Chapter 6 – Emily
Emily
Ana orders for both of us because she knows I won't. She always has, since we were nineteen and I'd stand paralyzed at a counter reading the whole menu twice and then order whatever the person ahead of me got.
She reels off two of the flat whites and the lemon thing we split and then she folds her hands on the little marble table and looks at me, really looks, the way almost no one has looked at me in three weeks, and says, "Okay. You look terrible. Tell me."
"Thank you," I say. "You look wonderful, I've missed you too."
"Emily."
The café is one of the ones near her office, all reclaimed wood and hanging plants and young people with laptops nursing single espressos for four hours, and it's loud in the good way, the way that means we can say things and they'll be carried off before they land anywhere that matters.
I wrap both hands around the coffee when it comes.
I've been cold for three weeks in a way that has nothing to do with the weather.
So I tell her. I tell her about the truck.
About the drafting desk carried past me up my own stairs to the room beside the only room in that house that was ever mine, about right next to your little music room, like a couple of girls at finishing school, about the text that sat there saying Delivered and nothing else, not that night, not the next morning, not once.
And then I tell her the thing I came to tell her, the thing that's been sitting under my sternum like a swallowed stone since Tuesday.
"She left a delivery inside my studio door," I say.
"Art supplies. Boxes of them. Stacked just inside where I'd have to move them to get to the cello.
And when I asked she said—" I do the voice without meaning to, the light one, the one that laughs a half-beat late.
"She said, oh, the man must have gotten the rooms mixed up, they're right next to each other, silly, I'll shift them when I get a minute.
And she never got a minute. They were there two days.
My own—" I stop. "I stood in the hallway, Ana.
I stood in the hallway of my own house because I didn't want to go in and see her paint fumes soaking into the one place I?—"
I don't finish it. Ana doesn't make me.
"Tell him to make her leave," she says.
It's so simple, coming out of her mouth. That's the thing about Ana—she has a whole life built on the radical idea that a person is allowed to want things and say so. I love her for it and I cannot, in this moment, follow her into it.
"It's not?—"
"It is that simple. It's her out. It's your house. You say, Ben, I want her gone, and if he loves you he says okay, and if he—" She catches herself, but I've already heard the shape of the rest of it, the if he doesn't, and it hangs there over the lemon thing neither of us has touched.
"That's exactly it," I say quietly. "That's exactly why I can't."
She waits.
"If I ask him," I say, "then I'll know. Right now I don't have to know.
Right now I can tell myself he's overwhelmed, he's distracted, the merger, he doesn't see it.
But if I stand in front of him and I say the words—get her out of my house—and he looks at me and says no.
" My voice does the thing it does, the shrinking.
"Then it's not a story I'm telling myself anymore.
Then it's a fact. Then I have to look at eight years and ask what they were, and I don't—Ana, I don't have anywhere to put that.
There's no room in me for that to be true yet. "
She reaches across and covers my cold hand with her warm one and doesn't say anything smart, which is how I know she understands. Ana knows when a thing can't be solved, only sat beside.
My phone buzzes against the marble.
It's Marta. Emily — should I take the roast out? It's getting quite dark on top, I'm worried it's going over.
I look at it for a moment the way you look at a sentence in a language you almost know.
What roast? I type back.
The dots come and go and come. The one Ms. Adamson put in. She said she wanted to do it herself, wouldn't let me touch it, she's very particular. But she went up to take a call a good while ago and hasn't come down and I can smell it starting to catch. I didn't want to overstep.
I read it twice. Then I'm standing, and my chair scrapes, and Ana is looking up at me with her eyebrows already climbing.
"She's cooking in my kitchen," I say, and even as I say it I hear how insane it sounds, how small, a woman upended by a roast. "She put something in the oven and then wandered off and left Marta to—I have to go."
"Emily." Ana's on her feet too, catching my sleeve, and her face has stopped being gentle and gone somewhere fiercer. "Whatever's happening at that house, you don't have to run toward it. You know that, right? You're allowed to let it burn."
But I'm already pulling my coat on, because I am who I am, and there is a kitchen full of my staff and a fire I can put out, and putting out fires is the one thing left in that house I still know how to do.
—
I smell it before I'm through the mudroom. Not disaster—not yet—but the sharp edge of sugar gone too far, of fat smoking, and under it the good honest smell of a real dinner, root vegetables and rosemary and something braising, more food than four people eat, more food than six people eat.
