The Pub Across the Pond (41 page)

“What’s that smell?” he said.

“It must be garbage,” Bailey said, clenching her stomach.

As they approached the entrance to the beautiful limestone building where their penthouse awaited, Bailey’s attention was arrested by a patch of bright yellow tulips shimmering in the dredges of the afternoon sun. Bailey loved the month of May, littering the city with her favorite color. How simple happiness was sometimes; how free. The color yellow made Bailey happy. It was one of the things Brad loved about her, how much she loved the color yellow.

“Because of you,” Brad had said, “I’ll never think of yellow
the same way again. No matter what.” She was twenty-one when he said that to her. First she obsessed on how romantic that was, then she switched to analyzing the “No matter what.”

What did he mean by that? Was he already forecasting a future breakup? She’d forever changed his relationship to the color yellow. Was that supposed to be a consolation prize? And if so, was that enough?

“Bails,” he said when she complained to him. “Name all the things you can that are yellow. Go.”

The sun, flowers, signs, school buses, traffic lights, lemons, plastic squeeze containers of mustard, not to mention the mustard itself, urine—

“Urine?” Brad said. “Urine?!”

Gross maybe, but it still counted, and since he drank a lot of water, always carried around whatever new magic water was on the market, it was a logical choice.

For the rest of his life, simple, everyday and sometimes mundane, ugly objects or disgusting bodily fluids would remind him of her. And she supposed that was good enough.

If, each time he saw the color yellow, some semblance of a thought of her ran through him, yes, that would definitely be of some consolation. Although there was no court of law, no law-abiding-yellow rule that would force him to follow it, still it was out there, as energy, his proclamation. They were forever bound by the color yellow till-death-do-they-part. It would have to be enough.

Was that what love was? Forever changing you in the tiniest of ways, so that
no matter what,
you’d never be the same again? She had a million little references like that with Brad as well, probably way more than he had with her, but it was enough, knowing he would never look at yellow the same way ever again. And they were still together. She’d never faced “No matter what.” At their wedding he gave her a hundred yellow roses.

If Faye and Jason weren’t watching her every move, she’d love to cut a few of the tulips to bring up to the penthouse. Not that she’d ever really do such a thing. There were a million
things Bailey thought about doing, and very few she ever actually did. Brad was the risk taker, the kite soaring for the clouds; Bailey was the one with her feet on the ground, holding the string, poised to tug him back to earth whenever he’d gone too far. So, no stolen tulips for her clients today, but at least she had the chocolate-chip-scented candle in her purse. If only she’d had the time to actually bake chocolate-chip cookies. Imagine a New Yorker having that kind of time! She paused for one more look at the glorious bulbs and soothed her rule-following self with the thought that, once cut, the tulips would have lost most of their brilliance anyway. After all, it was the targeted ray of sunshine making them glitter, and even a wild child couldn’t cut down the sun.

“Hands behind back,” Bailey said. “Smile, but not too much.”

“I just don’t get it,” Jason said. “How come I can smell the garbage but I can’t see it?”

Bailey dug the candle out of her purse and held it up. “Maybe I should light this now,” she said.