Chapter 44
“I wouldn’t get it, anyway,” Cherry said. “Meg Jones doesn’t know my name.”
Tom frowned. “Meg Jones knows your name.”
They were on the way home from work. Tom had moved into Cherry’s apartment, so it made sense for them to ride together. Their
offices were only a few blocks apart.
Cherry always drove. She kept her car cleaner, and it got around better in the snow. It was snowing that evening. The windshield
wipers were on high.
Cherry shook her head. “The last time I presented at a meeting with Meg Jones, the only feedback she gave Doug was—‘What was that girl wearing?’ ”
“What were you wearing?”
“My snail vest.” A wool sweater vest with a snail knit over the chest. The snail was wearing glasses and reading a book.
Tom smiled. “Cute.”
“With a blazer,” Cherry said.
“Keeping it profesh.”
“I don’t know why it matters what I wear!” she said.
“It doesn’t matter—hey, give that guy some space.”
“What guy?”
Tom motioned at the car ahead of them.
“I’m giving him space.”
“I know,” Tom said. “Just . . .”
“I’m not going to apply,” she said. “I’ll never get it.”
“You may as well apply—you’re already running the department.”
Cherry grimaced. “That’s not fair to Doug . . .”
“Doug would be the first person to say so.”
“Yeah, but—”
The car ahead of her slammed on the brakes, so Cherry slammed on the brakes. Tom put his hand on the dashboard. Her car slid
a few feet.
Cherry waited for traffic to start moving again. It was snowing so hard. “I don’t even know if I want to work for the railroad,” she said.
“You already work for the railroad.”
“I don’t know if I want to stay.”
“You don’t have to stay.”
“It’s not art. I’m not making anything.”
“Hey.” Tom was giving her a concerned look. “That’s not true.”
“You would never want my job.” She had to slam to a stop again. The anti-lock brakes kicked in and crunched.
After a second, Tom said, “I couldn’t do your job. No one in your department can do your job. The place falls apart when you take a vacation day.”
“Well, I just really like making things work.” Cherry had started crying. It was embarrassing. Railroad execs didn’t cry.
Assistant department heads didn’t cry.
“Baby, I know . . . You’re allowed to like it.” Tom was giving her a soft look. When their eyes met, he nodded toward the
road.
Cherry looked back at the car in front of her. “They’ll never give me a promotion.”
His voice was stern: “If they don’t give it to you, you can leave.”
Hers was strained: “Tom, I don’t want to leave!”
“You don’t have to! But you’re already doing the work. Get the title and the money and the bigger office. No one there—” She
hit the brakes again. “Okay,” Tom said quietly, “I’m gonna need you to pull over.”
She was wiping her eyes on her coat sleeve. “What? Why?”
“Because . . .” His brow was furrowed. “I just . . . need to drive.”
“I can drive.”
“I know. But . . . I need to.”
“Tom, it’s not my fault that it’s snowing.”
“I know.”
“I’m doing fine. Am I not doing fine?” The anti-lock brakes engaged again, loudly. “They’re supposed to sound that way!”
Tom had both hands on the dash. “Cherry, I love you, but—”
“You love me, but?”
“—I’m a better driver than you!”
“Tom. That’s so sexist!”
He laughed. He was stressed. “It’s not sexist—it’s true. Let me drive, and you can talk, and we’ll get home in one piece.”
There was a gas station coming up. Cherry turned into the driveway. The car slid. She put it in park, got out, and left her
door open. Tom got out, too. She didn’t look at him when they passed each other.
Tom got in and adjusted her seat. He’d never driven her car before. It took him a second to shift it out of park. Cherry didn’t
say anything.
He moved them back onto the road.
The streets were as bad as Cherry had ever seen them. She felt smug when Tom had to hit the brakes. Then less smug when the
car didn’t skid.
“You can talk,” he said without looking at her.
“I don’t have anything to say,” she said.
Tom didn’t push her.
Cherry watched the headlights in front of them. She watched an SUV slide right through a red light. Her teeth had been clenched
in anger . . . She clenched them in fear.
The street in front of their apartment was the most treacherous. They got stuck for a few minutes. Tom kept rolling the car
back and forth, and it finally broke free.
He parked the car outside their building, pulled the keys out of the ignition, then held them out to her. She took them.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Cherry didn’t answer.
“You’re not a bad driver.”
“No,” she snipped. “You’re just better.”
