He got up and opened the door. Rumpled shirt, yesterday's shirt, and a look on his face I recognized because I'd been wearing a version of it in my own kitchen an hour before.
"I know," he said. "I forgot to close the blinds last night."
"What's going on?" I came in and shut the door behind me and went to the windows and dropped the blinds myself, all theway around the inside wall. "You don't want anyone else seeing this. Everything okay?"
"Yeah. Everything's fine." He took the blanket and the pillow off the couch and folded them down into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, the wooden one, where the light couldn't get at them. "It's great. I love sleeping in the office and showering at the gym." He shut the drawer with his foot. "Sorry. I'm dealing with a lot right now. Nicole threw me out."
I sat down on the arm of the couch.
Dustin had been with us ten years. Somewhere in there he'd gone from a guy I hired to a guy I'd have to dinner, and I hadn't heard a word of this, not from him, not from anyone.
"You were both at the Jubilee," I said. "Last week. She was right there."
"I asked her to come. If I showed up alone it'd get around, people would ask." He rubbed a hand down his face. "And I figured maybe a night out, dressed up, a few drinks. Maybe it'd remind her of something."
"It didn't."
"No." He sat down in his desk chair and it sank under him. "I don't even know what happened, Oscar. That's the truth. She says I ignore her. She says I don't talk to her, I don't listen, she says things to me and they go in one ear and out the other." He shook his head at the carpet. "I keep telling her I hear her fine. She doesn't believe me."
I didn't say anything for a second, because he'd just said my wife's lines back to me in his own voice, and it landed somewhere I wasn't ready for.
"So you've been sleeping here since when," I said.
"Off and on a month." He said it to his hands. "First few nights I got a hotel. But every time I put the card down I got angrier. I've got a beautiful house sitting there empty and I'm paying two hundred a night to sleep away from it? So I stopped.I come here. Set an alarm, hit the gym before anybody's in, shower, come back up." He tried to smile and didn't get there. "It's a system."
"Dustin."
"It's fine. Really." He straightened some papers that didn't need it, and I recognized that too. "Anyway. Enough. How's Ocean City? Adam's been chewing on it for weeks."
"It's nowhere," I said. "Adam got us one more shot with the council. But I think we're just not the guys for it."
He frowned. "Since when? We're exactly the guys for it. That whole stretch of the shore opens up if we land this, you know that better than I do." He leaned back. "Adam and I were talking about it a while back. Did he ever get Ruby to look at it? I never worked with her, she was gone before my time, but I've seen the old files. Her floor plans, the notes in the margins. That's not normal, what she does. That's a different thing entirely."
"We've got a floor full of architects," I said. "There's nothing she'd add."
Dustin looked at me for a second, and I thought he was going to say something, and then he decided not to, and I was glad, because I didn't want to hear it.
* * *
It was dark by the time I got home.
The porch light was on around the side of the house, and when I came through the mudroom I could see her out there through the glass, Ruby, sitting with something in her lap, her head down over it. Working at something. I couldn't tell what and I didn't go out to find out. We hadn't traded ten words in four days that weren't about the coffee or the mail, and I wasn't going to walk out onto that porch and stand there while she waited for me to leave.
I watched her for a second through the door. The way she sat when she was into something, one foot tucked up under her, had not changed in twenty-three years. I missed her. She was thirty feet away with the light on her and I missed her like she'd already gone.
I went upstairs.
The guest suite was the same as I'd left it except for the boxes. Two of them, open, sitting out on the floor by the closet, and around them her old things, sketchpads gone soft at the corners, a couple of folders with paper sliding out, a tin of pencils. She must have been in here while I was at work, digging for something, and left in enough of a hurry that she never put it back. That wasn't like her. Ruby didn't leave things out.
I crouched down to pack it in. I wasn't reading any of it, just squaring the pads and sliding the folders back the way they'd come, and I had a stack of it in my hands when a napkin slipped out of the bottom of one of the folders and dropped to the floor.
A bar napkin. Thin, gone brown at the folds, soft as cloth from being carried.
I picked it up and turned it over and there it was, in her hand, in pencil that had smeared twenty-three years ago and never all the way gone. The sketch. The first one. Before the company had a name, before it had anything.
I sat down on the floor of the guest room and looked at it for a long time.
Then I put it back where it had been, careful, between the same two pages, and I closed the folders and set both boxes back up on the shelf where they belonged. I don't know why I was careful with it. I just was.
