“Nothing. Sorry. I was just thinking about something.”
“Since when were you cagey, Cat?”
“I’ve gotta pee so bad,” she said, and she took off for the bathroom. That was so like her that I wasn’t even sure if she was avoiding the subject or if she actually did randomly need to use the bathroom.
Whatever. Her business was her business.
The kitchen smelled incredible, the oven running and three different pans on the cooktop, a couple of dishes already out on the table. Daniela, packing carrots into the food processor, turned and looked at me, and her eyes lit up.
“Well hey, you,” she said, standing up and wiping cooking steam off her glasses. “Nice to see you round these parts again.”
“I swear, you must redecorate every fifteen minutes, I barely recognize the place.”
She laughed. “Sit down. You can have a bread roll before dinner if you want, just don’t spoil your appetite. I’ve got compound butter and regular butter. Both are the fancy butter, because I’m worth it.”
“Becauseyou’reworth it? Are we not allowed the butter, we can just look at it longingly while we eat bread?”
She grinned. “Well, since you asked so nicely, I’ll share this time. Now sit your butt down.”
She’d arranged the chairs with three of them across from one, the typical setup we did so Cat could follow our conversations. On the bright side, it meant she was still being considerate for Cat. But it also meant I had to take my pick: sitting right next to Alyssa, or sitting on the other end. I wasn’t going to be able to focus on any of the conversation if I had Alyssa right next to me. I pulled out the chair farther from her, and when I sat down, I noticed her smile had turned a little fake, a little glassy, when I’d started talking to Daniela. Hadn’t she wanted us talking? Was she upset about it?
Cat joined us before long, walking in tentatively with a measured smile at Daniela. “Hey,” Cat said. “Thanks for having me.”
“Thanks for coming,” Daniela said, signing as naturally as if she hadn’t gone a day without talking to Cat. I’d expected connecting Cat and Alyssa to work, as far as getting Cat back into the community, but I hadn’t expected it to be this quick nor this dramatic. “Food’s almost ready. Help yourself to some bread and butter. Do we all want some drinks?”
She opened a bottle of sparkling cider and poured us all drinks as Cat joined us at the table, and it wasn’t much longer before Daniela took a rack of lamb from the oven and started the plating on everything, a big spread on the table before we knew it, and Daniela sat with us, in between me and Alyssa. I felt like it was symbolic somehow, even before Alyssa closed off, not talking as much as Daniela led the conversation.
It was an amazing dinner and a good conversation, and I loved seeing how much Daniela and Cat got on like they hadn’t missed a day, inside jokes and signs we’d invented and nobody outside of our group knew as we caught up on everything from our lives since we’d last been like this, but I found my thoughts circling around the way Alyssa was getting quieter and quieter. She smiled and nodded, and she focused on her food, giving a quick answer whenever someone addressed her directly.
It wasn’t any of my business. But my brain was intent on making it my business.
The food ran down as we ate our fill, and Daniela stretched and let out a long, satisfied groan, her arms up over her head, before she stood up. “Well,” she said, “what do you say—”
“A walk to help us digest,” I said, and she laughed, swatting my shoulder playfully.
“Let me say it myself!”
“You never change,” I laughed, standing up. “But it sounds good to me. Alyssa, are you—”
“Oh, I’m good,” she said, flashing a smile that was almost convincing. “I’m exhausted, so I’m just going to sit and try to figure out this board game with Cat before you two get back.”
Cat stifled a laugh—Alyssa clearly didn’t know how to signboard gameand instead went withbored game, but it got the point across. “Yeah, I’m wiped too,” she said. “Have fun! Look at some trees for me.”
“I can’t believe I knocked you both out that easily,” Daniela said. “It wasn’tthatmuch food.”
“It kind of was,” I said. “But let’s leave your knocked-out victims here to fend for themselves a bit.”
Daniela led me through the front to grab our jackets and get our shoes back on before we headed outside, and I didn’t do a good job playing it cool, because we’d barely gotten outside before I shifted closer to her and spoke in a low voice.
“Is Alyssa okay?” I said. “I feel like something was eating at her for most of dinner.”
“Mm.” She shrugged, looking down as we walked along the edges of the lot, following an old wooden fence to a gate that she unlatched. Opening the gate out to the nature trails behind Daniela’s house really took me back—such a post-meal routine that I couldn’t have eaten a meal at her house and skipped the walk if I wanted to. “I dunno. But she went to have dinner at Charlie’s and Linda’s yesterday, and she’s seemed to have something on her mind since then.”
Oh, god. If she’d sat with the two of them listening to them talk about me, it would explain why she’d been stiff in a conversation with me. But she’d been just fine talking to me in the entryway… it was just until Daniela and I started talking. “She didn’t tell you what it was?”
“I didn’t really ask,” she said with a shrug. “It seemed like she didn’t want to share. You know when you can just feel that someone isn’t looking to talk about something?”
“Huh… I hope she’s okay.”
