Who Do You Love(49)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

After we’d freshened up, Nana gave me a map of the city and told me her plans. She was meeting old friends for a late lunch, then accompanying them to see the Barnes collection, out on the Main Line. Then she’d return to the room for her afternoon siesta—a custom she strongly believed Americans should adopt—and at eight o’clock we’d have dinner in the hotel.

“I want you to be careful,” she told me, winding a scarf around her neck. “You’re a beautiful young lady, and you’re old enough to know your own mind, but you haven’t seen this boy in years. You might find that you don’t feel the same way about him that you did two summers ago.”

“I do,” I said . . . but the truth was, I’d wondered about that myself. What if he didn’t look good or smell good, the way he had in Atlanta? What if I looked at him and just saw an ordinary guy?

Nana kissed my cheek and squeezed my hand. I checked myself in the mirror—the long white eyelet sundress with the tiered skirt that I’d bought, and my new boots, ankle high with a low heel, pale-blue leather with embroidered birds and flowers in turquoise and silver and pink. Cowgirl boots had been the fad at my school, and I’d asked for and received my pair for Chanukah. I glossed my lips, gave my hair a final spritz of spray, then took the elevator to the lobby and stepped out the door.

There was a fountain in front of the hotel. At its center was a bronze sculpture of a slender girl in an ankle-length dress, balanced on one foot like she was running. Andy was waiting in front of the fountain, in a plain blue T-shirt and jeans. His hair was still short, but he looked bigger, more solid and adult than I’d remembered, as he raised a hand in greeting and his lips formed my name.

I had imagined a scene where I’d throw myself into his arms, where he’d lift me up, holding me against him, raining kisses down on my face. The reality was more awkward, with the two of us looking but not touching, not quite meeting each other’s eyes. Even with all the letters, all the calls, so much time had gone by. His shoulders had filled out; his back looked broader; his face looked even less like a boy’s face, more like a man’s. “You look pretty,” he said shyly. He started to reach for my hand, then stopped and reached up to tug gently at a curl. I was the one who took his hand and pulled him close, playfully bumping my hip against his, feeling something inside of me start to unclench as I thought, This will be fine.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. Up in the hotel room, I had been, but now the logistics of having a meal—finding a place, ordering the food, chewing, swallowing, paying the bill—seemed overwhelming and endless, fraught with dozens of possibilities for potential shame. What if I spilled something, or he made dumb jokes with the waitress, the way my great-uncle Si sometimes did? (“It’s too bad a nice place like this doesn’t allow tipping” was one of his favorites.)

“Are you? Hungry?” I asked Andy.

“I’m kind of always hungry,” he said, and I smiled, remembering the way my brother used to come home from school, take a mixing bowl, fill it with cereal, dump in a quart of milk, and eat the whole thing, and then follow it up with an enormous dinner an hour and a half later. “Come on,” he said.

We walked down Walnut Street, past blocks of fancy shops, and crossed Broad, which, Andy explained, was the city’s major thoroughfare. “Every May they shut down the street and there’s a race, the Broad Street Run. It’s ten miles long.”

“Have you ever done it?”

He smiled at me. “I won the eighteen-and-under age division last year.”

“Of course that’s only because I didn’t enter.”

“Oh, you,” he said, the way he’d said it in Atlanta, before the horrible fight with Bethie. I pulled him close and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him, feeling beautiful as the wind swirled my dress around my ankles.

The Reading Terminal was filled with hundreds of people, dozens of stands, and all kinds of mouthwatering smells—cinnamon rolls and doughnuts, pork sandwiches and roast turkey, falafel and gyros and dumplings. Andy and I walked past the places that sold Greek food and Mexican food, deli and sushi. Then he found us a table and asked what I wanted. “I don’t know,” I said. “It all looks so good.”

“I’ll surprise you,” he said, and came back in ten minutes with a roast pork sandwich with greens and sharp provolone, two warm pretzels, glistening with butter, and a quart of soup filled with noodles and dumplings. “A little of everything,” he said, and even though I thought I would be nervous or feel awkward, the sandwich was so delicious that I devoured half of it, then wiped my mouth and daintily dipped a chunk of pretzel into the cup of honey mustard that had come with it. “Better than the Home Free stuff,” he said, and I said, “Oh, God, remember those sandwiches?”