Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,32

He was a handsome young man, but I’d known a lot of handsome young men in my time, so I was cautious. It took months of persuasion on his part before I agreed to have dinner with him. We were married within the year, and soon after, we left America and began to travel the world together.”

The name Nathaniel reminded me of the voice mail I’d deleted last night. He was definitely a real person, but God only knew why Zelda was pretending he was her husband.

Did you tell him all the same stuff you’re telling me?

“Of course. He was bound to catch on sooner or later.”

And he believed you?

“He did.” Zelda drank off the rest of her tea. “Now, do you have any more questions, Parker Santé, or are you ready to admit defeat?”

I considered. She’d done as good a job as anyone could have; I hadn’t spotted a single hole in her story. But that hardly mattered when the story she was trying to sell me involved immortality, multiple marriages, and hanging out with the Brothers Grimm. Basically, the whole thing was a hole.

Sorry, I wrote. But no.

BELIEVE IT

“WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHAT else to tell you,” Zelda said. “I’ve done everything I can.”

I write stories too, Zelda. It’s not that hard.

“It is for me. I don’t have that talent. I can only tell things as they are.”

But you don’t actually expect me to believe you’re immortal just because you say so, do you? I’m not stupid.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Parker, and I didn’t say I was immortal. I just don’t seem to age. I have every confidence that when I jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, that will be the end of things.”

See, there you go again. More crazy shit you want me to believe just because I like you. You say you’re going to kill yourself so I’ll feel sorry for you or something, and you make up this husband—

Zelda reached across the table and ripped out the page of the journal I’d been writing on. She crumpled it up into a ball and tossed it over the railing, into the stream. She was angry now, or pretending to be anyway; I could almost see the waves crashing in her eyes.

“Parker, do you want me to leave?”

Her tone was dead serious, and I suddenly remembered this vacation my mom and dad had taken me on, back when I was really little. We’d spent a whole week fishing off some huge boat in Alaska, along with a bunch of other people and this really intense fisherman-captain dude whose beard was so thick you probably could’ve hidden a full-grown salmon in it. The trip was crazy boring up until the third day, when I got my first bite. All at once, everybody on deck started cheering, and this fish was thrashing around for its smelly life, and I was pulling and pulling, and the line was jumping like an EKG during a heart attack, and the intense fisherman-captain dude was watching with this look on his face like he would be evaluating my viability as a human being based on whether or not I landed this stupid fish. I fought and I fought and I fought . . . and then everything went slack. The cheering died. The fisherman turned away. I’d lost the fish.

And you’d think I wouldn’t have given a shit. I mean, so I didn’t have a fish, right? Who cared? One minute earlier, I hadn’t had a fish either. But somehow that one minute of struggle had transformed the very concept of not having a fish, from something that didn’t matter at all to something that mattered a whole lot.

If I’d never met Zelda, well, that would have been one thing. But now that I had her, or almost had her, I couldn’t stand the idea of losing her. Which I realize makes it sound like I’m comparing her to a fish. But whatever—it’s a metaphor. Deal with it.

“Parker, do you want me to leave?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Then you have to believe me. Because I’m not going to spend what is probably my last day on earth trying to convince someone I’m not a liar. I promise you that, in exchange, I’ll believe everything you tell me as well, even though you’re an admitted thief, misanthrope, school skipper, and all-around malcontent.”

I’ll try, I wrote on a fresh page.

“No. Not good enough.” She pushed our cups of tea to the edge of