“Cherry . . .”
“It’s true. You’re better.”
Tom had turned toward her in the seat. “I would follow you anywhere.”
His voice sounded different. Raw.
Cherry had argued so much with her college boyfriend . . . She almost never fought with Tom. Tom got quiet, not angry.
She didn’t look at him.
“I mean it,” he said. “I would put you in charge of . . . everything.”
“Except the car.”
“Cherry . . .”
She looked at him. She felt tearful again. “I wasn’t trying to endanger you, Tom.”
He brought his hand to her jaw. “Hey. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She waved her hand. “You got us home in one piece. You’re a better driver—it’s fine.”
He was looking in her eyes. His face was open. More open than Cherry was used to. Like he was struggling with something. “You
can drive . . . everywhere else, okay?”
“When it’s not snowing?”
Tom closed one eye. “No—I always want to drive the car, in all weather. From now on. But you can drive, you know, when we’re
not in the car.”
Cherry shook her head. “What are you even . . .”
He wrapped his thumb around her chin. “I mean”—his voice dropped even lower—“I’m at your service.”
Cherry shook her head again.
“You just tell me where to go.”
It was hard to talk to Tom about some things.
Personal things.
His family. Work. Thursday. Sex. The future.
(That was a lot of things.)
It was like he kept everything important deep, deep inside of him . . . Like he had to hike three days through the wilderness
to reach his feelings, and then hike three days back to share them with Cherry.
(Had he buried his feelings there? Or was that where they were naturally located?)
Tom would do anything for Cherry.
He liked to do it before she even asked. He liked to anticipate her wants. To show up with lunch. To fix something before
she’d thought to complain about it. To discover something she’d never heard of that would make her smile.
In Tom’s perfect world, maybe they never spoke at all. Or maybe he never spoke. (In Thursday, The Guy went months without a dialogue balloon.) Tom was foundationally, maybe fundamentally, reticent. And Cherry didn’t
want to pull feelings and memories out of him like teeth.
She still didn’t know whether Tom had dated anyone before her—she’d never asked him. It felt . . . intrusive to ask Tom questions like that. (It felt heretical, to mention anyone who came before.)
The first time they’d had sex, Tom had been so hesitant . . . Cherry had to undress herself. She had to take his hand and
put it on her breast.
He had been so reverent. He made Cherry feel like she was something rare and brand-new. A first edition.
But she didn’t know that it was his first time. Even now.
Stacia couldn’t believe that Cherry didn’t just talk to Tom about things. Cherry was normally so forthright.
“I just . . . can’t,” Cherry would say.
“What’s he going to do? Yell at you?”
“Of course not.”
“Snap at you?”
“No. I can just tell that it makes him uncomfortable.”
“Oh, ‘uncomfortable.’ Perish the thought.”
“You don’t understand. Making Tom uncomfortable is like . . . making a mountain uncomfortable. Or a volcano.”
“Like, he’s going to erupt?”
“No.” Tom never erupted. “More like he’s going to get bigger and stonier and change the entire landscape in a way that affects
weather patterns for years to come.”
“Cherry, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not to you.”
Stacia wasn’t married to the kind of guy whose moods affected the weather.
That wasn’t a useful memory.
That didn’t get Tom right.
That was leaving out the lightness.
The everyday magic of living with Tom—of Cherry and Tom, together.
“Just get them.”
“What are we going to do with a full set of china?”
“Eat off of it. They’re just dishes.”
“We already have dishes.”
“Cherry, we don’t go to estate sales because we need things. We go to estate sales because we like things.”
She picked up a dinner plate and watched the gilt flash in the light. “They’re so pretty, with the roses, and the absinthe
green . . .”
Tom had heard enough. “We’re getting them.”
“They want three hundred dollars for the set.”
“Yeah,” he said, “and I want a pony.”
Cherry laughed. “You do want a pony. Every dog you show me is the size of a small horse.”
“I see you eyeing that china . . .” One of the people running the sale had wandered over—a guy in his seventies who looked
like he was playing an antiquarian in a movie. Waistcoat. Rosy cheeks. Glasses at the end of his nose. “It’s a complete set.”
“I think it’s missing a gravy boat . . .” Tom became a different person at estate sales. Ridiculously gruff and stubborn.
(Maybe this was who he was with his coworkers.)
“Made in England,” the man said. “Hardly used.”
