Book Lovers

ON THE AIRPLANE, Libby insists we order Bloody Marys. Actually, she tries to pressure me into taking shots, but she settles for a Bloody Mary (and a plain tomato juice for herself). I’m not a big drinker myself, and morning alcohol has never been my thing. But this is my first vacation in a decade, and I’m so anxious I chug the drink in the first twenty minutes of our flight.

I don’t like traveling, I don’t like time off work, and I don’t like leaving my clients in the lurch. Or, in this case, one rather indispensable client: I spent the forty-eight hours pre-takeoff alternating between trying to talk Dusty down and pump her up.

We’ve already bumped the deadline for her next book back six months, and if she can’t start getting her editor pages this week, the whole publishing schedule will be thrown off.

She’s so superstitious about the drafting process that we don’t even know what she’s working on, but I fire off another encouraging you-can-do-it email on my phone anyway.

Libby shoots me a pointed look, brow arched. I set my phone down and hold up my hands, hoping to signal I’m present.

“So,” she says, appeased, and drags her cartoonishly large purse onto the folding tray table, “I figure now is as good a time as any to go over the plan.” She fishes out an actual, full-sized folder and flops it open.

“Oh my god, what is that?” I say. “Are you planning a bank robbery?”

“Heist, Sissy. Robbery sounds so déclassé, and we’re going to be wearing three-piece suits the whole time,” she says, not missing a beat as she pulls out two identical laminated sheets with the typed heading LIFE-CHANGING VACATION LIST.

“Who are you and where did you bury my sister?” I ask.

“I know how much you love a checklist,” she says brightly. “So I took the liberty of crafting one to create our perfect small-town adventure.”

I reach for one of the sheets. “I hope number one is ‘dance atop a Coyote Ugly bar.’ Though I’m not sure any manager worth her salt will allow that in your condition.”

She feigns offense. “Am I showing much?”

“Noooo,” I coo. “Not at all.”

“You’re so bad at lying. It looks like your face muscles are being controlled by a half dozen amateur puppeteers. Now, back to the bucket list.”

“Bucket list? Which of us is dying?”

She looks up, eyes sparkling. I’d say it’s the glint of mischief, but her eyes are pretty much always sparkly. “Birth is a kind of death,” she says, rubbing her tummy. “Death of the self. Death of sleep. Death of your ability not to pee yourself a little when you laugh. But I guess it’s more like a small-town romance novel experience list than a bucket list. It’s how we’re both going to be transformed via small-town magic into more relaxed versions of ourselves.”

I eye the list again. Before Libby got pregnant the first time, she briefly worked for a top-tier events planner (among many, many, many other things), so despite her natural tendency toward spontaneity (read: chaos), she’d made some strides in organization, even pre-motherhood. But this level of planning is so extremely . . . me, and I’m weirdly touched she’s put so much thought into this.

Also shocked to discover the first item on the list is Wear a flannel shirt. “I don’t own a flannel shirt,” I say.

Libby shrugs. “Me neither. We’ll have to thrift some—maybe we can find some cowgirl boots too.”

When we were teenagers, we’d spend hours sorting through junk for gems at our favorite Goodwill. I’d go for the sleek designer pieces and she’d beeline toward anything with color, fringe, or rhinestones.

Again I feel that heart-pinch sensation, like I’m missing her, like all our best moments are behind us. That, I remind myself, is why I’m doing this. By the time we get back to the city, whatever little gaps have cropped up between us will be stitched closed again.

“Flannel,” I say. “Got it.” The second item on the list is Bake something. Continuing the trend of us being polar opposites, my sister loves cooking, but since she’s usually beholden to the taste buds of a four- and three-year-old, she’s always saved her more adventurous recipes for our nights in together. My eyes skim down the list.

3. General makeover (let hair down/get bangs?)

4. Build something (literal, not figurative)

The first four items almost directly correlate to Libby’s Graveyard of Abandoned Potential Careers. Before her event-planning job, she’d briefly run an online vintage store that curated thrift store finds; and before that, she’d wanted to be a baker; and before that, a hairstylist; and for one very brief summer, she’d decided she wanted to be a carpenter because there weren’t “enough women in that field.” She was eight.

