“I love everything about your idea and I also think you’re crazy,” I say, admiringly, as he hands me thumbtacks from a plastic container in his backpack pocket.
“I know,” he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. Now they’re bright green, it seems. “Let’s do it. Let’s go make public art.”
It’s like a sip of champagne; his thrill is contagious and I catch it too. We race, watching behind us, in front of us, beside us, making sure we’re not caught by whoever it is that catches people doing what we’re doing. We execute our first mission as impromptu practitioners of found love, tacking up the dozen copies of the letter all along various doorframes on Mr. and Mrs. Lipshitz’s block. An older woman walks a pug with a pink collar, and eyes us curiously. My heart beats faster in worry, but the woman says nothing as she passes us leaving messages of love.
Found love. Lettered love. Love from a stranger. Love on the street. Messages of love all around. I breathe them on the air, I imprint them on the walls, I spread my hopes and dreams for the way things could have been across the city streets.
I look at our handiwork—each piece of ivory-colored paper, curling at the edges, like parchment, then the words in curving script, letters shaped like they were made in another century. I don’t know who will see them, but the possibility that someone will stop and read and realize that they too are surrounded by love for just a moment here in this city of millions unclenches some of the pain inside me.
I could get used to this feeling. Buoyed by the lightness inside of me, I throw my arms around Lane and hug him tightly.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“For what?” His voice is nervous, worried.
“For being my friend,” I say, as I untangle myself from his arms.
He waves a hand in the air as if to say it’s no big deal. “Easiest thing I’ve ever done,” he says.
But it’s more than easy. It’s vital—this friendship. No one else knows all my family secrets, or all my family shame, or all my family guilt. And no one else knows how much I want to mend all the mistakes I have made my whole life over.
And in this moment, his friendship is even better than a crush.
*
After we leave the first letter, I head to my dad’s. He’s making a mushroom risotto that smells delicious. I’m tempted to ask if he misses cooking with my mom, laughing in the kitchen with her, and kissing the back of her neck while she arranged Goudas and Bries on a serving plate. I want to ask if he wishes I never told him what she’d done, if he wants to go back to whatever blissfully ignorant state he was living in just so we could all be together again.
I’m dying to know if I ruined cooking for him.
He was making pasta primavera the night I told him. “Mom is having another affair and it’s not the first time she’s fooled around on you. Mom has been having affairs since I was nine or ten years old and she has men over at the house all the time when you’re not around and she does everything with them,” I began and then went on and on. He stopped stirring, stopped moving. Face white as a sheet, eyes glazed.
Soon the water from the pot boiled over, spilling onto the stove. He didn’t move, so I grabbed a towel, cleaned it up, turned off the burner, and said I was sorry a million times. He unfroze and said it wasn’t my fault, none of it was my fault, that I should never ever be sorry for what I told him. Then he called the pizza place down the street and had them deliver a cheese pie and we ate the whole thing.
In the morning, I found the pizza box had been stabbed many times.
Now, as he finishes the risotto and spoons it onto plates, I can’t help but wonder if cooking is a bitter reminder of my mom. But I don’t want to stir up painful memories.
“How is the love letter exhibit going?” I ask when he sits down with the plates and I push my calculus homework to the side of his dark-brown oak dining room table, a newish table, because this place is still relatively new. We are in his apartment—my other home—a fifth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up with windows that look out over my dad’s quiet street. There’s just a sliver of a view of the Hudson River and New Jersey if you push your face as far as you can against the corner of the window. It is homey in its own way, with exposed brick and art on the walls, mostly prints of my dad’s favorites, works by Édouard Manet and Willem Claesz Heda, by Francesco Hayez and Roy Lichtenstein, but also originals from newer artists, like one of the photographs from his exhibit.
“It’s going really well,” he says with a smile, then takes a bite of his culinary creation. He nods several times, pleased with his proficiency in the kitchen. “You should meet the photographer behind that one,” he says, gesturing to the photo he bought. “She’s really fantastic. Nineteen, an art student at NYU, very talented and very easy to talk to. Her name is Amy Vaughn.”
“Got a crush on her?”
He pretends to laugh. Then he turns serious. “I hope you know I wouldn’t have a crush on someone that much younger than I am. Because you know how I feel about that.”
“Dad, relax. I was just kidding.”
“I mean it, though. It’s not appropriate for a man my age to date a college student.”
“Obviously,” I say quickly.
His face turns pinkish blotchy and he clears his throat. “I didn’t mean it like that, Kennedy. I mean in general, there is a certain acceptable age range that people should date in.”