London Is the Best City in America by Laura Dave Read Free Book Online

keeping her eyes averted, “you did have a visitor earlier this evening. He was very disappointed to have missed you.”
    “What are you talking about?” I said. I couldn’t imagine who would have come by to see me. I couldn’t even think of anyone I had told that I was coming home. I hadn’t told anybody. I knew I hadn’t. Because I didn’t talk to anybody from home—the entirety of my exchanges with friends from high school were exceedingly limited since I dropped out of a life I thought they could recognize. It wasn’t that they all were becoming doctors and lawyers and bankers—though many of them were. It was more that they were becoming something. And I—one fragmentary interview at a time—wasn’t.
    My mom put down her knife in a grand gesture of emphasis. “I’m talking about Justin Silverman,” she said. “Justin Silverman!”
    Justin Silverman and I had “gone out” in junior high before either of us was allowed to go out anywhere without our parents. “I don’t understand,” my mother loved saying back then, “how are you going out with someone you never go anywhere with?” If she didn’t dial down her excitement level, I was going to have to remind her of that.
    “Justin Silverman came by?” I said. “To see me?”
    “Well, Justin Silverman’s mom,” she said. “But the point is, Justin just graduated at the very top of his class from Northwestern Law School, and he’s back in New York now! Is that not so exciting?”
    Here we went. This was the first of what I knew would be many attempts by my mother to remind me, over the next couple of days, of the many opportunities in New York—men, jobs, hope—all the things that I was giving up in my makeshift life too far from home.
    “It’s so exciting, what he’s doing. All this work with intellectual property. You know who would be totally interested in all the work he’s doing with intellectual property? You. Which is why I told Evelyn to bring him by the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night so the two of you could catch up.”
    “What? Mom, why on earth would you do that?”
    “Emmy. Because. Justin’s back in New York now.”
    “Does he know I’m not back in New York now?”
    She put the apple down, looking up at me. “What can it possibly hurt to spend five minutes with an old friend? Evelyn says he’s gotten very handsome.”
    “Evelyn is his mother.”
    “So shouldn’t she know?”
    I crossed my hands over my chest, in amazement at this standoff. There was not—and never had been—a way to argue with my mom. At least not one that I had found. And before I could even not attempt to this time, Josh walked into the kitchen, coming up behind our mom.
    He put his hands on her shoulders, the same way I had moments before, and leaned in to give her a kiss hello on the cheek. “You okay?” he asked.
    She shrugged, giving off a little sigh. But then she turned and actually looked up at him, and a smile started growing on her face. He matched her smile—the same half-baked expression they each were prone to wearing—an undeniable reminder of how alike they looked: same baby nose, hazel eyes. Same skin. Watching them, from my side of the counter, I had the feeling I used to have when I was little—that she must love him more because he looked so much more like her than I did. Now, though, that feeling held relief in it instead of the opposite.
    Berringer appeared in the kitchen doorway, his T-shirt wrinkled from his fake nap, his dolphin boxer shorts sneaking out from beneath the top of his jeans.
    I wanted to reach out and touch them.
    My mom looked over at him, wiping her hands on her robe. “Jaime here really saved the day with everything,” she said. “They probably would have slept in the RV if it weren’t for you.”
    He smiled. “You just got to know how to talk to people,” he said.
    “Is that what you’ve got to know?” I said, meeting his eyes. He looked back at me, but didn’t say anything.
    Josh looked