“Did he really do that?” I say, picturing it. Picturing Lola.
“Isn’t that great?” she says. “Can’t you just see him? Explains a lot. Poor guy. I think he was a sweetheart really. Wanted the world to be beautiful and artistic and lovely. But it isn’t. Not all the time, anyway. And thinking it will be could drive anyone mad.”
“How do you remember all this information about Van Gogh, but you can’t remember which tea you like?” I ask in good humor.
“Did you see the note?” She shakes her head. “I don’t know how many times I’ve bought that stupid tea. As Van Gogh would concur—the mind is a terrible thing to lose.”
“I agree.”
We sip our coffee, and after a bit, Lola waves her hand at me in that “get on with it” motion. She knows I’m here for a reason.
“Oliver,” I say, and she just nods. “I think it’s turning into something and it shouldn’t.”
“Are you crazy?” Lola asks like I’ve just told her I’m thinking of taking a job on an oil rig in Alaska. “He’s the Orange Juice Hottie.”
“Stop calling him that.” I wrinkle my nose at her. “It makes me sound ridiculous. His name is Oliver. And he’s a lot different than you’d expect, actually.”
“All right,” she says. “Then what’s the deal? You like him, right?”
“Sure, I like him. But who has the luxury of just liking someone at my age? At his age, you can like and get away with it.”
“How old is he anyway?”
“Twenty-eight. But to talk to him, you’d think he was forty-eight.”
“Well, to look at him, you wouldn’t make that mistake.” She winks at me.
I giggle, embarrassed, but happily. We sip our coffees and stare into Lola’s yard. The day is bright and easy around us. The flowers in the yard are thick with fragrance and bumblebees. The summer air is sticky-sweet already.
“I ran into Jack on the street,” I say. “Oliver was with me.”
“You should have run over him on the street,” she says, looking me straight in the eye.
“What if I made a mistake?” I say. “I couldn’t get Jack out of my head last night. He made me feel so foolish for being with Oliver, but I think underneath it all, I might still want Jack.”
“You’re just afraid of what comes next,” Lola says. “Fear. It’s totally natural.”
“What does come next?” I ask, thinking she has the answer.
“I don’t know.” Lola shrugs as if not knowing were totally ok.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I say and mimic her gesture.
“Well, I never know,” she says and laughs at her little inside joke. “You should try it sometimes. It’s liberating in a weird way.”
“You think I should suffer a lasting brain injury?” I tilt my head at her to let her know I’m joking.
“They’re less damaging than what you have.”
“What’s that?” I ask, completely confused.
“A lasting heart injury,” she says and puts her hands to her chest.
I sigh.
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with you and Jack, but you are forgetting the fact that you two are incapable of seeing each other through the hard times. That his idea of ‘working through it’ meant cozying up to his receptionist.”
“But we could get better at that,” I say. “I’m not innocent in all this either. I wasn’t that easy to live with. I was so distraught about the miscarriage and infertility issues that I pretty much cut him off.”
“Blah blah blah. I’ve heard all this before. You know you can count on me to listen to a repeat story and not even realize it, but for heaven’s sake, Nina, you can’t go around and around about this forever. What do you really want?”
“I just think this thing with Oliver is too . . .”
“Exciting, new, wonderful?” she asks, calling me out. “You’ve just started dating. You don’t even know what this relationship is about yet. You haven’t even gotten past first base, apparently.”
“Is that strange?” I ask, seizing the chance. “We start kissing and then he pulls away. I mean, even now that we’ve sort of made it official that we’re seeing each other, he’s still standoffish in that, you know, area,” I say, fumbling around saying the actual words.
“He pulls away?” she asks, wrinkling her brow. “Yeah, that’s a little strange. Gay?”
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Neither are you, anymore,” she says. “Just see where it goes. You might be surprised.”
“But I’m not sure some good-looking, young guy is where I should be moving on to. Maybe I didn’t give me and Jack a fighting chance. What if he wanted intimacy and validation as much as he wanted the sex?”
“Stop watching daytime talk shows this instant,” she says and points a finger at me. “Do you hear me?”
“I know.” I slump in my chair. “I just don’t want to make a mistake.”
“Sweetie, that’s not possible,” she says and reaches over the table to take both of my hands in hers. “Everything could be a mistake. Every time you get out of bed in the morning it might be a mistake. If by mistake, you mean risk.”
I envy the way she sees the world.
“Jack invited me out to eat,” I say. “Or coffee. I’m not sure where we landed on that one.”
“Was that before or after he saw you with Oliver?”
“After.”
“Well, there you go,” she says as if it’s final.
“I know you want to take my side,” I say. “I appreciate that. I really do. But I think I’m going to have to break this thing off with Oliver.”
“Nina, sweetie,” she says. “I love you, but you have a terrible habit of taking a nice glass of lemonade and extracting the water and sugar. You’re supposed to turn the lemon into lemonade, not the other way around.”
“Do I really do that?”
“Yes,” she says pointedly.
“Are we talking about real lemons?”
“Your divorce is the lemon,” she says. “Your miscarriage and fertility troubles are a whole bowl of lemons. And now Dad has died, and Cassie
