Chapter 4 – Emily
Emily
They arrive together, which tells me everything before the door is even open.
Maria never comes without Kyle these days—she likes an escort, likes someone to open her car door and carry the wine she brings that she'll then criticize us for not decanting properly—but the two of them coming as a pair, on a Sunday, with that particular brightness in Ben's step all afternoon, means this was arranged.
Means there was a phone call I wasn't part of. There have been a lot of those lately.
I've set the table myself. Marta offered, twice, and both times I told her no, I've got it, because there is something in me now that needs a task I can put my hands to, and if the only territory left to me in this house is the placement of forks, then God help me I will command it.
I've done the good silver. I've done the low arrangement of white ranunculus that won't block anyone's sightline.
I've seated Maria to Ben's right because she expects it and myself at the far end because I have learned, over eight years, that the far end is where the least is asked of me.
"Maria," I say, and I go to her with my hands out, and she offers me one cheek and the cool dry press of her palm against my forearm, the touch of a woman confirming the quality of a coat she has no intention of buying.
"Emily." She looks past me as she says it. "Is she down yet? Tara?"
She. Not how are you. Not the house looks lovely. Just—is the sun up yet, is the show about to start.
"I'm here, I'm here," and there she is on the stairs, coming down in something soft and pale that makes my own dark dress feel like a uniform, and Maria's whole face opens the way I have never once seen it open for me. "Maria Carson, look at you, you haven't aged a day?—"
"Oh, stop it, you liar?—"
"I mean it, it's obscene, Ben, doesn't your mother look obscene?—"
And Ben laughs, and Kyle laughs, and the four of them fold into each other in the foyer like a family reuniting after a long war, and I stand at the edge of it holding a wine I'm apparently meant to have decanted, and I understand that I am the guest here.
In my own house. I am the one being hosted.
"Emily." A voice, low, at my shoulder. "You look like a woman who could use a drink she doesn't have to pour."
Connor. I hadn't even heard him come in, and the relief of him is so sudden and so total that I have to look down at the floor for a second to gather myself.
Of all of Ben's world, Connor is the one piece that has always felt like mine too—the one who remembers my birthday, who asks about the cello and then actually listens to the answer, who once, years ago, told Ben in front of me that marrying me was the smartest thing he'd ever do and then winked at me like we'd gotten away with something.
"I have wine," I say. "I just can't seem to make myself drink it in front of the committee."
He huffs a laugh through his nose and steers me, gently, by the elbow, toward the far windows where the light is going amber over the lawn, and for a moment we just stand and watch the tableau by the stairs—Tara with her hand on Ben's arm, Maria beaming up at the both of them like a portrait she commissioned herself.
"You're doing this with more grace than most people would," Connor says quietly. He isn't looking at me. He's giving me the mercy of not being looked at while he says it. "I want you to know somebody sees it."
Something in my chest pulls tight and then, dangerously, tries to come loose. I keep my eyes on the lawn. "I don't feel graceful. I feel like furniture."
"That's what grace looks like from the inside." He takes a sip. "It never feels like anything. It just feels like swallowing."
I laugh before I can stop it, and it's a small ugly wet thing, and I press the back of my hand to my mouth.
Across the room Tara's head tips back with laughter at something Ben's said, that easy proprietary laughter, and I hear myself ask the question I've been carrying around like a stone in my shoe for a week.
"Connor. Were they always—" I gesture, uselessly, with the wine. "Him and Tara. You've known them both longer than I have. They met in college, before me. Was it always like this?"
He's quiet for a beat too long, and then he laughs, but it's not a kind laugh, it's the laugh of a man remembering something he'd rather not. "Emily," he says. "It was worse."
"Worse."
"Much." He turns the glass in his fingers.
"You showed up and it got better, if you can believe that.
You calmed the whole thing down. Before you—" He stops himself, and I watch him decide how much to hand me, and I watch him decide on mercy again, only half of it.
"Let's just say there's history there she likes to keep warm.
And he lets her. He's always let her. It's the one blind spot in an otherwise very sharp man. "
I want to ask him ten more things. I want to ask him what worse means, exactly, and I want to ask him whether the blind spot is really a blind spot or just a place Ben has decided not to look. But Marta appears in the doorway to say dinner is served, and the moment folds shut, and we file in.
It takes eleven minutes.
I count them now, out of habit, the way I counted the eleven minutes it took Tara to find my soft places that first night.
We make it through the soup and most of the way through the fish before Maria sets down her fork, dabs her mouth, and says, to the table but really to Tara, "You know, I always did think you and Benjamin made a handsome pair.
Back in the day. Two peas." She smiles down the length of the table in my general direction, not quite at me.
"Some people just come from the same stock, don't they. You can't manufacture it."
"Oh, Maria." Tara touches her heart, mock-scandalized, thrilled. "You'll make Emily jealous."
"I'm sure Emily's very secure," Maria says, in the tone one uses for the dog.
Ben cuts his fish. He does not look up. He has heard every word—I know he has, I know the exact set of his shoulders when he's decided something isn't happening—and he lets it wash over him like weather, the way he lets all of it wash over him, and I sit there with my hands folded in my lap and I feel the eleventh minute close over my head like water.
"The renovation on the marketing floor," Tara says brightly, pivoting, generous, "Ben's letting me have a real hand in it.
It's so nice to be somewhere I can actually contribute.
I'd go mad otherwise. I don't know how some women do it, just—floating around a big beautiful house all day with nothing that needs them. " A little laugh. "I'd feel useless."
And there it is. Slid in clean, the way the good ones always are, gift-wrapped so tightly that to unwrap it would make me the ungracious one. I look at my plate. I have gotten so good at looking at my plate.
"Emily's needed," Connor says.
He says it lightly. He says it into his wine, almost, the way I said the thing about being furniture. But the table hears it, and it lands, and Tara's smile does a small complicated thing at the corner.
"She holds this whole life together," Connor goes on, easy, pleasant, deadly. "You'd be surprised how much floating it takes. Some people just make it look effortless. Can't manufacture that either."
For one bright, impossible second I love him. For one second the table is mine.
And then Ben's fork comes down against the china, one sharp click, not loud but final, and he looks up at last—at last, at last—and it's at Connor. "That's enough," he says. "Nobody needs the commentary, Con."
The silence that follows is a different silence than the one I live in. This one has a shape. Everyone hears it.
Because he heard that. Out of the whole evening—Maria's stock, Tara's useless, the two of them passing me back and forth between them like a plate nobody wants to finish—the only thing that reached him, the only barb sharp enough to make Ben Carson set down his fork and defend the wounded, was the one aimed at Tara. In my defense.
Connor holds his gaze a moment. Then he lifts his glass an inch, a toast to no one, and drinks, and lets it go, because he is a better guest than I will ever be brave enough to be.
"Well," Maria says pleasantly, into the wreckage. "Is there dessert?"
There is dessert. Marta brings it, and we eat it, and I say the correct things, and Tara laughs her laugh, and Ben's hand finds Tara's shoulder once in passing on his way to the sideboard, and I sit at the far end of my own table where the least is asked of me and I look at my plate and I think about the word worse, and how much of it is still coming, and how, when the one person at this table who saw me tried to say so out loud, my husband's first and only instinct was to make him stop.