Marta's at the range with her oven mitts on and pure relief on her face when she sees me. "It's the glaze," she says, low, "it's all sugar, it's scorching before the middle's done, and there's the potatoes that never went in, and she's got the good china half out on the counter?—"
"Turn it down to two-fifty, tent it with foil, give it the potatoes' oven.
" I've already got my sleeves pushed up, already got my hands in it, and there's a horrible relief in it, in the clean geometry of a problem I can actually touch.
"The braise is fine, the braise just needs left alone.
Julia—" the younger girl, hovering—"the potatoes, halve them, they'll roast in forty if we go hot on the top rack.
" I lift the foil and look at the roast and it's savable, it's savable, another twenty minutes and it wouldn't have been. "Who is this even for?"
"I don't—she just said dinner. She said it was a surprise."
A surprise. Something goes cold and slow down my spine.
That's when Tara comes in, and she stops in the doorway with her phone still glowing in her hand, and her face does its recalibration a half-beat too slow so that I catch the flash underneath, the real one, before the warmth slides up over it.
"Oh—Emily. What are you doing?"
"Saving your roast," I say. "It was burning. Marta called me."
"I had it." She sets the phone down, comes toward the range with her hand out like I'm a child near a hot surface.
"I was going to come right back down, I just got caught on a call, you didn't have to—God, you've taken the glaze right off, that was the whole—Marta, why would you let her—" She turns a small tight circle, taking in my hands in her dinner, the foil, the rearranged oven, and her eyes are bright and wet-rimmed all at once, the transition seamless, professional.
"This was mine. This was the one thing that was mine to do. "
"Tara, it's my kitchen." I hear my voice climbing out of its usual register and I can't seem to catch it. "These are my—you didn't tell anyone. You didn't tell me. You've got the good china out, my grandmother's china, for—for how many people?"
And there's Ben in the doorway, drawn by the pitch of us, tie loosened, and he takes in the scene the way he takes in everything now, at a glance, deciding before he's understood.
"What's going on in here."
"Emily's a little upset about the dinner," Tara says, and her voice has gone soft and trembly and small, my register, she's taken my register, "and it's my fault, I should have—I only wanted to do something nice, Ben, I wanted to surprise you?—"
"Surprise me with what?"
"Your mom." She says it to him, only to him, her eyes filling now, genuinely, the woman can cry on a beat.
"Kyle, Connor, the Hendleys, the whole old crowd—I wanted to cook, a real dinner, the way I used to before—before everything, I wanted to do one nice thing for the people who've been so good to me, and I thought—you said make yourself at home, you said that, I thought that's what you meant?—"
"Nobody told me," I say, and it comes out flat and disbelieving. "There are guests coming to my house in—Ben, there are people coming and no one told me. She used my staff, my kitchen, my grandmother's good china, my?—"
"Emily." Ben's already crossed to Tara, already got a hand on her shoulder, already turned so his back is half to me. "You're making a huge deal out of nothing. She wanted to do something kind. Look at her."
"I'm not—the roast was burning, Ben, Marta had to call me at a café because a woman put a dinner in the oven and walked away for two hours?—"
"She got caught up. It happens." He's rubbing Tara's shoulder now, and Tara has tipped her forehead toward him and she's murmuring no, no, she's right, it's my fault, which is the cleverest thing she's done all evening, agreeing with me in the voice of a wounded child so that my anger becomes the cruelty in the room.
"It was thoughtful," Ben says over her head, to me, in the reasonable voice, the one he extends like a hand toward someone standing too close to an edge.
"It was a genuinely thoughtful thing to do and you're standing here scolding her over foil. Do you hear yourself?"
Do you hear yourself. The exact words. Eight years and the same clean blade.
I take my hands out of the dinner. I wipe them slowly on the towel. And something in me that has been swallowing for three weeks, for a year, for longer, just—declines. Not a break. Quieter than that. A door closing somewhere very far down.
I set the towel on the counter. I pick up my keys from the dish by the door.
"Emily." Ben's voice sharpens. "Where are you going? The guests will be here in an hour."
And I turn in the mudroom doorway, and I look at him with his hand still on her shoulder in the wreckage of a dinner I saved and was never told about, and for once, for once, my voice doesn't shrink.
"I don't see why that should matter," I say. "I wasn't invited."
And I go out into the cool evening and get in my car, and I do not look back at the glass and the stone, and I drive.