Chapter 10
TEN
DANIEL
I saw her truck before I’d even pulled into the lot.
It was parked at the curb in front of my building, the pizza box visible on the dash, Ellie herself behind the wheel staring through the windshield at with the expression of a woman who’d seen some shit today and was still in the process of sorting it. I’d been hoping to beat her here.
She was already out of the truck by the time I’d turned off my engine.
“Someone put it on Facebook,” she announced.
“I heard.”
“Daniel. Facebook.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at the pizza box, then back at me. I recognized a woman who’d run out of reactions and was operating on reserve capacity. “I also got a voicemail from my dentist.”
“Your dentist.”
“Dr. Purcell. He was asking if we’re doing a registry.” She paused. “I’ve been a patient there since I was twelve.”
I considered this. “What did you say?”
“I haven’t called him back yet.” She followed me toward the building, and we ran straight into Mrs. Kowalski from the ground floor unit, in her house slippers, who took one look at me and clasped both hands to her chest. “Daniel,” she said. “I heard the news. Married! Finally!”
Her cheweenie, Kielbasa, barked in agreement.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kowalski.”
“Your Ellie is such a lovely girl. I always said so. I said to Mr. Kowalski—God rest him—I said, that boy is going to marry that girl one day, you mark my words.”
“You were correct,” I said, wondering if she’d somehow missed that Ellie was right here.
She beamed at my wife, who smiled back with the practiced composure of someone running on fumes, and said, “You bring her by. I want to make her my pierogi.”
“We’ll do that,” I said, and got us upstairs and inside before anything else could happen.
My apartment was the same as I’d left it this morning.
Reasonably clean by my standards, which Ellie had once described as aggressively adequate.
She moved through it without hesitation, dropping her purse by the couch and continuing directly to the kitchen the way she always did, because she knew her way around my place the same way I knew my way around hers.
She left the pizza on the counter. I grabbed two beers from the fridge, and by the time I turned around she’d already pulled out plates and was snagging two paper towels off the roll.
It was comfortable. The two of us in a kitchen had always been comfortable.
I also noted with weary resignation that this domesticity was doing something to me that it never had before.
There was no logical reason for it. Ellie Granger had been in my kitchen approximately four thousand times.
She’d eaten pizza on my couch more times than I could count.
None of that had ever registered as anything other than what it was—my best friend, in my space, in the easy way of people who were such a part of each other’s orbit that proximity required no negotiation.
And yet here she was, leaning against the counter with a slice of pizza in her hand and a small smear of tomato sauce at the corner of her mouth that she hadn’t noticed, and I was finding it extremely difficult to look at anything else.
I handed her a beer and looked at the pizza.
“The pharmacist, Sandra, the nurse, Dr. Purcell,” she said, ticking them off. “Oh, and Mrs. Petty called the store. Patrice took the message. She said Mrs. Petty cried.”
“Mrs. Petty cries at everything.”
“She cried at the Fourth of July parade.”
“She did,” I agreed. “She cried at the new stoplight on Commerce Street.”
“She said it was a long time coming.” Ellie took a bite of her pizza and looked at the middle distance as she chewed. Her brows pulled together slightly when she was thinking. A small vertical line between them that I’d always found unreasonably—
I looked at the pizza again. Aggressively at the pizza.
“So,” she said.
“So,” I said.
“Gus.” She set her slice down on the plate and turned to face me more fully. “Sandra said Whitfield’s coming tomorrow, and she doesn’t think it’s going to be bad news. Which is everything I wanted.” She said it like a disclaimer. “I want to be clear that it’s everything I wanted.”
“But.”
“But when we came up with this plan, he had a week. Maybe less. It felt contained. Manageable.” She picked up her beer. “What if he actually gets better, Daniel? What if he gets better enough to come home?”
There it was. The thing that had sat in the back of my mind all afternoon, unnamed, waiting for tonight.
“Then we deal with it,” I said.
“He’ll expect us to be—“ She gestured between us. “He’s going to want to see it. The whole town already believes we’re married. If they don’t see us acting like it, someone’s going to say something to Gus. You know how this town—“
“I’m aware of how this town works,” I said. “Yeah.”
She looked at me. I looked at her. The smear of tomato sauce was still there at the corner of her mouth, and I was doing an absolutely heroic job of not looking at it.
“The fiction has to hold,” she said. “However long it takes.”
“Right,” I said. I set my beer down and pondered the logistics of it, because logistics were useful right now. Logistics were concrete and manageable and did not involve tomato sauce or the memory of ten seconds in a hospital room. “Which means if he comes home…”
“We’d need to be living together,” Ellie said. “Obviously. He’s going to—”
“You have the house,” I said. “More room. Ground floor bedroom for him; we’d be upstairs.
” I said it like I was describing a floor plan and not the arrangement of where I would be sleeping in proximity to my wife.
My actual legal wife. “I’ve still got the lease here through April.
It’s not like I’d be giving anything up permanently. ”
She blinked at me. “You want to move in with me.”
“It’s the practical solution, yeah.”
“Into my house.”
“Gus has a better chance of getting home to his own space than to a new one. And your house has the layout for it.” I watched her work through it, the logic catching before the implications did, and then the implications catching up all at once.
“It would be temporary,” I said. “Same as everything else. Until we figure out the annulment.”
The word landed between us and sat there.
Annulment. The off-ramp. The part of the plan that was supposed to make all of this manageable. Except that every time I said it, I had to actively talk myself into meaning it, which was a thing I was going to need to actually analyze at some point in the near future.
After a moment, she said, “Okay, yes. That’s the logical thing.
” She reached for her pizza again, and I watched her take a bite, and the tomato sauce situation resolved itself when she grabbed a napkin, which should have helped and somehow only made things worse because now I knew the taste of that mouth and could easily—
She is your best friend, I reminded myself.
She’s also your wife, said the considerably less helpful part of my brain, with the smug energy of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity to say it.
We are not doing this, I told that part.
She’s literally wearing your ring.
We are absolutely not doing this, and I need you to be quiet.
Ellie was saying something about the timeline, about whether Patrice could keep covering the store through a transition.
I nodded and made the appropriate sounds, keeping my eyes at a responsible altitude while I thought of the annulment, and about April, and about all the sensible and mature reasons why I was going to keep things exactly as they were.
I was a responsible adult. I was her best friend. I was not going to take advantage of a situation she hadn’t signed up for, regardless of what the paperwork said.
“Daniel,” she said.
I looked at her.
“You went somewhere.”
“Logistics,” I said. “Just thinking about logistics.”
She studied me for a moment with the sharp eyes of a woman who’d known me since the third grade and was therefore difficult to fool. Then she appeared to decide to let it go, which I was grateful for, and reached for another slice of pizza.
“Okay,” she said. “We move in together. We keep up appearances. We figure out the annulment when—“ She stopped. “When things settle down.”
When things settled down. When Gus came home and got better, or didn’t. When the plan ran its course. When we ended.
“Yeah,” I said. “When things settle down.”
We ate the rest of the pizza in the comfortable quiet that had always lived between us, the familiar rhythm of two people who understood how to share a space. It was fine. It was exactly what it had always been.
Except that it wasn’t. I was the only one sitting with that. I’d made myself a promise, and I intended to keep it.
I looked at the ring on her finger and looked away.
April. Lease through April.
That was the plan.