So everything so far makes sense—at least as much as this entire thing makes sense (which is to say, only in Libby’s brain)—but then my gaze catches on number five. “Ummm, what is this?”

“Go on at least two dates with locals,” she reads, visibly excited. “That one’s not for me.” She lifts her copy of the list, on which number five is struck through.

“Well, that doesn’t seem fair,” I say.

“You’ll recall that I’m married,” she says, “and five trillion weeks pregnant.”

“And I’m a career woman with a weekly housekeeping service, a spare bedroom I turned into a shoe closet, and a Sephora credit card. I don’t imagine my dream man is a lobster hunter.”

Libby lights up and scooches forward in her seat. “Exactly!” she says. “Look, Nora, you know I love your beautiful, Dewey-decimal-organized brain, but you date like you’re shopping for cars.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“And it always ends badly.”

“Oh, thank god.” I clutch my chest. “I was worried that wouldn’t come up soon.”

She tries to turn in her seat and grabs my hands on the armrest between us. “I’m just saying, you keep dating these guys who are exactly like you, with all the same priorities.”

“You can really shorten that sentence if you just say ‘men I’m compatible with.’ ”

“Sometimes opposites attract,” she says. “Think about all your exes. Think about Jakob and his cowgirl wife!”

Something cold lances through me at the mention of him; Libby doesn’t notice.

“The whole point of this trip is to step outside our comfort zones,” she insists. “To get a chance to . . . to be someone different! Besides, who knows? Maybe if you branch out a little, you’ll find your own life-changing love story instead of another walking checklist of a boyfriend.”

“I like dating checklists, thank you very much,” I say. “Checklists keep things simple. I mean, think about Mom, Lib.” She was constantly falling in love, and never with men who made any sense for her. It always came crashing down spectacularly, usually leaving her so broken she’d miss work or auditions, or do so badly at either that she’d get fired or cut.

“You’re nothing like Mom.” She says it flippantly, but it still stings. I’m well aware how little I take after our mother. I felt those shortcomings every second of every day after we lost her, when I was trying to keep us afloat.

And I know that’s not what Libby’s saying, but it still doesn’t feel all too different from every breakup I can remember: a long-winded monologue ending with something along the lines of FOR ALL I KNOW, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE FEELINGS.

“I mean, how often do you get to just let loose and not worry about how it fits into your perfect little plan?” Libby goes on. “You deserve to have some low-pressure fun, and frankly, I deserve to live vicariously through you. Ergo, the dates.”

“So am I allowed to take the earpiece out after dinner, or . . .”

Libby throws up her hands. “You know what, fine, forget number five! Even though it would be good for you. Even though I basically designed this whole trip for you to have your small-town romance novel experience, I guess—”

“Okay, okay!” I cry. “I’ll do the lumberjack dates, but they’d better look like Robert Redford.”

She squeals excitedly. “Young or old?”

I stare at her.

“Right,” she says. “Got it. So, moving on. Number six: Go skinny-dipping in a natural body of water.”

“What if there are bacteria that affect the baby or something?” I ask.

“Damn it,” she grumbles, frowning. “I really didn’t think all of this through as well as I thought.”

“Nonsense,” I say. “It’s an amazing list.”

“You’ll just have to go skinny-dipping without me,” she says, distracted.

“A lone thirty-two-year-old woman, naked in the local swimming hole. Sounds like a good way to get arrested.”

“Seven,” she reads. “Sleep under the stars. Eight: Attend a town function—i.e. local wedding or festival of some kind.”

I find a Sharpie in my bag and add funeral, bris, ladies’ night at the local roller rink.

“Trying to meet a hot ER doctor, are we?” Libby says, and I scratch out the part about the roller rink. Then I notice number nine.

Ride a horse.

“Again.” I wave vaguely toward Libby’s stomach. I cross out ride and change it to pet, and she gives a resigned sigh.

10. Start a fire (controlled)

11. Hike???? (Worth it???)

When she was sixteen, Libby had announced she’d be following her boyfriend out to work at Yellowstone for the summer, and Mom and I had howled with laughter. If there was one thing all Stephens girls had in common—aside from our love of books, vitamin-C serums, and pretty clothes—it was our avoidance of the great outdoors. The closest we ever came to hiking was a brisk walk in Central Park’s Ramble, and even then, there were usually paper bowls filled with food truck waffles and ice cream involved. Not exactly roughing it.

