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“I only had you for the blink of an eye,” he says. She laughs. “You had me an entire lifetime. All of mine.” “That wasn’t enough.”
“Isn’t it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it’s just children and old people who laugh.”
“The amount I love you, Noah,” she would tell him with her lips to his ear after she read fairy tales about elves and he was just about to fall asleep, “the sky will never be that big.”
“We’ll have plenty of chances to practice. You’ll be good at it. Almost all grown adults walk around full of regret over a good-bye they wish they’d been able to go back and say better. Our good-bye doesn’t have to be like that, you’ll be able to keep redoing it until it’s perfect. And once it’s perfect, that’s when your feet will touch the ground and I’ll be in space, and there won’t be anything to be afraid of.”
“You were never easy, darling difficult sulky you, never diplomatic. You might even have been easy to dislike at times. But no one, absolutely no one, would dare tell me you were hard to love.”
“I mean on the inside. Does it hurt on the inside?” “It hurts less and less. That’s one good thing about forgetting things. You forget the things that hurt too.”
“I always knew who I was with you. You were my shortcut,” Grandpa confides.
“We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.” “An ordinarily extraordinary life.”
she had the strongest feelings I ever experienced in a person, when she got angry she could empty a full bar of grown men, and when she was happy . . . there was no defending yourself against that, Noahnoah. She was a force of nature. Everything I am came from her, she was my Big Bang.”
“She got lost in my heart, I think. Couldn’t find her way out. Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.”
“Tell me that we danced, Noahnoah. Tell me that that’s what it’s like to fall in love, like you don’t have room for yourself in your own feet.”
“Noahnoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back. Live your life. It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”
“And I don’t think you need to be scared of forgetting me,” the boy says after a moment’s consideration. “No?” The corners of the boy’s mouth reach his earlobes. “No. Because if you forget me then you’ll just get the chance to get to know me again. And you’ll like that, because I’m actually a pretty cool person to get to know.” Grandpa laughs and the square shakes. He knows no greater blessing.
“You were a busy man,” she whispers, regret filling every word because she knows she bears the same guilt. “And now Ted is a busy man,” he says. “But the universe gave you both Noah. He’s the bridge between you.
It’s a big universe to be angry at but a long life to have company in.
