The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,89
in the falafel queue, and he ducks away to get in line.
Addie watches him step up to the counter window and order, watches the middle-aged woman working the truck as she leans forward, elbows on the sill, watches them talk, Henry nodding solemnly. The line is growing behind him, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice. She’s not smiling exactly; if anything, she looks on the verge of tears as she reaches out and takes his hand, squeezes it.
“Next!”
Addie blinks, gets to the front of her own line, spends the last of her stolen cash on a lamb gyro and a blueberry soda, finds herself wishing for the first time in a while that she had a credit card, or more to her name than the clothes on her back and the change in her pocket. Wishes that things didn’t seem to slip through her fingers like sand, that she could have a thing without stealing it first.
“You’re looking at that sandwich like it broke your heart.”
Addie looks up at Henry, cracks a smile. “It looks so good,” she says. “I’m just thinking of how sad I’ll be when it’s gone.”
He sighs in mock lament. “The worst part of every meal is when it ends.”
They take their spoils and stake out a slope of grass just inside the park, a pool of quickly thinning light. Henry adds the falafel and an order of dumplings to her gyro and fries, and they share, trading bites like cards in a game of gin.
Henry reaches for the falafel, and Addie remembers the woman in the window.
“What was that?” she asks. “Back there at the truck, the woman working, she looked like she was about to cry. Do you know her?”
Henry shakes his head. “She said I reminded her of her son.”
Addie stares at him. It isn’t a lie, she doesn’t think, but it’s not entirely the truth, either. There’s something he isn’t saying, but she doesn’t know how to ask. She spears a dumpling and pops it in her mouth.
Food is one of the best things about being alive.
Not just food. Good food. There is a chasm between sustenance and satisfaction, and while she spent the better part of three hundred years eating to stave off the pangs of hunger, she has spent the last fifty delighting in the discovery of flavor. So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.
She wipes the grease from her fingers and lies back in the grass beside Henry, feeling wonderfully full. She knows it will not last. That fullness is like everything else in her life. It always wears away too soon. But here, and now, she feels … perfect.
She closes her eyes, and smiles, and thinks she could stay here all night, despite the growing cold, let the dusk give way to dark, burrow against Henry and hope for stars.
A bright chime sounds in his coat pocket.
Henry answers. “Hey, Bea,” he starts, and then abruptly sits up. Addie can only hear half the call, but she can guess at the rest.
“No, of course I didn’t forget. I know, I’m late, I’m sorry. I’m on my way. Yeah, I remember.”
Henry hangs up, puts his head in his hands.
“Bea’s having a dinner party. And I was meant to bring dessert.”
He looks back at the food trucks, as if one of them might hold the answer, looks at the sky, which has gone from dusk to dim, runs his hands through his hair, lets out a soft and muttered stream of cursing. But there’s no time to wallow now, not when he is late.
“Come on,” says Addie, pulling him to his feet. “I know a place.”
* * *
The best French bakery in Brooklyn has no sign.
Marked by only a butter yellow awning, a narrow glass window between two broad brick storefronts, it belongs to a man named Michel. Every morning before dawn, he arrives, and begins the slow assembly of his art. Apple tarts, the fruit sliced thin as paper, and operas, the tops dusted with cocoa, and petit fours coated in marzipan and small, piped roses.
The shop is closed now, but she can see the shadow of its owner as he moves through the kitchen at its back, and Addie raps her knuckles on the glass door, and waits.
“Are you sure about this?” asks Henry as the shape shuffles forward, cracks the door.
“We are closed,” he says, in a heavy accent, and Addie slips from English