Needless to say, Libby dumped that guy two weeks before she was supposed to leave.

I tap the final line on the list: Save a local business. “You do realize we’re only here for a month.” Three weeks of just the two of us, and then Brendan and the girls will join. We’ve gotten a steep discount by staying so long, though how I’ll make it past week one, I have no idea.

The last time I traveled, I went home after two days. Even letting my mind wander toward that trip with Jakob is a mistake. I jerk my focus back to the present. This won’t be like that. I won’t let it. I can do this, for Libby.

“They always save a local business in small-town romances,” she’s saying. “We literally have no choice. I’m hoping for a down-on-its-luck goat farm.”

“Ooh,” I say. “Maybe we can get the ritualistic sacrifice community to band together in dramatic fashion to save the goats. For now, I mean. Eventually, they’ll have to die on the altar.”

“Well, of course.” Libby takes a swig of tomato juice. “That’s the biz, baby.”

Our taxi driver looks like Santa Claus, down to the red T-shirt and the suspenders holding his faded jeans up. But he drives like the cigar-smoking cabbie from Bill Murray’s Scrooged.

Little squeaks keep sneaking out of Libby when he takes a corner too fast, and at one point, I catch her whispering promises of safety to her belly.

“Sunshine Falls, eh?” the driver asks. He has to shout, because he’s made the unilateral decision to roll all four windows down. My hair is flapping so violently across my face I can barely see his watery eyes in the rearview mirror when I look up from my phone.

In the time that we were deplaning and collecting our luggage—a full hour, despite the fact that our flight was the only arrival in the dinky airport—the number of messages in my inbox has doubled. It looks like I just got back from an eight-week stranding on a desert island.

Nothing makes a coterie of already neurotic authors quite so neurotic as publishing’s annual slow season. Every delayed reply they get seems to trigger an avalanche of DOES MY EDITOR HATE ME?????? DO YOU HATE ME?? DOES EVERYONE HATE ME???

“Yep!” I shout back to our driver. Libby has her head between her knees now.

“You must have family in town,” he screams over the wind.

Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me, or maybe it’s the woman, but I’m not about to announce that we don’t know anyone here, so I just say, “What makes you say that?”

“Why else would you come here?” He laughs, whipping around a corner.

When we slow to a stop a few minutes later, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into applause like someone whose plane just made an emergency landing.

Libby sits up woozily, smoothing her gleaming (miraculously untangled) hair.

“Where . . . where are we?” I ask, looking around.

There’s nothing but shaggy, sun-blanched grass on either side of the narrow dirt road. Ahead, it ends abruptly, and a meadow slopes upward, riddled with sprays of yellow and purple wildflowers. A dead end.

Which begs the question: are we about to be murdered?

The driver ducks his head to peer up the slope. “Goode’s Lily Cottage, just over that hill.”

Libby and I duck our heads too, trying to get a better look. Halfway up the hill, a staircase appears out of nowhere. Maybe staircase is too generous a word. Wooden slats cut a path into the grassy hillside, like a series of small retaining walls.

Libby grimaces. “The listing did note it wasn’t wheelchair accessible.”

“Did it also mention we’d need a ski lift?”

Santa has already gotten out of the car to wrestle our luggage from the trunk. I clamber out after him into the brilliant sunlight, the heat instantly making my all-black travel uniform feel stiflingly thick. Where the dirt road ends, there’s a black mailbox, Goode’s Lily Cottage painted in curly white on it.

“There isn’t another way?” I ask. “A road that goes all the way up? My sister’s . . .”

I swear Libby sucks in, trying to look as un-pregnant as possible. “I’m fine,” she insists.

I briefly consider waving toward my four-inch suede heels next, but I don’t want to give the universe the satisfaction of leaning into the cliché.

“ ’Fraid I can’t get you any closer,” he replies as he climbs back into the car. “An acre or two back is Sally’s place. That’s the second-closest road, but still a good ways further.” He holds his business card out the window. “If you need another ride, use this number.”

