Chapter 4
Astrid
"Audrey, I beg you."
She didn't move her hand off the steering wheel. She didn't put the car in park. She just sat there, half-turned in her seat, her seatbelt cutting a diagonal across the pink scrub top.
"That's a firefighter's shirt."
"I know."
"That is Easton Ford's house."
"I know."
She opened her mouth to say something else. I held up my free hand.
"I will tell you. I will tell you everything. I will sit at my kitchen table and tell you every single thing I have done with my morning. But Audrey, please, I need to put on underwear first."
There was a beat.
Audrey's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Underwear."
"Yes."
"You were at his house."
"Yes."
"In his kitchen."
"Yes."
"And you have not been—"
"I'm aware."
"ASTRID."
"AUDREY."
"How long were you over there?!"
"Twenty-five minutes."
"Twenty. Five."
"Audrey. Please."
She rolled her window back up an inch and stared at me through the glass like I was the ninth wonder of the world. Then she turned the wheel slowly, with the deliberate patience of a woman who wanted me to understand she was doing me a favor, and rolled the Subaru into my driveway.
She was out of the car before I had my front door open. She followed me up the walk, into my front hall, into my kitchen. She set the bakery bag down on the counter and put both palms flat on it.
"Go," she said. "Underwear. Now. I'll be waiting right here. Don't even think about lying to me about a single detail when you come back down."
I went.
I peeled the shirt off in my own hallway, dropped it in the wash with the towels, and put on underwear, jeans, and a tank.
By the time I came back down, she'd pulled the cinnamon bread out of the bakery bag, made herself coffee in my kitchen, and was waiting at the counter with her hands folded and a look on her face I had been the recipient of since the third grade.
"Sit. Start at the beginning. Don't leave anything out. Start with the dog."
I told her.
She made me start over twice. Once after the bra came up. Once after Moose hit the back gate.
She slid down the counter, laughing somewhere around the moment my hair towel hit the grass. By the time I got to come inside, I'll find you a shirt, she had her forehead against the counter and was wheezing.
"This is the best thing that has ever happened in this town," she said into the counter. "I want you to mark this day. This is the funniest thing that has happened in Hartsdale since the Doyles' truck rolled into the river back when we were in high school."
"Audrey."
"You have to marry him."
"Audrey."
"You owe it to me as a friend. I have been waiting my entire life to know someone who started a relationship in a bath towel."
"This is not a relationship."
"Mhm."
"Don't mhm me."
"I'm just sitting here."
Audrey came off a twelve-hour shift at seven that morning. She stopped at the bakery on Main on her way over instead of going home. Scrubs. Lipstick. Cinnamon bread. This was not a woman who needed to be on a stool at somebody's kitchen counter at nine-fifteen in the morning. She was here anyway.
"How was your shift?"
She made a small mmph sound. Which was Audrey for long.
"Twins. A first-timer. Eight hours. Husband fainted twice."
"And the twins?"
"They're great. Cooking. Six pounds even, the both of them. Mom is a goddamn warrior. Husband is concussed."
Audrey didn't know how to go home and rest. She grew up in a house where silence meant somebody was about to leave.
Her father left. Her mother spent ten years chasing him.
Audrey decided very young that she was going to fill every silence she met, so it could never get quiet enough to mean anything.
"How's the clinic search going?"
"I called about a storefront on Main. Waiting to hear back."
She nodded. She didn't push.
She traced a small piece of icing off the corner of the bread, ate it off her thumb, and let the silence sit.
When she spoke again, her voice had gone careful.
"Good thing you kept your license live, by the way."
I renewed it every two years. I did the CE on my laptop in the brownstone with the door closed, twenty hours one weekend, ten the next, while Brett was at squash, his mother's, or wherever he went on Sundays.
I paid the renewal fee out of grocery money.
I stopped saying the word license at the dinner table after year two. I never let the license die, either.
Some part of me knew. Year three, year four, before any of it had a name. My hands kept themselves alive while my head was pretending I didn't need them.
"I'm proud of you," she said, slipping the words past her own face on the way to mine. "I want you to know that. For getting out. For standing up for yourself. You did a real big thing, and you don't get enough credit for how hard it was."
