Chapter 14
Astrid
We were a week past our first date. The word for it could come later, or not come at all, or come in a smaller voice than the ones I had worn out in my last marriage.
What I had been doing in the meantime was learning the shape of him in grief.
I hadn't slept in my own bed in two nights, and that was the part I kept coming back to. Not the kiss on the water tower. Not the hand on his chest in the dark. The fact that I had crossed Maple twice after dinner and let myself stay.
Sunday afternoon, I carried a pot of soup across Maple in a sweater and the same jeans I'd worn home that morning.
He opened the front door before I had a hand free for the knob.
He said nothing. He took the pot, put it on the burner, and stood at the kitchen window, looking out at the roses, with his back to me.
I stood at the counter and let him have the window for as long as he needed it.
He turned eventually. He came over and put his forehead against mine and stayed there a while.
Then he ladled soup into two bowls, and we ate with Moose at his feet and the rug by the back door empty where Penny had lived every day I'd known her.
Both nights in his bed, I kept my hand where I'd put it, on his chest, where his breath was finally leveled and calm. There were a hundred things in his house, and three quarters of them had been hers.
In an hour, I was going to walk into the Hartsdale Community Hall in a navy blazer my best friend had picked out and a pair of earrings my mother gave me at sixteen, and I was going to sit beside a man in his grief, and I was going to ask a town that owed him nothing to give me something.
I was going to ask it in a room with Joe Caldwell in it.
I was going to ask it in a voice I hadn't used since I was twenty-three, in a brownstone on Marlborough Street where I taught myself, year after year, to ask for less.
I was about to find out how much of her was left.
The earring stuck.
I tipped my head sideways at the bathroom mirror and worked the post through my earlobe with the patience of a woman who hadn't worn a pair in months.
It came through eventually. I worked the back into place and looked at myself.
Hair pulled back at the nape. The navy blouse Audrey had told me to wear before I'd even asked.
The small gold hoops I'd dug out of the dresser drawer for the water tower date.
The phone buzzed. Audrey on speaker.
"You wearing the navy?"
"I'm wearing the navy."
"Lipstick?"
"Audrey."
"Lipstick, Astrid."
I uncapped the tube and pressed the soft red against my lower lip.
The smell of it, wax and something faintly floral, brought back the brownstone bathroom on Marlborough Street.
The same lipstick I'd bought myself at twenty-three.
I'd been keeping it in the drawer next to the earrings, which was something a woman did when she was coming back to her life.
Two pieces of evidence that she was coming back, and she didn't want them in different rooms.
"Are you ready?" Audrey said.
"Yes."
"Liar."
I looked at myself in the mirror.
"I'm worried about him being there tonight."
"He wants to be there."
"I know he does. I want to give him a quiet week."
Audrey filled silences as a rule. She didn't fill this one.
"Astrid."
"Yeah."
"Wear the lipstick."
I finished putting it on.
I capped it and set it on the counter. The cat came around the doorframe and sat on the bath mat with the deep yellow-eyed look of a cat who had decided I was a thing he was now in charge of.
He'd come out of the crate on Monday morning and stayed out.
He'd taken Moose's spot on the bed without consulting him, and Moose had let him.
The cat watched me put my blazer on.
"You're going to need a name," I told him.
He blinked at me once.
I'd been calling him "sir.” A placeholder, the word a woman uses when she knows she has a cat now and is waiting for him to be himself long enough that the right word falls out of her mouth.
He pressed his shoulder against my ankle. I bent down and rubbed his head. He leaned. He'd been with me two weeks, and he'd been with me always. That was what cats did.
The doorbell rang.
Easton's truck was in his driveway across Maple.
He came down the front walk before Audrey had backed out of mine.
Dark jeans, navy button-down under his Hartsdale Fire jacket, hair combed back the same as the first date, the cut at his temple from the cat night fully healed.
He came across the street with a forward walk, a man who'd been working through grief and had decided, today, to be somewhere.
He got in the back seat behind me.
"Audrey."
"Ford."
"Astrid."
"Hi."
