She decided to move home, to help them, emotionally and financially, through their transition into new lives, but they refused.
“Please don’t let us drag you down, Abigail,” her mother said. “Go live your life. We’re totally fine.”
But it was her father she was more worried about. He’d aged about ten years since the collapse of the theater. One night, after her mom had gone to bed, Abigail and her father had stayed up to watch Two for the Road on Turner Classic Movies. He drank steadily through the movie, finishing off the red wine from dinner, and afterward told Abigail that they’d already canceled their premium cable subscription, that it was going away at the end of the month, and he was trying to watch as many old movies on TCM as possible.
Something about that particular detail made Abigail so sad that she had to get up and tell her father she was going to the bathroom, just so he wouldn’t see her cry.
When she came back out, she said to her father, now watching Charade, “I talked to Mom about this, and she wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but I’m thinking of coming home for a while. I know that I could get a job at—”
“No, no, Abby. Your mother and I discussed this. Not a chance. It’s totally enough that you come back on weekends, and you have that great job—”
“It’s not that great a job.”
“It’s in publishing. You’re in the greatest city in the world. Please. We are one hundred percent fine.”
“Okay,” Abigail said. “I hear you both, loud and clear.”
CHAPTER 4
Back in New York, unmoored by her breakup with Ben and feeling powerless to help her parents, Abigail moved into a three-bedroom apartment with two strangers and took an extra job as a nanny for a family on the Upper East Side to just be able to pay her share of the rent. She kept thinking about her father’s words to her, that she had a job in publishing in the greatest city in the world, and somehow those facts, instead of making her happy, made her feel sad and worthless. She was where she’d wanted to be, but she felt like an impostor, a small-town girl playing grown-up in the city.
She started spending time with her college friend Rebecca, who was heavily subsidized by her parents and had her own place near Gramercy Park. Abigail knew that some of Rebecca’s fondness for her was attraction, and out of curiosity, and a requisite amount of attraction herself, Abigail got drunk one night with coworkers, then showed up at Rebecca’s apartment at just past midnight. It was a sexual encounter so awkward that both of them seemed to know, instantly, that they’d killed their friendship. And they kind of had, even though they continued to text and meet for drinks and coffee. But by this point Abigail had decided that, despite her parents’ protests, what she really needed to do was move back to Boxgrove, stay with them, or Zoe, for a while, and get a job waitressing so she could help them with some of their bills. It wasn’t just that she wanted to do it, she was also somehow longing to do it. Moving home would give her purpose.
She was just about to enact this plan when she met Bruce Lamb. She was on her lunch break at a coffee shop, looking at job listings in western Massachusetts, when he sat down at the next table. Abigail glanced at him briefly, just as he was glancing at her, and they smiled at each other, the quick, noncommittal smiles of city people. Abigail remembered thinking that even though the decent-looking thirty-year-old man was wearing faded jeans and a rumpled blazer she could tell that those jeans and that blazer probably cost more than two months of her rent. She went back to job-hunting.
When the man finished his goat-cheese salad he stood, cleared his dishes, then came over to Abigail’s table. “Excuse me,” he said.
She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow.
“Can I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked.
Abigail laughed, but then she said, “Okay,” surprising herself a little by the swiftness and surety of her answer.
“Do you live around here?”
“Close enough,” Abigail said.
He named a restaurant with a French-sounding name, and they agreed on eight o’clock.
After he left, Abigail thought that at least she’d be getting an expensive dinner in the city bought by a perfect stranger before she left. It could be her New York story.
Dinner was actually nice. She’d thought that, considering the way he’d asked her out, he’d be a player, but he was actually down-to-earth. Almost innocent. He’d just moved to New York from Silicon Valley, where he’d been living (“not really living, just coding”) for the past ten years. He’d started two companies and sold them both, and he was sick of being the idea man and decided to be the moneyman instead, starting up an angel investor business. “I didn’t want to do it in Silicon Valley and I’d always dreamt of living in New York.”
On their third date she told him about her plan to leave the city and move back in with her parents, and she told him about the guilt she felt because of the college loans, and how beaten down her parents were, and how she was sick of the city, anyway. The words came out in a rush, her voice cracking on the word “helpless,” and another voice in her head was imagining that Bruce was right now searching for the EXIT sign.
But after she was finished talking, he said, “I’ll pay your college loans.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay them. How much are they?”
“That’s not the point. I can’t have you paying my college loans.”
“Look. I give money to charities all the time. I have more money right now at my age than I’ll ever in a million years be able to spend. You’re a good person. I assume your parents are good people. Let me pay the loans. You can still move back home. I’m not trying to get you to stay in New York.”
“It’s crazy. We don’t even really know each other.”
“Look,” Bruce said, and took a deep breath through his nostrils. They were at an upscale gastro pub, sitting at the corner of the bar, a plate of truffled deviled eggs between them, and they both had to talk a little louder than they normally would to be heard. “When I lived in Silicon Valley, I gave pitches all the time, and the standard line among my colleagues about giving pitches was to practice them, to know exactly what you were going to say, and to stick to the script. I used to do the opposite. I’d go into pitch meetings and just speak from my heart, describe my product exactly as it was. I never practiced. I never worried about how I’d come off. I just went in with total honesty, and it made the whole thing so much easier.”
“What does this have to do with you wanting to pay my loans?”
“I think because when I told you I wanted to do that, I wasn’t being entirely honest. So, here it is, I’m about to be totally honest. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something very close to that happened when I saw you in the coffee shop. I wanted—no, I needed—to get to know you, so I took a shot. And now here we are three dates later and I know, with certainty, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No, let me finish. You’re the most interesting woman I’ve ever met. You love poetry and horror movies, and dress like a 1950s housewife. You’re far smarter than I can ever hope to be, and you’re kind and selfless. Plus I think we fit, and I know that we could make it work. I feel, in a way, that you are now my purpose for living. I don’t expect you to have the same feelings. I would be pleased, obviously, if you shared some of them, but that’s not why I’m telling you this. I just want to be open. I think we should be together. I also think that if you’re about to tell me that I’m scaring the shit out of you, and that you never want to see me again, that I still want to pay your student loans, because you’re a good person and you shouldn’t have to worry about something that I can take care of so easily. Consider it your payment for sitting through this embarrassing speech.”