I looked down at my coffee.
The cutoff didn't make Brett a different man.
It made him an unfunded version of the man he always was.
His parents sat him down in their kitchen six months ago and told him they were turning off the tap.
He stopped being a husband, a son, or a person around hour two of that conversation. The night with the lamp came after.
I sat on the floor of that brownstone and waited for the part of me that still loved him to surface.
It didn't.
I sat there long enough to know it had ended a long time ago. I just hadn't let myself see it. He stopped sending flowers a year into the marriage. He stopped asking questions a year after that. He stopped reading what I left on the coffee table by year three.
Somewhere along the way, I'd become a piece of his furniture, and I'd let it happen.
"Thank you," I said.
She waved it off.
"Eat your cinnamon bread. I'm going home to sleep for nine hours."
I looked at her over my mug. Twenty-two years of her filling every silence I ever had on my behalf.
I came back to Hartsdale to be no one's.
I'd forgotten I was always, always Audrey's.
The afternoon passed in a half-unpacked house.
I broke down two boxes and called Howie about the storefront on Main again.
He answered this time and said he had the space open on the calendar the next morning.
I made a note on my phone. I ate a sandwich standing at the counter and tried not to think about the gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt going around in the dryer.
Moose followed me from room to room with the particular attentiveness of a dog who was very much aware he had committed a crime that morning, and who was not sorry about it.
"We're still going to have that conversation," I told him.
He just looked at me and stretched.
Around six, I remembered the mail.
The light on Maple was already going soft. I opened the front door.
That was my mistake.
Moose was past me before the door had fully cleared the frame. He was a yellow blur through the porch, down the front walk. He hit the driveway and shot across Maple at full stretch toward the bungalow.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
I made it as far as the front walk before I gave up running. He was already on Easton's porch by the time I cleared my own lawn. Sitting. Wagging his tail at the front door. Waiting.
Easton's front door opened before I'd made it across the street.
He took one look at Moose and another look at me, in my socks, halfway across his lawn.
"He came back."
"I'm so sorry. I opened the door for the mail. He went straight through me."
He bent down and put a hand on top of Moose's head. Moose leaned into him.
"He came to see his friend."
On the other side of the screen door, Penny had her muzzle pressed against the mesh. Her tail was making a slow, wide arc that, in a dog her age, was equivalent to running.
"I'll get him and go. I promise."
Easton looked down at Moose, who hadn't moved from his hand. He looked back at me.
"Coffee?" he asked.
"I don't want to keep you."
"You aren't."
He held the screen door open a little wider. Somewhere behind him, in the dim of the entryway, Penny made a small sound of recognition. Of welcome.
I didn't want to leave. I wasn't going to admit it.
"Okay," I said.
I stepped past him into the house.
The living room was small and tidy in a way that meant someone had lived in it for forty years and never thrown anything out without reason.
A folded blanket on one arm of the couch.
The guitar case against the wall. Across from the couch, an old leather chair with a brass lamp and a pair of reading glasses was still tucked into the slot of a hardbound book on the side table.
His grandmother's chair. He hadn't moved it.
He gestured me to the couch, poured coffee in the kitchen, came back with two mugs and a small carton of cream on a tray. He set it down on the low table between us and lowered himself into the leather chair. He sat at the very front edge of the seat. He didn't lean back.
Penny lay down at his feet. Moose flopped down beside her like he had been coming here his whole life.
"Thank you," I said. "Again. For the shirt. For not laughing too hard."
"You're welcome. Again."
"I'd like to put it on the record that I'm not, generally, that woman."
A small, almost-smile. "Noted."
A moment of silence passed. It wasn't uncomfortable. I cleared my throat.
"Easton, I heard about your grandmother. I'm so sorry for your loss."
He looked at the table for a beat. His thumb passed once along the rim of his mug. Stopped.
"Thank you."
I picked up my mug. The coffee was good. Hot enough to burn my upper lip, and exactly enough cream that I could taste he'd been paying attention to how I took it in the kitchen earlier, without my noticing.
"How are you holding up?" I asked.
He took a breath. Held it. Let it out.