"—because youmovedit," Iris says. "You moved the whole run to Friday and you didn't tell me."
"It's a still, Iris. Not a merger."
"It'sours.That's the entire point. You don't get to just—" She stops. Breathes. Starts again in the reasonable voice, which is somehow worse than shouting. "Something is wrong. Something's been wrong since we read that letter. Since the ninety days. I have been extremely patient and I am running out."
"Nothing's wrong."
"You won't touch me."
"I'm tired—"
"You won'tlookat me."
And something in me — small and cornered and vicious — gets up onto its feet.
"Because I'm waiting," I say.
She goes very still. "For what."
"For you to change your mind."
"Cat—"
"You've been a lesbian for four months." It comes out flat and ugly and rehearsed, because itisrehearsed; I've been running it at two in the morning for a fortnight. "Four months. After thirty-two years of being somebody else. You arrived here in a crisis and you fell in love with the crisis, and one morning you're going to wake up and look at me and understand it was a phase — and I'd honestly rather know now, if it's all the same to you."
The look on her face is like I've hit her.
"A phase," she says.
"I didn't—"
"You think what I feel for you is aphase."
"I think you've never done this before!"
"I've never doneanyof this before!" She's shouting now. Iris does not shout. "I've never had a home before! I've never had apersonbefore! I have never once in my life said out loud what I wanted and then gone and taken it — and I did, I did that, I did itfor you, standing on that terrace in front of my mother, and you werethere—"
"And what happens when it gets hard?"
"It hasbeenhard—"
"Not like this!" I'm shouting too and I can hear myself and I can't stop. "Not the boring kind! Not ten years in, when I'm just the woman you live with and the farm's just work and nobody's clapping for you anymore!Everybodystays for the good part!"
"I am not your mother!"
And there it is.
She knows it the second it's out. I watch it land on her — the horror, the reaching after it.
"Cat, I didn't mean—"
But it's in me now, and the fear has both hands on the wheel.
"No," I say. "You're not. You'll be worse. She at least had the decency to leave when I was twelve."
The silence is enormous.
"Maybe you should have listened to her," I say. "Your mother. Maybe you should have got on the plane. Gone back to Chicago and found someone easier to love."