“Well, who has any use for china?” Tom said. “It just sits in your cabinet until your own inevitable estate sale.”
“Exactly,” Cherry said.
Tom frowned at her over the man’s shoulder.
She picked up a footed platter. It was beautiful.
“That’s a very rare pattern,” the man said, then leaned toward Tom as if he was confiding in him. “Your lovely wife has a
good eye.”
Cherry wasn’t Tom’s wife. She was his girlfriend.
She glanced up at Tom. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were bright. “I mean,” he said, “I can’t argue with you there.”
Cherry smiled.
The man put his hand over his heart, theatrically. “Madame, put that smile away. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes.
“You should let her do the wheeling and dealing,” the man said to Tom.
“They’re beautiful dishes,” Cherry said, “but we can’t afford them.”
“I’d be prepared to let them go for one hundred dollars,” he said.
“Seventy-five,” Tom said.
The man looked at Cherry. She smiled.
“Sold,” he said, “to the lovely young lady who won’t let these dishes die in a cabinet.”
Tom paid in cash. The man seemed reluctant to let the china go. He looked up at Cherry and shook his head. “Dimples and freckles, that shouldn’t be legal.”
As they were walking away, Tom said, “He doesn’t know the half of it.”
Cherry was made assistant department head. Then department head. Then put in charge of several departments.
Tom was unwavering in his support—even though he disliked her coworkers and felt indifferent at best about the railroad. He
listened to her talk. He helped her strategize. He never let her feel alone in her frustrations. (Western Alliance got so
much free expertise out of Tom over their dinner table.)
Early evening, a weeknight, the year that Tom quit:
They’d stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work, and they were both tired and hungry, and Tom was putting away
groceries while Cherry started dinner, and Tom was complaining about one of the account managers.
“She’s so literal,” he said. “We don’t have to use the word ‘jobs’ in every recruitment headline. If someone doesn’t understand that the ad
is about jobs, they’re not smart enough to work on trains anyway. I asked her if she needed restaurants to hang a sign that
said ‘food’ in the window . . .”
Cherry had been slicing cucumbers. She turned away from the cutting board.
Tom glanced over at her. “What’s wrong? Did you cut yourself?”
“That was my note,” Cherry said. “On the recruiting ad.”
Tom let the refrigerator door swing closed. “Oh.” He looked like he was thinking. “Okay.”
“They’re billboards,” she said. “We need them to be obvious.”
He smiled a little. His shoulders had dropped. “You’re right. I’ll change it.”
She frowned. “You can argue with me . . .”
“I’m not going to argue with you. You’re the boss.”
Cherry shook her head. “Tom. I don’t want you to agree with me just because I’m the client.”
Tom walked over to her and rested his hand on her hip. “I’m not. That’s not what I meant.”
“You called me the boss . . .”
He shrugged. He looked in her eyes. “You are the boss.”
She frowned.
He was standing in front of her. He bumped his hip against hers. “I trust your judgment.”
“If you thought the note was idiotic when Katie gave it—”
“Katie’s an idiot.”
“—and then when I say it—”
“You’re not.”
“Tom, I want you to be honest with me.”
He wrapped his hand around her chin. “Cherry, I am being honest with you.”
“You can’t just do whatever I say at work because I’m your wife.”
He tilted his head. “Wouldn’t that make your life easier?”
“I don’t want my life to be easy. I want it to be good.”
Tom was smiling with his eyes. He kissed her.
She kissed him back half-heartedly. “I want you to argue with me,” she said.
“I don’t like arguing with you,” he murmured. “If I’m arguing with you, it usually means I’m wrong.” He pulled back to look
in her eyes—
Then dropped gently to his knees in front of her.
Cherry was surprised. “Tom.”
He lifted up his chin. “Baby . . .” he whispered.
She shook her head.
“You’re the boss,” he said.
Cherry couldn’t tell if he was teasing. His eyes were light, but he wasn’t laughing. She shook her head some more. She ran a hand through his hair, tugging on it. Tom let his head fall back and brought his hands up to her thighs. “I don’t want to be the boss,” Cherry said quietly.
He was just barely smiling. “Don’t you?”
His scalp was warm under her fingertips. “Not with you.”
He smiled a little more. Like she was full of shit.
“Tom,” Cherry said insistently. She wasn’t sure what she was insisting on. She tugged his head farther back.
Tom let her. His eyes were still light. “I want your life to be easy and good.”