Libby accepts the scrap of paper, and over her shoulder, I read: Hardy Weatherbee, Taxi Services and Unofficial Once in a Lifetime Tours. Her bark of laughter is lost beneath the roar of Hardy Weatherbee’s car reversing down the road like a bat out of hell.

“Well.” She winces, hunching her shoulders. “Maybe you should take your shoes off?”

With all our luggage, it’s going to take more than one trip, especially because there’s no way Libby’s carrying anything heavier than my heels.

The climb is steep, the heat sweltering, but when we crest the hill and see it, it is perfect: a winding path through shaggy, overgrown gardens to a small white cottage, its peaked roof a lovely burnt sienna. Its windows are ancient, single-paneled, and shutterless, and the only accent on the wall visible to us is a pale green arc of vines painted over the first-floor window. At the back of the house, gnarled trees press close, forest extending as far as I can see, and off to the left, in the meadow, a gazebo twined with wild grape stands within a smaller copse of trees. Sparkling glass-shard wind chimes and cutesy bird feeders sway in the branches, and the path cuts past a row of flowering bushes, curving onto a footbridge and then disappearing into the woods on the far side.

It’s like something out of a storybook.

No, it’s like something out of Once in a Lifetime. Charming. Quaint. Perfect.

“Oh my gosh.” Libby juts her chin toward the next few steps. “Do I have to keep going?”

I shake my head, still catching my breath. “I could tie a bedsheet around your ankle and drag you up.”

“What do I get if I make it to the top?”

“To make me dinner?” I say.

She laughs and loops her arm through mine, and we start up the final steps, inhaling the softly sweet smell of warm grass. My heart swells. Things already feel better than they have in months. It feels more us, before things amped up with my career and Libby’s family and we fell into separate rhythms.

In my purse, I hear my phone chime with an email and resist the urge to check it.

“Look at you,” Libby teases, “stopping to smell the literal roses.”

“I’m not City Nora anymore,” I say, “I’m laid-back, go-with-the-flow N—”

My phone chimes again, and I glance toward my purse, still keeping pace. It chimes twice more in quick succession, and then a third time.

I can’t take it. I stop, drop our bags, and start digging through my purse.

Libby gives me a look of wordless disapproval.

“Tomorrow,” I tell her, “I’ll start on being that other Nora.”

As different as we are, the second we start unpacking, it could not be more obvious that we’re cut from the same cloth: books, skin care products, and very fancy underwear. The Stephens Women Trifecta of Luxury, as passed down from Mom.

“Some things never change,” Libby sighs, a wistfully happy sound that folds over me like sunshine.

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

Within twenty minutes, I’ve settled in, washed my face, changed into fresh clothes, and booted up my laptop. Meanwhile, Libby put half her stuff away, then passed out on the king bed we’re sharing, her dog-eared copy of Once in a Lifetime facedown beside her on the quilt.

By then I’m desperately hungry, and it takes six more minutes of googling (the Wi-Fi is so slow, I have to use my phone as a hot spot) to confirm that the only place that delivers here is a pizza parlor.

Cooking isn’t an option. Back home, I eat fifty percent of my meals out, and another forty percent come from a mix of takeout and delivery.

Mom used to say New York was a great place to have no money. There’s so much free art and beauty, so much incredible, cheap food. But having money in New York, I remember her saying one winter as we window-shopped on the Upper East Side, Libby and I hanging on to her gloved hands, now that would be magical.

She never said it with bitterness, but instead with wonder, like, If things are already this good, then how must they be when you don’t have to worry about electric bills?

Not that she was in the acting business for the money (she was optimistic, not deluded). Most of her income came from waitressing tips at the diner, where she’d set me and Libby up with books or crayons for the length of her shift, or the occasional nannying job lax enough to let her tote us along until I was about eleven and she trusted me to stay home or at Freeman Books with Libby, under Mrs. Freeman’s watch.

Even without money, the three of us had been so happy in those days, wandering the city with street cart falafel or dollar pizza slices as big as our heads, dreaming up grand futures.

Thanks to the success of Once in a Lifetime, my life has started to resemble that imagined future.

