I feel my own brow crinkle at the way he’s said this, as though I’d been dumb enough to hide the wordMISTAKEin the wedding program of the guy who invented Morse code or something.
“Aren’t you a banker?” I ask. I’ve got a vague memory of Avery saying something about Reid working on Wall Street, which I functionally understand as a beeswarm of bankers, a bunch of black- and navy-suited people with dollar signs in their eyes instead of pupils.
“I’m a quant,” he says, as if that explains everything.
“A what?”
He shakes his head minutely, answers quickly. “Math models for investments. Risk management. Numbers, code. You know what I mean.”
Uh, I do not know what he means. He said “math models” and all I could think of was the time my tenth-grade geometry teacher built a cube out of cafeteria straws and silly putty. I’m guessing that’s not the kind of work Reid does.
“Sure,” I say, which is, interestingly, also what I told Mr. Mes-teller when he asked if I understood his lesson with the straws and silly putty. I got a D in geometry.
There’s a stretch of silence. It feels long, but it must be only a matter of seconds, that program lying between us like a headstone. Inscription,notfrolicsome:Here lies everything you’ve worked for. Dead by your own unruly, interfering hand.
I take a silent breath through my nose before I speak again.
“I’m sorry to hear about your divorce.”
“There’s no divorce. I didn’t—we didn’t have the wedding.”
So, forget getting sick in the trash can. I’ll just move in there like the piece of garbage I truly am.
“I am so—”
“It’s not because of this,” he says, touching the corner of the program again before tucking his hands back in his pockets and taking a small step back. “Or rather, it’s not only because of this.”
I wonder if I could fit a blanket with me in the trash can. I definitely do not deserve a pillow.
“But I would still like to know. I would like to know how you knew.”
He’s looking at me with that stern face, those sad eyes, and I think I could say a lot of things. I could say,I was talking about myself; it was always a mistake for me to do weddings. This is an old habit. Sometimes I don’t always know when I’m doing it. I didn’t mean for it to come out in your program the way it did. You and Avery were a nice couple.
I can almost see it, how it would go. I’d tell his triple-take face and he’d know I was lying about half of it, but he’s too reserved or too uptight to press, and maybe I don’t seem all that reserved or uptight to him, but still. Still, I know how that goes. I know how easy it is to avoid saying anything important at all. I can already see, by the way he holds his jaw—his ears seem to sit higher with the tension—that he came to ask me this question once and once only, and he’ll give me one of those nods (this one not so approving) before he leaves. I’ll close up and go home. I’ll walk in the front door and I’ll tell Sibby,You will notbelievewhat happened today—
No, that’s not right. I won’t tell Sibby, because Sibby barely acknowledges that I exist for anything other than half of rent and utilities anymore. Instead I’ll tell Reid one of those lies and he’ll leave and I’ll stare down atuntil my eyes blur, worrying about my unruly hands and my encroaching deadline and my missing inspiration. I’ll wait here until I’m reasonably sure Sibby’s gone to her room for the night andthenI’ll go home, and I’ll still feel all the things I felt before Reid walked through that door,be-ing myself into a personal and professional crisis while I wait to find out whether this man is going to spread the word about what I’ve done.
So instead I unclasp my hands and pick up the program. I don’t think I could meet his eyes for this, so I keep focused on the letters, the ones only he was able to see. The pattern, the code. The mistake.
“How about I buy you a coffee and we can talk about it?”
We go to a slick espresso bar on the corner of Fifth and Berkeley. There’s one closer, only a block and a half from the shop, but it closes earlier and it’s also one of the places in the neighborhood where I regularly meet clients, so I’d decided that even though it would mean a longer awkward walk, there’d at least be less of a chance someone would overhear whatever conversation Reid and I are about to have.
Of course it’d been more awkward than I’d anticipated, completely silent except for one blindingly difficult moment of conversation after I’d stepped away from locking the shop’s front door and gripped the edges of my cardigan to wrap it more tightly around myself against a lingering winter chill in the air.
Reid had cleared his throat and said, “Would you like my jacket?” and it hadn’t even been grudging. It had been automatic, sort of the same as his very well-mannered “Good evening.” I’d been so taken aback that I’d said, “Don’t beniceto me.” Then he’d done another nod and we’d both pretended to be invisible to each other until we got to our destination. Where he opened the door for me.
In our seats he seems as stiff as he had in the shop, his back and (still very nice) shoulders straight and his elbows tucked into his sides, God forbid he puts them on the table like a normal person. He’s still got that slight air of distaste about him—he seems suspicious of every surface in this place, had peered at the heavy-lidded glass jars of biscotti and extra-large cookies and chocolate balls rolled in shredded coconut as though they were exceptionally disgusting dead insects pinned inside a display case for the express purpose of grossing him out. When I’d asked him what kind of coffee he’d wanted, he’d said it was “quite late for coffee” (quite late!) and had ordered an herbal tea instead.
I feel like I’m doingMasterpiece Theatrecosplay.
“It’ll take me some time to get back to the city,” Reid says when I’m in the middle of the first sip of my cortado (bad choice; I’ll be up all night, but what else could I do in the face of thatquite late?), and as a conversation-starter it seems entirely like a non sequitur until I realize he’s urging me to get on with my explanation.
“Um,” I begin, and suppress a wince at this tic, something I never realized I did so prominently until I started seriously with videos on social media. The first one I’d ever recorded had it pretty much every third word—some letterers prefer,um,a classic Blackwing Pearl,um,with a nice,um,balanced graphite—and it took me four takes to eradicate the “ums” to a tolerable level. My last video—proof of how far I’ve come—had none, even in a single take.
I try again.
“I don’t know if I’ll have an answer that’s satisfying to you.”
