the beard. Just the thought of it pulls a band of nostalgia tight in my chest. “Well, I guess that’s why I had to write Milkweed,” he says.
I narrow my eyes, trying to puzzle out his meaning. “I don’t follow.”
“To remind myself that they were worth it.” He laughs. “They were pretty ornery at the end.”
I’m still lost. “Worth what?”
Sam looks at me as if I’m being exceptionally slow, and a half smile curves his mouth. “Worth losing you.”
twenty-one
“WHY AM I SO terrible with men?”
The sun is dipping below the tree line, and Charlie’s dark hair is a wild halo in the breeze. “I don’t think you’re bad with men—”
She stops when she catches my Come ON face. My You have got to be kidding face. Charlie knows my track record better than anyone: I am terrible with men.
“I’m serious,” she says, eyes back across the field again, to where the set crew is putting the finishing touches on the barn for tonight’s shoot. “And even if you were, who could blame you? It’s not like you’ve had the best examples to follow. Your parents were a mess when they were together. Your mom’s never dated, and your dad needs to just . . . stop. Nana never remarried. My parents were a hot mess, too, so I’m not winning any awards in the romance department either. If you suck at this, it’s because you’ve never actually seen what a normal relationship is supposed to look like.”
I consider this as I look out over the landscape. I’m nervous about tonight’s shoot because it’s going to be intense, even if things go exactly the way they should. The farm might be over two hundred acres, but with my dad around it feels entirely too small. With Sam there it feels even smaller. I thought settling into some kind of quasi-friendship would make things easier between us, but instead it’s only made things more confusing.
Anger was easier, and it was definitely safer.
The thought that I’ve played a woman in a healthy relationship more times than I’ve actually been one is depressing.
“I’m thirty-two, Charlie. Thirty-two and eternally single, with crippling daddy and abandonment issues. I thought Dad and I would finally connect, and that’s all gone to shit. I thought I’d finally moved on from Sam, but now all of that is a lie, too. At least you were engaged.”
“For six months,” she reminds me.
“Yeah, but you got that far. The farthest I got was Chris saying ‘I love you,’ and me replying with ‘You’re the best.’ ”
She laughs. “Maybe that’s what drove him to drink.”
“Charlie Zhao, you are the fucking devil.”
“Didn’t you get to the I-love-you’s with Pete?”
“Nope.”
“Evan?”
Ah, Evan. Sweet Evan only bothered with me for five months. “Nope again. Well,” I correct, “he said it. And I think I tried to improve on my ‘You’re the best’ and came up with ‘That makes me so happy to hear.’ ”
Charlie leans between her knees, cracking up.
“I keep reading the script and thinking, ‘Wow, Sam wrote this.’ ” I draw a circle in the soil with a scraggly twig. “The terrible person I built up in my head wrote this beautiful thing. That has to mean something, right? That he understands women, or that he’s good enough inside to have done this? Or maybe it’s that Ellen”—I shake my head and correct myself—“Roberta was just that great? I think of everything she went through: pregnant at sixteen, put her husband through law school only to have him leave her and their son and run off with someone else. Her dad is sick. She falls in love with a man the whole town is against and yet she still puts the work in to build up their community and help the very same people who would have turned her away. She didn’t close herself off. She didn’t move from one pointless, meaningless relationship to another. She’s just this wonderful person who made mistakes and learned from them and kept going.”
Charlie appraises me with a small tilt of her head. “You’re pretty great yourself, you know.”
I try to laugh but it sounds hollow and cynical. “Do you remember those art projects we helped the kids with at YMCA camp? You fill in the entire paper with different colors, and then go over it with black crayon? You think it’s just a black picture, but when you scratch at the surface there’s all this . . . stuff underneath. That’s a terrible analogy, but it’s