.”
“Perhaps it’s why you stuffed your tongue down what’s-his-name’s throat.”
“Daniel,” I corrected him. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew, Charley.” He gripped me tighter. “She and Myka have been together for years, but that would have made for some brilliant telly.”
We laughed until he returned to his transience, explaining how his businesses are his brood. “Each location’s a child to tend to.”
“You really don’t have a home?” I asked again, my expression that of a question mark.
“No. I don’t.”
He waited for my response, but I was studying the different parts of him and wondering what to do with this piece. He wore a powder-blue shirt and a pair of white cotton slacks. His skin was pink from our days exploring the city and the afternoon we picnicked in the park. An ominous question rose in me. His eerie ubiquity was unsettling. “I don’t understand. Where do you keep your clothes? What state is your driver’s license issued in?”
He chuckled, and I already knew what was coming. He was going to tease me, and then he was going to introduce me to another magical side of him. “My Charley,” he’d say. “You said home. I have several homes.”
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. A man as worldly and sophisticated as Philip was meant to have multiple homes. But I wondered where I’d fit. Where we’d fit.
I’d often wondered in those early weeks what it was that attracted Philip to someone like me. Though we came from opposite ends of the spectrum, our meeting fell somewhere in the middle. A man like him could have had any woman he wanted, and he chose me. In some way, I believed our histories bound us—protected us. Our past hurts became a source of strength, providing a safe and reasonable distance, the impervious shield from future pain. What burned bright and alive was the present, the now we effortlessly found ourselves in.
What at first was a glaring embarrassment—my shabby apartment, a dull childhood home, my quiet life outside the classroom—became something else. Witnessing my life through Philip’s eyes shined a light on our commonality. We were more similar than we were different. For all his success, he was just as content to sit upon my mother’s frumpy couch and praise her cooking. “Katherine,” he had said, “this is the best chicken teriyaki I’ve ever eaten. Trust me, I’ve eaten a lot of teriyaki in my life.” He was comfortable, at ease, and you’d never know he didn’t belong there. I think Philip could be himself without the glare that followed him around.
Mom was thrilled to see him again.
“I had a hand in this,” she whispered in my ear.
“Don’t.” I stopped her. “You can’t say it out loud.” But I knew, and so did she. She had wished for someone to love her daughter.
“Just don’t bring up Dad,” I said.
Philip and I sat in my old bedroom, where we pored over the artifacts of my adolescence. I felt young and childish around him, surrounded by Nancy Drew mysteries and oversize movie posters. He flipped through my yearbooks and faded photographs of awful hairstyles and pudgy cheeks.
Later, we explored the city, shopping at River Market, where he bought me my first snow globe, followed by a trip to the World War I museum. He walked me through the gallery of my beloved city in my beloved country and told me countless tales of war heroes. We walked hand in hand through Swope Park and took pictures of ourselves with the animals in the zoo. He threw an apple at my head. He did. Because he said in ancient Greece that’s how they declared their love. I sat on his lap on the sky tram and let him wrap me in his arms until it felt like we were one.
I remembered watching the film 9½ Weeks, when Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke emerged from their marathon erotic sleepover and embarked on a journey through Chicago, their weekend highlighted by a musical backdrop. The romantic music and scenes were so artfully crafted, I’d wanted my own reel. Philip gave me that over four days in Kansas City, Missouri.
My 11:11 wish—crossed with my mother’s—had come true.
CHAPTER 9
July 2018, Present Day
NAET Clinic; Islamorada, Florida
“Did you hear me?” Liberty asked, crossing behind my desk, sending papers flying in her wake. The clock read 2:22. I still made wishes, though they were different now. World peace. Less cancer.
I responded to her as I reached for the papers. “Yes. My referral’s coming in.”
“Hectic morning?” she asked.
“You can say that.”
“Tell me about this Jimmy.”
“Anaphylactic. Eggs, peanuts, and gluten.”
“Poor kid.”
I recounted the market story and our visit to the hospital. “I’m surprised they called you so soon. People are usually far more skeptical.”
Liberty brushed it aside. “You were always better at drawing people in. I think it’s that wholesome charm of yours. You’d think I was a sorcerer.”
When I’d first been diagnosed with an almond allergy, Mom sent me to a doctor in Kansas City who’d performed a barrage of tests that almost drained us of our life savings. I’d left the office with tracks of Braille lining my arms and a life-saving EpiPen. Up until that day, I was a healthy eight-year-old with one nasty ear infection to my medical file.
Suddenly, I was under a doctor’s care and advised to return for cost-prohibitive monthly allergy shots. I had spent my early years unfazed by what I put in my mouth and hated that I had to be vigilant, restricted. I toted the pen around like a third arm, nixed the allergy shots, and avoided not only almonds, but all nuts.
Unless you counted Liberty.
At first, I’d fought hard against her treatment. Those who subscribed to it were bigger kooks than she was. But weeks into her voodoo of eating cauliflower and potato chips for breakfast while she massaged me with a mini massager, followed by a quiet slumber that included holding glass vials of allergic substances, I could safely eat almonds. I would never judge the witchery again. I had passed.
“What’s with the long face, Charlotte? Were you able to talk to Philip?” Her broad nose was stuck in a chart, giving me time to admire her boho style. With her flaming red hair falling past her shoulders, she could make wearing a tablecloth look chic. I never could guess her age. Some locals had her close to seventy, though her firm skin and childlike eyes gave her the illusion of fifty. She claimed her all-natural lifestyle—no alcohol or drugs, ten glasses of water a day, granola eating, organic, cage-free, preservative-free, gluten-free, I may as well eat kale for the rest of my existence—kept her young and unwrinkled. I believed it was more than that. Some people were put on this earth to do good, to be good. Liberty literally saved people. I think God had preserved her as a way of saying thanks.
“Philip and I are fine,” I said, avoiding her eyes.
“You’re a terrible liar, Charley.”