Page 45
I keep walking.
Evan
You can’t avoid me forever.
Evan
I made a mistake, okay?
I watch the dots appear and disappear and appear again, which is its own small theater, Evan composing and recomposing, deciding how to package the thing he’s decided isn’t his fault.
Evan
You wanted a break. I gave it to you.
Evan
We never talked about exclusivity.
Evan
I didn’t actually do anything wrong.
There it is. The thesis statement. I didn’t actually do anything wrong — delivered with the confidence of a man who genuinely believes that the absence of a verbal contract retroactively converts being inside Vivienne Park into a technicality. I think about the word actually doing all that work in that sentence. I think about how a person has to arrange the furniture of their own mind to get to a room where that sentence is true.
The phone buzzes again. He’s calling now.
I hit decline without breaking stride, and slide the phone back into my pocket, and it buzzes a fourth time against my hip — voicemail, or another text, I don’t check which — and I let it. I’ve gotten very good at letting things buzz. It’s a skill, the way composure is a skill, the way most of the things I’m good at are skills I’d rather not have needed to learn.
By the time I turn onto Sailmaker Lane, my jaw has gone tight in a way I’m choosing not to examine, and the only thing I want in the world is to be inside my own house with the door shut and the phone face-down on a surface I’m not looking at.
The Sailmaker is lit up warm at the end of the lane, kitchen window glowing, and the relief of it loosens something in my chest before I’ve even reached the porch steps.
The living room does the thing it always does, which is forgive me for the day.
It’s not a beautiful room in any way a magazine would recognize. It’s better than that — it’s lived in, which is a different and rarer quality. The leather sofa is the color of a worn saddle and sags in the middle where four of us have collapsed onto it across two years of bad days and good ones. There are throw blankets in three competing patterns that none of us chose together and all of us defend. The bookshelf by the window is mine, mostly — overflow from a life I keep trying to fit into a single bedroom — and it leans slightly, the way everything in old New England houses leans, like the building is settling into a more comfortable position. Margo’s collage of Polaroids climbs one whole wall. There’s a lamp with a scarf thrown over the shade that we have been told, repeatedly, by the landlord and by common sense, is a fire hazard, and that we keep anyway because it makes the light the right color.
The kitchen opens off the back of it, separated by a counter we use as a table, a bar, a desk, and on at least one occasion a triage station. And in the kitchen, dinner is happening.
The kitchen is the warmest room in the house, partly because of the oven and partly because of who’s standing in it. It’s small — galley-style, white cabinets gone a little soft with age, open shelves crowded with mismatched mugs and the good olive oil Margo brought back from her internship and a row of cookbooks none of us follows. There’s a window over the sink that looks out on the back garden, dark now. The whole room smells like garlic and lemon and something green, and the radio’s on low, and Margo is at the stove with her back to me.
She’s in sweats and a cropped tee, blonde hair piled into a bun that has given up structurally and is being held together by faith and one clip. Margo Ashby in public is polished to a finish. Margo Ashby in the kitchen at seven on a Tuesday, narrating a recipe to herself under her breath, is the realest thing in this house.
“Oh, good, you’re home,” she says without turning around, the way she somehow always knows. “I made lemon-herb chicken with the roasted vegetables and that quinoa thing you like. June’s working late and Wren’s out doing whatever Wren does, so it’s you and me. Sit. It’s basically done.”
I drop my tote bag by the end of the sofa and exhale, and it comes out longer and heavier than I mean it to.
Margo turns around.
She has a wooden spoon in one hand and an expression that has already read the exhale and filed it, because Margo reads exhales the way I read exits — fast, accurate, without seeming to. She’s the only one of us who clocks me as quickly as I clock everyone else, which is the thing about Margo that people miss, distracted by the cheerleader gloss and the relentless brightness. She grew up performing fine in a house that demanded it. She knows what performing fine costs because she pays it too.
“Okay,” she says. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“You did the sigh.”
“I always sigh.”