But here, we can’t even get an order of pad thai brought to the door. We’ll have to walk the two miles into town.

When I try to shake Libby awake, she literally cusses me out in her sleep.

“I’m hungry, Lib.” I jog her shoulder and she falls onto her side, burying her face in a pillow.

“Bring me something back,” she grumbles.

“Don’t you want to see your favorite little hamlet?” I say, trying to sound enticing. “Don’t you want to see the apothecary where Old Man Whittaker almost overdoses?”

Without looking up, she flips me off.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll bring you something back.”

Hair scrubbed into a blunt little ponytail, sneakers on, I take off back down the sunny hillside toward the dirt road hemmed in by scraggly trees.

When the narrow lane finally T-bones into a proper street, I turn left, following the curving road downward.

As with the cottage, the town comes into view all at once.

One instant, I’m on a crumbling road on the side of a mountain, and the next, Sunshine Falls is spread out beneath me like the set from an old Western, tree-covered ridges jutting up at its back and an endless blue sky domed over it.

It’s a little grayer and shabbier than it looked in pictures, but at least I spot the stone church from Once, along with the green-and-white-striped awning over the general store and the lemon-yellow umbrellas outside the soda fountain.

There are a few people out, walking their dogs. An old man sits on a green metal bench reading a newspaper. A woman waters the flower boxes outside a hardware store, through whose window I see exactly zero customers.

Ahead, I spot an old white stone building on the corner, perfectly matched to the description of Mrs. Wilder’s old lending library in Once, my favorite setting in the book because it reminds me of rainy Saturday mornings when Mom parked me and Libby in front of a shelf of middle grade books at Freeman’s before hurrying across town for an audition.

When she got back, she’d take us for ice cream or for glazed pecans in Washington Square Park. We’d walk up and down the paths, reading the plaques on the benches, making up stories about who might’ve donated them.

Can you imagine living anywhere else? Mom used to say.

I couldn’t.

Once, in college, a group of my transplant friends had unanimously agreed they “could never raise kids in the city,” and I was shocked. It isn’t just that I loved growing up in the city—it’s that every time I see kids sleepily shuffling along en masse at the Met, or setting their boom box down on the train to break-dance for tips, or standing in awe in front of a world-class violinist playing beneath Rockefeller Center, I think, How amazing it is to be a part of this, to get to share this place with all these people.

And I love taking Bea and Tala to explore the city too, watching what mesmerizes a four-and-a-half-year-old and a newly three-year-old and which trappings of the city they walk right past, accepting as commonplace.

Mom came to New York hoping for the set of a Nora Ephron movie (my namesake), but the real New York is so much better. Because every kind of person is there, coexisting, sharing space and life.

Still, my love for New York doesn’t preclude me from being charmed by Sunshine falls.

In fact, I’m buzzing with excitement as I near the lending library. When I peer into the dark windows, the buzzing cuts out. The white stone facade of the building is exactly how Dusty described it, but inside, there’s nothing but flickering TVs and neon beer signs.

It’s not like I expected the widowed Mrs. Wilder to be an actual person, but Dusty made the lending library so vivid I was sure it was a real place.

The excitement sours, and when I think of Libby, it curdles entirely. This is not what she’s expecting, and I’m already trying to figure out how to manage her expectations, or at least present her with a fun consolation prize.

I pass a few empty storefronts before I reach the awning of the general store. One glance at the windows tells me there are no racks of fresh bread or barrels of old-fashioned candy waiting inside.

The glass panes are grimy with dust, and beyond them, what I see can only be described as random shit. Shelves and shelves of junk. Old computers, vacuum cleaners, box fans, dolls with ratty hair. It’s a pawnshop. And not a well-kept one.

Before I can make eye contact with the bespectacled man hunched at the desk, I push on until I come even with the yellow-umbrellaed patio on the far side of the street.

At least there are signs of life there, people milling in and out, a couple chatting with cups of coffee at one of the tables. That’s promising. Ish.

I check both ways for traffic (none) before running across the street. The gold-embossed sign over the doors reads MUG + SHOT, and there are people waiting inside at a counter.

I cup my hands around my eyes, trying to see through the glare on the glass door, just as the man on the far side of it starts to swing it open.