Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom

Author:Amy Bloom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Jewish fiction, Humorous stories, Teenage girls, Jewish teenagers - Fiction, New York (N.Y.) - Fiction, New York (N.Y.), Contemporary, Teenage girls - Fiction, General, Romance, Jewish teenagers, Bildungsromane, Fiction, Love stories
ISBN: 9780375750229
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1998-01-27T05:10:55.474845+00:00

Elizabeth put the check in her jewelry box until she could figure out what to do with it.

May God forgive me.

Max said this every morning, drinking a beer in the bathroom. Clearly, his life would get much better or much worse very soon. He’d been planning a strategy for weeks. He sent her a bouquet of pink and yellow calla lilies with a note of condolence. He sent a funny postcard of a woman scolding a cat, saying “And you call yourself a dog,” and signed it Max Stone. He called when he thought her mother might be gone and said, “I’d like a chance to say good-bye before you go off.”

She said she’d meet him for coffee. He wouldn’t talk about getting back together right away. He wouldn’t say “share.” It sounded too much like what he really wanted, a life forever together. Maybe he’d mention that if she was planning to be around for the summer he was thinking of renting a small place for himself, since Greta and the boys would be away. Maybe she’d like to stay there with him. Maybe he could get two places, across the hall from each other. Maybe he’d just beg her to spend the summer with him, give him two months before she went off to college and found her next romance, her next bareback-riding hero, her future husband. There was something to be said for frank and honest groveling.

Sitting with Elizabeth in a diner twenty miles from Great Neck, his hands circling her wrists, Max could not remember what he had planned to say. Her face was a little thinner. New contact lenses made her eyes brightly pink and round as little lightbulbs. She looked bored.

“I’d love to have you visit me this summer. I might take a little place in the city. Do you think that might be fun? Or maybe a cabin in the Berkshires?”

“I don’t know.” She made a nest of torn sugar packets around her coffee cup.

“Think it over. It’s the end of June now. If you could decide this week, I could start looking. We could start looking, if you felt like it.”

Max and Elizabeth shared, for twenty seconds, exactly the same mental picture: Max and Elizabeth trudging from walk-up to walk-up, meeting a dozen rental agents whose pleasant surprise at this nice father-daughter pair curdles before the plumbing’s been tested.

“No, I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell you next week.”

“I’ll take maybe, milacku. Maybe yes? Is that yes for a visit or yes for—for a long visit?”

Elizabeth was done. Between his fat shrimp fingers around her wrist and the last sugar packet. Done. Now everything out of her mouth would be a lie, and she smiled like he was her favorite person.

“Maybe yes. Maybe very likely yes, a long visit. I could stay for a month or six weeks if you want, but I don’t even want to talk about it for another week, okay? There’s been too much going on.”

“Okay, baby girl.” He kissed each of the ten fingers he’d been squeezing.

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