He set his hand on the back of my seat between my shoulder blades and the headrest. Not on me. Where I could feel his knuckles through the seat if I let my shoulder go back. I let my shoulder go back.
Audrey watched it in the rearview mirror and said nothing, which was Audrey's whole vocabulary when she'd decided not to say something.
The community hall was on Elm, three blocks from the firehouse, a low brick building with fluorescent light coming out the front windows. The parking lot was full.
Mrs. Halloran was already inside in the second row with her good handbag in her lap.
She turned when she saw me, lifted her chin, and didn't smile, which was the Halloran version of an embrace.
Caldwell was at the back coffee urn with a Styrofoam cup in his hand.
Silver hair brushed back. The fleece vest. He saw me come in. He smiled.
I smiled back. Not the porch smile. The one I'd practiced in a brownstone for six years and could deploy at a man's mother across a dinner table without the man at the table knowing it had happened.
We sat in the third row. Audrey on the aisle, then me, then Easton. He took my hand under the cover of my coat on my lap. He laced his fingers through mine but didn't squeeze.
The chair was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and the patience of someone who'd outlasted everyone in the room at least once. She ran through the agenda in a flat municipal voice. Minutes from the previous meeting. A knocked-down stop sign. The fall festival budget.
When she came to my permit, she lifted her head and looked at me over the reading glasses.
"Item six. Veterinary practice application, Dr. Astrid Matthews. Main Street."
She started to read the application.
Caldwell stood up.
The chair looked at him.
"Joe?"
"Madam Chair. Couple of things to say, if I may."
She set the agenda down.
"Floor's yours."
He stepped into the aisle. He stayed three rows behind us, hands clasped at his waist, the position of a man who'd done this enough times to know not to take the podium for something he wanted to sound informal.
"Thanks, Madam Chair." He gave the room a small smile. "Won't keep you long. Most of you know me. I've been doing what I do up on Elm for about thirty years now."
A chuckle from his corner of the room.
"I'm not here to oppose anything, exactly. I want to say that up front. Dr. Matthews and I had a nice chat on her porch a few weeks back. She seems like a very capable young woman. Her folks were good neighbors, and I'm glad she's home."
He paused. The pause was deliberate, timed with the ease of a man who'd been at this his whole life.
"I just want to make sure we're being honest with each other about what this town can carry.
Hartsdale's a small town. We've had one practice for thirty years because that's what a place this size supports.
" He looked at his hands, then back at the chair.
"I have to be honest with the council. I don't want to see a young woman come back to her hometown and put everything she has into a business that this town isn't going to be able to keep open.
That's the part I worry about. I'd hate for her to have come all this way for that. "
He let it sit.
"I also have to think about the folks in this room who've been my clients for thirty years.
Three generations of pets, in some cases.
Those folks aren't going to know what to do if the town starts splitting itself in two.
They're going to feel pulled. They're going to feel like they have to choose.
And in a town this size, I don't know that's a thing we ought to be asking people to feel. "
Easton's hand under my coat went still.
"I'm not retiring next week," Caldwell said. "I've got a few years left in me. If we approve this application tonight, we're not making a decision about next year. We're making a decision about the next decade. I want the council to be thinking about that."
He looked at the chair.
"That's all I had. Appreciate the floor."
He sat down.
The chair looked at her notes. She looked at me.
"Dr. Matthews. Would you like to respond?"
I stood up.
Easton's hand let go of mine. He set it on the seat where I'd felt it on the drive over. I felt the heat of him at my hip.
I had a folder in my hand. Audrey told me to bring a folder, even if I didn't use it, because a woman with a folder reads differently to a council than a woman without one. I held it at my side.
"Madam Chair. Council. Thank you."
My voice came out lower than I'd been carrying it in the car. I noticed it. I let it be.
"I want to thank Dr. Caldwell for his concern. I do. He has served this town for thirty years, and that means something. I'm not standing up here to argue with any of it."
He hadn't expected the thank-you. I saw it in the small movement at the side of his mouth.
"I want to be straightforward with the council about what I've already been doing in this town."
