“I mean, I guess you could call it that, if you’re trying to make it sound silly,” Imogen says, rolling her eyes. “But more just like a place for you all to talk stuff out and come up with strategies so you’re not getting steamrolled all the time. Some girls at Harvard did it; I read about it inRookie.”
“Is it like that in premed?” I ask Sadie, wanting to include her in the conversation. “It’s gotta be, right? Total sausage fest?”
Sadie frowns. “Sort of, maybe,” she says, considering. “But I guess I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff, you know? I feel like people make too big a deal about it sometimes. Like, as long as you’re doing good work, I don’t see why it matters if you’re a girl or a guy.”
Imogen tilts her head to the side, an expression on her face that I recognize immediately as the one she wears right before she’s about to take someone to school about feminism. “Well, the thing is,” she begins calmly, but Gabe opens the back door just then, a dish towel slung over one shoulder.His gaze darts back and forth between Sadie and me, and I wonder briefly if he wants to writhe on the floor in agony, too. “What are you guys talking about?” he asks.
“Starting an all-girl metal band,” I answer immediately.
Gabe nods. “Sounds awesome,” he says without missing a step. “You’re great on the tambourine. You guys wanna eat?”
Inside, the boys have put together a pretty decent pasta dinner, pesto made with basil from the convent’s overflowing garden and hunks of chewy bread from the bakery counter at the shop. Imogen lights a couple of fat vanilla candles and plunks them on the table, and the whole effect is kind of intimate and cozy, the smell of garlic and the sound of the rain pattering quietly against the rooftop, spaghetti heaped into piles on mismatched plates. As I pass Sadie a mixing bowl full of salad greens studded with tiny red radishes it occurs to me that maybe this wasn’t actually such a catastrophic idea after all. Maybe it really is ancient history, what happened between me and Gabe on the other side of the ocean. Maybe we really have moved on.
After dinner we drift off in different directions, Sadie slipping outside to call her mom back in Omaha and Ian wandering over to examine the bookshelves, which are full of yellowing C. S. Lewis paperbacks and what look like catechism books from the seventies. I stack a bunch of plates and bring them into the kitchen only to find Gabe already in there, sleeves of his thermal pushed up to the elbows and the stainless-steel sink full of soapy water. “You don’t have towash those,” I tell him, nodding at the pile of dirty pots waiting on the drainboard. “You guys cooked.”
“It’s fine,” Gabe says, shaking his head. “I like having a job.”
“Well,” I say, hesitating for a moment, a precarious load of dishes listing dangerously in my arms. I set them down on the counter, careful to leave a wide berth between us. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since last night at the bar in London. Already that seems like a lifetime ago. “I can dry, at least.”
Gabe doesn’t say anything either way, but he shifts to make room for me, and for a few minutes we work in a silence that isn’t exactly companionable. He was quiet through dinner, too, I realize, and the more I think about it the stupider I feel. Just because I felt like this was going okay—was enjoying myself, even—doesn’t mean anything has changed between us. He’s probably counting the minutes until he can grab his new girlfriend and escape back to his peacefully Barlow-free life.
“Look,” I begin, twisting the thin dish towel between my nervous hands. “I’m sorry about all this. I know you kind of got dragged here against your will.”
Gabe huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “I made my own bed. The whole thing just kind of got away from me, you know? I was so surprised to see you last night at the bar that I didn’t know how to explain—”
“I know,” I say quickly. “Me either.”
Gabe nods, both hands submerged in the soapy, lemon-scented water. “So I’m taking it you haven’t talked to Ian about—”
“No,” I say, rubbing hard at a spot on a water glass and not looking at him. “Have you told—?”
“I haven’t,” he admits. “I mean, not that there’s any reason to keep it from her or anything like that, I just—”
“No, I get it,” I interrupt. “Totally. It’s complicated.”
Gabe hums a sound that might or might not be agreement, smiling wryly. “That’s one word for it,” he says.
We’re quiet for another moment then, just the hiss of the running water and the clink of dishes as Gabe pulls them from the sink and hands them to me to dry; I can hear Imogen’s muffled voice from the living room, Ian’s full-throated laugh.
“He seems like a good dude,” Gabe says. “Ian, I mean.”
“He is,” I agree, standing on my tiptoes and setting a plate in the narrow cupboard. “Sadie, too.”
Gabe nods. “Yeah,” he agrees, mouth quirking. “She’s a good dude.”
“So how’s things?” I ask as we finish up, wiping my hands on the threadbare dish towel and then on the back of my jeans for good measure. “How’s school, how’s everybody at home, how’s Pilot?” Pilot is the Donnellys’ hound mix, a loyal rescue with soulful eyes and terrible breath; he used to rest his head in my lap while I did homework at the kitchentable in the farmhouse, leaving damp spots of drool on my thigh.
“Everything’s good,” Gabe replies, though he’s angling his body slightly away from mine so I can’t get a real look at his face as he says it. “Same as always. Not a ton to report.” He hesitates for a minute, draping a dish towel over the edge of the sink to dry. “The shop had kind of a slow summer, I guess, but other than that.”
“Really?” I’m surprised—when I think of his family’s pizza place it’s always packed, old Motown on the jukebox and pies coming out of the brick oven at breakneck speed, little kids and their tired-looking parents lined up on the bench outside the front window to wait. “What’s going on?”
Gabe shrugs almost violently, all shoulders and elbows. “Who knows?” he says. “It’s fine, it’s not a big deal or anything. We’ll bounce back.”
I nod cautiously. There’s something about his delivery I don’t entirely buy—it’s a reasonable facsimile of breezy coolness, maybe, but not the real thing. Still, I keep my mouth shut. After all, he isn’t mine to press.
“So how you doing, Molly Barlow?” he asks, leaning back against the orange laminate countertop and crossing his arms. He always used to call me by my first and last names when we were dating, paradoxically intimate, and the nickname combined with the fact that he hasn’t bolted from the room at his first available opportunity does something to the inside of my body, wringing all my organs out like a sponge.“You taking the business world by storm up in Boston?”
“I mean, I don’t know aboutthat,” I say carefully. “But I really, really love it there.”
