Treasure Island!!!

thing.”
    “But she doesn’t want that,” Adrianna said when my father had fetched a six-inch knife, “that’s for boning chicken.”
    My mother passed him the pie, and he cut wedges for everyone, destroying Adrianna with his efficiency.
    “Is there going to be ice cream with this?” I said.
    “No,” Adrianna said crossly.
    “If people ate less chicken,” Rena observed, “the reduction of greenhouse gases would be something along the lines of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year.”
    “Okay, then let’s go on,” I said. While they had been rattling around about the pie, I’d taken a moment to formulate my position. “You’re all thinking I’m in a bad way: no job, no apartment, no boyfriend, no plans, my whole future gone to wreck, but do you want to know what? I don’t care because
I
did it! After a lifetime of drifting and not-deciding anything, I
found
the book, I
made
the plan, and yes, I bungled up my job—but only because I no longer valued it. As for the parrot, it was I who found him, and I who took him to Lars, and when Lars and I weren’t working out, you know what?
I
broke that up too!”
    “Not to get technical, but I broke up with you,” Lars said.
    “Not now, Lars.” My speech was roughly modeled on the one Jim Hawkins gives in the enemy’s camp, and I was extremely pleased to realize I knew so much of it by heart. “I’ve had the top of this business from the first,” I went on. “You can do your inexplicable intervention or you can leave me alone, but I no more fear you than I fear a fly.”
    “You do fear flies,” Adrianna said blandly. “You’re always asking me to go after them.”
    “Jesus!” I threw down my fork. “Just bluebottles, and will everybody stop interrupting?”
    “But I want a turn to speak too,” Lars said. “Adrianna said to write down what we—” He fumbled with the paper and stood up, bumping the table with his shin and rattling the teacups. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, you know.” He emitted a convulsive nervous cough and then bore down on his piece of paper (graph paper, green tint). “When we first broke up, I felt as though you had sort of taken a dump on our relationship—excuse my French—but then I thought a while and realized it was more complicated.”
    “I should hope so,” I interrupted. “God, why did I waste all that time with—”
    “And I thought a lot about the beginning, when we first fell in love. The burritos. The hanging out. We never tried to fix each other, we enjoyed each other. Then you met the book and developed a new attitude, and although I admire you for striving, even when it seems you don’t know what exactly you’re striving for, I don’t think you had to go through all that. To be a good person I mean. I think you were already fine; the more I think about it, I know you were fine. So when Adrianna asked if I would come and help you drop the book, I said yes, but I did it with a secret motive. Actually, after you left, I got into therapy”—here his neck began to effloresce in red patches—“and I figured out that you were right: I
had
been lying to my mother, and now that I can talk more openly to her—about a few things—it’s better. Which I wanted to tell you and say thanks. So, I don’t want to say you have to give up the book, because that would be—well, kind of hypocritical, and also, frankly, condescending.”
    “Lars,” Adrianna broke in. “This is a total breach of trust.”
    “But if you do decide, on your own to give it up, and want to go back to an emotionally supportive kind of relationship, well, you know where I live. I changed the locks, but I could make you a key.”
    “This is good boy,” Nancy said. She was smiling despite a mouth full of pie.
    “Jeez, now what?” Adrianna rolled her eyes. “Are you going to propose to her?”
    Lars coughed uneasily. “No. I thought—I mean, I’m trying to say—I miss you is all.”
    I missed him too, though who can trace the arc of an emotion in its entirety? I wanted him to miss me and he was a great kisser, but as Adrianna had snarkily pointed out: if he loved me, cough up the ring!
    All this time Rena had been sitting very still, not eating her pie, her eyes half-closed in thought. I don’t think she was really taking in the tentative steps Lars and I were making towards reconciliation.
    “Listen,” she said to me, “probably all of us knew that you hated your job and that you had some ambivalence about