Chapter 11
Astrid
I'd forgotten I owned earrings.
I found them in a velvet pouch at the back of the dresser drawer, the small gold hoops my mother gave me at sixteen that I wore through college.
They didn't make the move to Boston. They didn't make the move back.
They'd been here, in this drawer, in this house, for the entire run of the Calloway years, waiting for me without making a thing of it.
The dresser also held Easton's stack. The thermal sat at the bottom of his pile after I'd let myself wear it twice.
The sweatpants on top of it were folded smaller than they needed to be.
The T-shirt under the thermal. The cotton socks rolled into neat balls.
I hadn't given the stack back yet. I'd told myself I'd do it after Saturday.
Audrey was on speakerphone on the bathroom counter, her voice coming through tinny and certain.
"The green one."
"Audrey."
The hoop in my left ear caught for a second on the curve of my lobe. I worked it through.
"The green one, Astrid. The green dress with the neckline. Don't make me drive over there and put it on you myself."
"It shows too much."
"It shows exactly enough. It shows what God gave you and what I've been waiting seven years for you to show somebody other than your gynecologist."
"Audrey."
"What? I'm telling the truth. You're putting on earrings you haven't worn since college. You're nervous. The green one is the dress that calms a panicking woman down."
"I'm not panicking."
"You are. And you're wearing the green one. I'm driving home, and I'm hanging up if you don't tell me you have it on by the time I park."
"It's been four minutes."
"I drive fast."
I dropped the second hoop into my ear and looked at the dress lying on the bed.
Green silk jersey. Wrap front. Three-quarter sleeves.
I bought it the second year of my marriage and wore it once to a dinner at his mother's, who gave me her disappointed look, the one she used when something didn't have a polite word attached to it.
I hung the dress in the back of the closet and let her win that one.
It moved with me from the brownstone to the storage unit to the U-Haul to here. It had been waiting, too.
The phone buzzed on the counter while I was reaching for the lipstick.
I picked it up to silence it. The lipstick was the soft red I'd bought myself at a department store counter at twenty-three, on a Saturday afternoon when a saleswoman told me it was made for my mouth and I believed her enough to spend forty dollars on the proof. It had aged better than the marriage.
The phone screen lit again. I looked at it.
Brett
I miss you.
Three words. Eight months of silence and three words.
Audrey was still talking through the speaker.
I wasn't hearing her. My thumb started composing a response before I'd given it permission.
I caught it before it finished the first word.
I set the phone face down on the counter.
I picked it back up. I opened the thread.
I deleted every message in it, eight months of silence followed by I miss you, and emptied the deleted folder for good measure.
"Astrid?"
"Yeah."
"You went quiet."
I steadied my voice against the counter.
"I'm putting on the dress."
"The green one?"
"The green one."
"Good girl."
I laughed. The sound came out small and ragged at the edges, a laugh I hadn't heard out of myself in something close to a year. It surprised me on the way out, like overhearing someone in the next room when you didn't know they were there.
I put the lipstick on.
He was at the door at seven on the nose.
I put my hand on the knob, gave myself a half-second, and opened it.
He stood there in dark jeans and a navy button-down with the sleeves pushed to the elbows.
The cut at his temple from Tuesday was already half-healed.
His hair was pushed back like a man who'd run his hand through it twice on the porch, trying to decide what to do with it.
He held a small bunch of cosmos in his good hand.
Wild pink, picked from somebody's garden in October.
He hadn't wrapped them. He'd just brought them.
He looked at me.
He looked at the neckline of the dress.
He looked at me again, very carefully, like a man working hard not to be caught looking at the neckline of the dress.
"Astrid."
"Easton."
A beat went by while he did what I'd been doing all afternoon, figuring out how to look at a person you'd spent weeks pretending you weren't looking at.
The porch light caught the cut at his temple and the loose curl falling against it.
"You look beautiful."
I smiled. "Thank you."
He held the cosmos out, his thumb against the stems.
"From the back fence."
"I love them."
I took them. Our fingers met on the stems for a beat longer than they needed to.
He waited while I put the flowers in water at the sink.
Moose had been brushed and bribed with a peanut-butter Kong and made to understand, in clear English, that no part of this evening involved him.
