Page 55 of Her Rival

"I picked it on purpose."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He came around. Opened my door. Offered me his hand. I took it.

Dinner was a small thing and a large thing at the same time.

The small thing was the dinner itself. We ate. We ordered like ordinary people who'd decided to feed themselves in the same room. He had the duck. I had the trout. He asked the waiter what was good, the waiter said the duck, he said the duck then, and the small unselfconsciousness of it, of him not performing knowledge about a menu, was a thing I filed for the article without meaning to.

We didn't talk about the article. We didn't talk about my father, beyond a brief exchange at the start where he confirmed the six update matched the noon one. We didn't talk about the conference room or the video review room or the kiss against the door.

We talked about the Pontiac. He told me about finding it in a barn in Tennessee the summer he turned twenty-one. The man who'd owned it. The four off-seasons he'd spent putting it back together at a garage outside Vegas with a mechanic named Earl who'd become, over those four off-seasons, one of his three close friends in this city. He told me he'd never driven another woman in the Pontiac. He'd let two women into it in eight years. One was a teammate's wife who needed a ride to the airport. The other was his sister, eight months ago, when she flew out for a weekend and he picked her up at Harry Reid. The car was, in some way he didn't yet have language for, the most honest thing he owned.

I asked him why.

He thought about it a long moment.

He said because everything else he owned had been bought, and the car had been made.

I drank my wine.

Then he told me about his sister, and he did it the way he did everything that cost him something, sideways, talking to the candle instead of to me.

"Mary Beth," he said. "Three years up on me. Still in Tennessee, same town we grew up in. She could've left. She's smarter than me, she could've left and done anything she wanted." He turned his water glass a quarter turn on the cloth. "She stayed. Somebody had to, and it was never going to be me."

"You're close."

He took a second with that one. I was learning to read his seconds. This was the kind where he was deciding how much of a thing to set on the table between us, not because he didn't trust me with it but because he hadn't said it out loud to anyone in a long time and wanted to get the weight of it right.

"She taught me to cook," he said. "She's the reason I feed myself like a grown man and not a nineteen-year-old living out of a billet fridge. And she's the one who let me leave. Everybody else in that house had an opinion about me going. Mary Beth drove me to the bus station and didn't say one word the whole way there, and she hugged me at the door, and she let me go." He looked up from the candle. "There are two people on this earth I'd answer the phone for at three in the morning, no questions asked. Her and Rhett. That's the whole list."

I didn't write any of it down. The writer in me was already setting it in type, the way she always did, and I would've sooner put my hand flat in the candle than reach for the recorder. That I felt that way was a thing I'd have to deal with later, somewhere that wasn't this table.

He did not tell me about his mother.

He did not tell me about the money.

He did not tell me what was in the rest of the rooms he hadn't opened the doors to.

I didn't ask. We weren't yet in the conversation where I asked. I knew that. He knew I knew it.

I told him about the Iris Street essay. The full version. My grandmother, the kitchen, the summers, the part I'd cut from the published version because I hadn't been able to sit with it. The way I'd let the magazine run it on impulse, and how I'd felt for two weeks afterward, the particular, exposed feeling of having put a piece of myself in front of strangers, the way you let a small bird out of a cage and watch it fly and aren't sure whether you want it to come back. The moment my editor texted to say it was getting attention and the small horrible joy I'd felt. The moment, three weeks later, when the envelope arrived at my Brooklyn doormat with the byline circled.

He listened.

He didn't say anything the entire telling.

When I finished he said, "You're a real writer."

"I'm trying to figure out what I am."

"Hartley. You're a real writer. I've known three real writers in my life. None of them ever say so out loud. You all do the same thing, bury it under a sentence about figuring it out. I'm a hockey player. I know what real talent looks like at a thing. You're a real writer."

I drank my wine.

I didn't know what to do with that, so I didn't try to do anything with it. I let it sit between us on the table and let him hold it without me trying to take it back.