I opened the folder. I didn't read from it. I had wanted my hands to have something to do.
"I've been back in Hartsdale a little over six weeks.
In that time, I've signed a lease on Main Street, hired a tech, and cleared inspection.
I'm ten days from opening. I also diagnosed a senior dog with a fractured upper carnassial that had been missed by the practice on Elm for three months.
I referred her to Hudson Valley Animal Hospital for the extraction. She came home a different dog."
A few heads in the room turned, slowly.
"I want to say something else. I don't say this to make a point. I say it because the council needs to know it."
I lifted my eyes from the folder.
"Four nights ago, a dog in this town died in her owner's arms on a kitchen floor.
She was bleeding internally from a splenic tumor, something that takes old goldens.
She was twelve. She had a good life. None of that was anyone's fault.
" I let the next breath go. "But the reason her owner spent that hour on a kitchen floor and not in an exam room was that the only practice in this town was unreachable, and the nearest after-hours clinic was forty minutes south on Route 23, and her owner didn't have forty minutes. "
I felt Easton stop breathing beside me.
I didn't look at him. I looked at the council chair.
"I'm not saying she could have been saved. She probably couldn't. I'm saying her owner shouldn't have had to find that out on the floor of his own kitchen."
The room was quiet.
I let it stay quiet.
"I'm not asking the council to take a side against anyone.
I'm asking the council to vote on what is already happening.
This town is being served by a second veterinarian.
That veterinarian is me. I'm not going to stop being one if you vote no.
I'm asking you to make it legal so I can do the job in a building with a license on the wall. "
I closed the folder.
"Thank you."
I sat down.
The chair looked at her papers.
"Any further discussion?"
There wasn't.
"All in favor of approving the application for veterinary practice at the Main Street location, signify by saying aye."
Three ayes around the table.
"All opposed?"
Two nays.
She looked over the reading glasses.
"Application approved. Welcome to Main Street, Dr. Matthews."
Audrey set her hand on my forearm under my coat and squeezed it once. I felt her exhale.
Easton was still beside me. I turned my head a quarter inch toward him. He was looking at me. He'd been looking at me, I understood, the whole time I'd been speaking. His eyes had something in them I hadn't seen before. I wasn't going to find a word for it tonight, and I didn't need to.
"Hey," I said, low.
"Hey."
The room rearranged itself, coats coming off chair backs, a few people heading for the coffee urn. Mrs. Halloran turned around and gave me the small nod a woman of her generation gives another woman she has decided is going to do all right.
Caldwell crossed the aisle.
He was smiling. It was the porch smile. The one that traveled all the way to the eyes only by being told to.
He stopped in front of me.
I stood up.
"Dr. Matthews."
"Dr. Caldwell."
He held out his hand.
I held out mine.
His grip closed on it. Not the grip of a man who'd just lost a vote.
The grip of a man who had decided, somewhere between his seat and mine, that he was going to make sure I understood something he was not going to say out loud.
His hand was big, dry, and a little too warm.
The room pulled back to the edges, and what stayed at the center was the pressure of his palm.
He held mine harder than he needed to. A beat longer than he should have.
His other hand came over the top and rested on the back of mine. A welcoming gesture. The same gesture my mother-in-law made across a dinner table when she wanted me to know I'd hung the wreath wrong. Soft on the surface and contained underneath.
Beside me, Easton went still. I felt it the way you feel a porch light come on next to you in the dark.
He stayed where he was and let the full weight of his attention rest on the place where Caldwell's hand was on mine.
Caldwell, who had been a man in this town for thirty years and had read its rooms for just as long, felt it.
He held my hand for another half second.
Then he smiled at me and let go.
"Welcome to the neighborhood, Doctor."
"Thank you, Joe."
He turned and went down the aisle, stopping at the back of the room to talk to two of his men in their fleece vests.
I sat down.
Audrey set her arm along the back of my chair.
Easton put his hand on my knee under my coat and left it there.
I looked at the place where Caldwell had been standing.
He'd lost the vote. He hadn't lost the war.
I'd seen it in the extra second his hand stayed on mine.