The cat in the crate by the radiator watched me with the yellow eye and the half-shut one. I told him I'd be back.
Easton took my coat out of my hand before I could put it on. He held it open by the shoulders. I turned. He settled it onto me and let his hands rest there for a count of one before he stepped back.
The diner smelled like coffee that had been sitting on the burner since lunch and the particular vinegar of a place that had been making the same French fries for forty years. We took the booth by the window in the back, the one I'd always taken.
Easton slid in across from me.
"You look like you've sat here before."
"I've eaten more meals in this booth than in any room I've ever lived in. Including the brownstone."
"That tracks."
A waitress brought waters and menus we didn't need. Meatloaf for him. Grilled cheese for me, because grilled cheese was what I'd been ordering at this diner since I was old enough to read it off the board. The fries to split.
"I should warn you about something."
"Hit me."
"You and I sitting in a booth together is going to be on the bridge club's agenda by Wednesday."
"Astrid. I'm a firefighter who lives across the street from a recently returned divorcée. The bridge club has been working on me for weeks. They started without you."
"You think you're the most interesting thing in here?"
"I think I just sat down with the prettiest woman in here."
My face went warm before my brain caught up with the line.
He ate his meatloaf like a man coming off a sixteen-hour shift. I ate my grilled cheese in halves and corners and the small triangles I'd been cutting it into since I was seven. We split the fries. He let me take the crispiest ones off the top without commentary.
He told me about a call he'd run on Tuesday between the cat and showing up at my door.
A woman with the back gate open and the toddler missing.
The toddler had been three doors down at his friend's house.
Mendoza found him in a sandbox. The mother cried into Easton's shoulder for ten minutes after they got the kid back, and Easton stood there and let her, because the worst part of getting your kid back was the next ten minutes after, and he wasn't going anywhere until she was through them.
He didn't tell it like a heroic story. He told it like a Tuesday.
I told him about the cat. The bald patch behind one ear, the ear mites, and the eye infection I was treating with ointment. I told him I thought I was going to keep him. I told him no name was getting picked until the cat had been with me long enough to know what kind of cat he was.
"You're a good vet, Astrid."
I shrugged.
"I'm a vet."
"You're a good one."
"How would you know?"
"Pen hasn't pawed at the side of her face once in two weeks."
We left the diner at a quarter to nine.
Main Street did its Saturday-night-in-October routine: quiet but not empty, the bookstore windows lit gold against the dark, leaves coming down off the maples and gathering at the bases of the parking meters. The air had finally gone cold enough that I needed to button my coat.
He bought me an ice cream cone from the place two doors down. Mint chip. I hadn't had to tell him. He'd remembered from something I'd said in his kitchen weeks ago and filed it without making me notice.
He got pistachio.
"Pistachio?"
"What about it?"
"That's a grown-up flavor."
"I'm a grown-up."
"It's a flavor for a man at a wedding."
"Do you want some?"
"Yes."
He held the cone out. I leaned in and took a small bite off the side, then looked up at him over the top of it.
His eyes did something I was going to think about later, when I had the privacy to think about it.
We walked.
At the corner of Main and Elm, I needed both hands to button my coat, and he carried my cone without making a thing of it. He held it on the side I wasn't on, so I wouldn't have to reach. He didn't look at me while I buttoned.
I'd been married to a man who never once held my coffee.
The water tower was at the edge of town, on the rise behind the old fire station.
I'd climbed it exactly once in my life. Audrey, at sixteen, on a dare she'd lost to me and made me carry out.
We sat up there for forty minutes and decided what we were going to do with the rest of our lives.
She was wrong about her plan. I was wrong about mine.
I stopped at the foot of the ladder.
"Have you ever climbed this?"
"I've been working out of the firehouse a block from it for two and a half years. Of course I've climbed it."
"On duty?"
"Yeah."
"Off duty?"
"Never."
I lifted my chin at the rungs.
"Bet you won't."
He laughed. The Queens crept in when he was relaxed.
"You're betting me to climb a water tower."
"I am."
"In a wrap dress."
"It stretches."
"Astrid."
"Bet you won't."
He looked up at the tower, then back at me. He shook his head once, slowly.