TEN
DANIEL
I saw her truck before I’d even pulled into the lot.
It was parked at the curb in front of my building, the pizza box visible on the dash, Ellie herself behind the wheel staring through the windshield at with the expression of a woman who’d seen some shit today and was still in the process of sorting it. I’d been hoping to beat her here.
She was already out of the truck by the time I’d turned off my engine.
“Someone put it on Facebook,” she announced.
“I heard.”
“Daniel. Facebook.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at the pizza box, then back at me. I recognized a woman who’d run out of reactions and was operating on reserve capacity. “I also got a voicemail from my dentist.”
“Your dentist.”
“Dr. Purcell. He was asking if we’re doing a registry.” She paused. “I’ve been a patient there since I was twelve.”
I considered this. “What did you say?”
“I haven’t called him back yet.” She followed me toward the building, and we ran straight into Mrs. Kowalski from the ground floor unit, in her house slippers, who took one look at me and clasped both hands to her chest. “Daniel,” she said. “I heard the news. Married! Finally!”
Her cheweenie, Kielbasa, barked in agreement.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kowalski.”
“Your Ellie is such a lovely girl. I always said so. I said to Mr. Kowalski—God rest him—I said, that boy is going to marry that girl one day, you mark my words.”
“You were correct,” I said, wondering if she’d somehow missed that Ellie was right here.
She beamed at my wife, who smiled back with the practiced composure of someone running on fumes, and said, “You bring her by. I want to make her my pierogi.”
“We’ll do that,” I said, and got us upstairs and inside before anything else could happen.
My apartment was the same as I’d left it this morning. Reasonably clean by my standards, which Ellie had once described as aggressively adequate. She moved through it without hesitation, dropping her purse by the couch and continuing directly to the kitchen the way she always did, because she knew her way around my place the same way I knew my way around hers. She left the pizza on the counter. I grabbed two beers from the fridge, and by the time I turned around she’d already pulled out plates and was snagging two paper towels off the roll.
It was comfortable. The two of us in a kitchen had always been comfortable.
I also noted with weary resignation that this domesticity was doing something to me that it never had before. There was no logical reason for it. Ellie Granger had been in my kitchen approximately four thousand times. She’d eaten pizza on mycouch more times than I could count. None of that had ever registered as anything other than what it was—my best friend, in my space, in the easy way of people who were such a part of each other’s orbit that proximity required no negotiation.
And yet here she was, leaning against the counter with a slice of pizza in her hand and a small smear of tomato sauce at the corner of her mouth that she hadn’t noticed, and I was finding it extremely difficult to look at anything else.
I handed her a beer and looked at the pizza.
“The pharmacist, Sandra, the nurse, Dr. Purcell,” she said, ticking them off. “Oh, and Mrs. Petty called the store. Patrice took the message. She said Mrs. Petty cried.”
“Mrs. Petty cries at everything.”
“She cried at the Fourth of July parade.”
“She did,” I agreed. “She cried at the new stoplight on Commerce Street.”
“She said it was a long time coming.” Ellie took a bite of her pizza and looked at the middle distance as she chewed. Her brows pulled together slightly when she was thinking. A small vertical line between them that I’d always found unreasonably?—
