with all kinds of people in all kinds of places. Penny was the kind of person who could go into a convenience store for a Coke and come out soul mates with the cashier.
We also seemed to operate on the same kind of schedule; it was a happy day when we admitted to each other that we loved taking the phone off the hook and napping in the mid-afternoons. “Do you sleep more than twenty minutes?” I asked. I felt a little guilty that my naps lasted thirty or even forty-five minutes. “I have gone for two hours!” she said, and I high-fived her.
We planned on alternating extravagant hotels with cheap motels on our road trip. “Maybe we’ll find a crumbly old pink one!” Penny said. “With one of those pools the size of a puddle!” It was our belief that tacky motels would be much more interesting, even if the beds gave pause. We wanted to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and take donkeys down into the Grand Canyon. We wanted to feel the power of the vortexes in Sedona, Arizona, and to buy some crystals there. Oh, we had plans. So many plans that I kept putting off.
“But when will you stop?” she would ask, year after year, and I would say, “Something will tell me when.” Once, exasperated, she said, “You act like there’s all the time in the world, and there isn’t!” To this I had no reply.
That Penny and Brice Mueller lived right next door to me was a gift of immeasurable proportion. I used to go into their house as though it were my own. We watched television a couple of nights a week and we often made dinners and ate together. Every Sunday, we used my living room to read the papers while we ate caramel rolls from Keys Café; the three of us were almost roommates. I used to tell them that they, more than anyone else I had ever met, supported my theory that people are attracted to those who look like themselves. Brice and Penny were both very tall, with strawberry-blond hair, wide eyes, freckled arms and legs. Even the shape of their noses was similar. Where they differed was in their personalities: Penny was always up for almost anything; Brice was far more cautious. Penny was an optimist, too, sometimes outright irritating in her consistently bright outlook; Brice had his moods. But they were good together; they loved each other, and they were so much fun to be around.
When Brice’s birthday was coming up, I hid his presents in my bedroom closet. I hid Penny’s in the furnace room; she was in my closet too often for me to risk putting anything there. There were times when I was at their house late at night and moaned about being too tired to walk across the lawn to my own house. They would invite me to stay and I would always say that was ridiculous and rally myself to make the short trip. But I think if I’d ever said, “Oh hell, why don’t I just move in?” they would have looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Sure!”
Eight months ago, Penny was diagnosed with a fast-moving cancer; she died four months later. Brice stayed in the house for another month. Then he came over one night with a bottle of wine and told me he knew he wasn’t supposed to make any rash moves, everyone had told him that, including me, but the hell with it, he was going to move back to New York. He said he couldn’t stand being in the house—or the city, or the state, or the Midwest—without her. When we had finished the bottle, he said, “You know, Penny told me that when she died, I should marry you.”
I smiled. “I know. She told me the same thing, that I should marry you. So what did you say, when she told you that?”
“What did you say?” Brice asked.
“Okay. Let’s both answer on three. One … two …”
On three, we both said, “Naaaah.”
“Not that I don’t love you,” Brice said, quickly.
“Or I you.”
“But …” he said.
“But,” I agreed.
He got up and stood looking out onto the street for a while, his hands on his hips like a quarterback. Then he turned and said, “Well.”
“Take care of yourself, B,” I said, and I watched him walk back to his house—their house—his head hung low.
A moving van pulled away from that house two weeks later, and