21. Chapter Twenty-One
Stanley
She closes her eyes, and the whole room’s gone quiet.
I stay where I am against the vanity and look at her, flat on her back on her childhood bed with her hands folded on her stomach like she’s bracing for impact, eyes shut.
And I don’t say anything, because there is nothing I could put into the first ten seconds of this that wouldn’t somehow curve around and end up being about me, and she did not just hand me that so I could make it mine.
So I give her the ten seconds. Then I give her thirty.
Then I push off the vanity, cross the room, and sit down on the end of the bed, by her feet, far enough that I’m not one more thing happening to her.
“You shouldn’t have spent that week on your own,” I say.
She doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t answer, either, and that’s all right, because it didn’t need an answer — it needed to be said out loud by somebody who wasn’t her, and now it’s been said. I let it lie there in the room where she can finally look at it from the outside instead of the inside.
“That’s a genuinely shit thing to have to carry by yourself,” I say. “Nobody checking on you.”
Her throat moves. She doesn’t cry. I thought she was going to, but it doesn’t come, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d come apart — she just lies there and takes it in.
I look up at the ceiling she’s been talking to this whole time. It’s a regular ceiling.
“Listen,” I say. “Wanting your dad to be proud of you — that’s a good thing to want, Linwood.
I’m not going to sit here in the man’s own shirt and tell you it isn’t, because my entire life is one long campaign to get one specific guy to look at me a certain way, so believe me, I get it down to the bone.
” I let that sit for a second, because it came out truer than I’d planned.
“But that’s his, Linwood. That was always going to be his.
Somewhere in here you’ve got to figure out what makes you happy — you, the actual person, not the daughter, not the analyst — and then go and do that and let him keep up or don’t. ”
She turns her head on the pillow and looks at me.
And because that is roughly the maximum amount of sincerity I can hold at one time before I drop it on my foot, I keep going.
“And look. If it’d help.” I spread my hands, generous, a man offering a gift.
“I am fully prepared to let you slap me clean across the face in front of every single person downstairs. Dessert table. Peak visibility. Really sell it. Throw your father’s good wine in my face, dump me on the spot, take the pumpkin pie and plant it in my face if you’d like — I’ll go down like a gentleman, won’t even flinch.
Your dad spends the rest of his natural life convinced I’m a villain, you walk away the rebellious daughter, and you will have finally done one genuinely reckless thing in your whole life that wasn’t grabbing me at a party. ”
It works.
She laughs — a real one.
That’s the whole thing I was after. That’s the only thing I was after.
“I’m not going to do that,” she says.
I look at her.
“I’m going to milk this for everything it’s worth.”
“So you’re keeping me?”
“I’m sorry you got stuck in it with me.” The laugh has gone back out of her voice. “I know what they’re all saying. That you’re getting every bit of this — my dad, the summer skate, the whole thing — off the back of me. I see it. I know that’s what they’re all thinking, Stanley.”
I shake my head. “I don’t care what anybody thinks.”
“Really?”
I nod. “Really.”
She studies me like there’s a seam in it somewhere, and if she stares hard enough, she’ll catch where it’s glued. “How do you do that?”
I shrug. “I remind myself that whatever a guy thinks about me is about him. Not me. Somebody decides I’m a charity case coasting on my girlfriend’s last name — that’s just a story he’s telling himself, so he feels better about wherever he washed up.
Got nothing to do with me. So I don’t pick it up. It’s not mine, I don’t carry it.”
“Can you teach me?”
She means it as a joke. I decline to take it as one.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can teach you that.”
She holds my eyes a second, and something behind them shifts like she’s quietly lifting me out of one column and setting me down in another, and I have the rare, good sense to say nothing while she does it.
Then she sits up, scrubs her face with the heel of her hand, brisk, finished, and swings her legs off the bed.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. “Okay.”
“You good?”
“I had too much wine and needed a minute. That’s the story.”
“It’s a believable story. You’ve put a glass and a half on top of two green beans and a forkful of stuffing — you genuinely are that woman.”
“It’s the only story I’ve got.” She stands, checks herself in the mirror, and fixes one piece of hair that didn’t need fixing. “How do I look?”
“Like a woman who had a little too much wine and needed a minute.”
“Good.”
I get up. At the door, she stops with her hand on the knob and turns back, and for a second, she just looks at me, working something through, and whatever it is, I let her carry it all the way to the end on her own.
“Thank you,” she says. “For not making it a thing.”
“Linwood, I am world-class at making things a joke. This is me showing restraint, live, in real time, at an enormous personal expense. Frame it. Put it over the mantel. Remember it forever.”
A small smile grows on her face when she opens the door.
Downstairs, the dining room has gone soft at the edges, slumped into the back half of a holiday — chairs turned sideways, coffee out, one of Ricardo’s kids asleep in his arms, every big man in the room gone slow and heavy with food.
Carolyn’s turning down help with the dishes for what sounds like the fourth time.
Coach is topping off wine he has no intention of drinking.
We come in not touching, just two people walking, and the whole table looks at us. Every eye lifts at once and drops at once and pretends, as one body, that it never noticed we left.
Margaret catches my arm as I pass. “There you are. Everything all right?”
Except for my mother.
“She had a bit much wine,” I say. “Needed a minute.”
My mother holds my eyes a beat past comfortable — that exact look she’s been aiming at me since I came down the stairs this morning in another man’s shirt — and then she pats my arm and lets me go, and lets it go.
Aspen drops back into her chair. Aunt Lisa, without even turning her head, lifts Aspen’s fork off the plate and puts it back in her hand, and Aspen takes it and eats a bite of a pie she didn’t ask for, and the old woman goes back to her coffee.
I sit down across from her.
Hodge is deep into a story about a road trip in ‘09 that I’d put money on having grown a few miles every year since.
McCallister’s actually laughing at it, head tipped back — second real laugh I’ve seen out of the man today.
Beth’s got her shoes off under her chair.
The light coming through the windows has gone gold and low and long, that one good hour at the back of a holiday before anybody’s rude enough to start hunting for a coat.
Under the runner, I find Aspen’s foot with mine.
She doesn’t look up. But she presses back — once — and then she just leaves it there.
“Stan.” Coach Linwood, down the table, lifting the bottle. “Drink?”
“One, Coach. Game tomorrow.”
“Smart man,” Hodge says, like it’s the finest compliment he keeps in stock.
“He’s a smart man,” Coach Linwood agrees.
Somewhere over the rim of the bottle, I catch Aspen’s eye across the table, and she rolls them at me — slow, private, mine — and I grin back, and for the first time in a whole day spent running one long con on a houseful of people I love, I am not performing a single thing.
I’ve known this girl about as long as I’ve known anything.
I never once met her until this afternoon.
I drink my one glass of wine. Her foot stays against mine the whole way through it.
And somewhere between the last of the pie and the gold draining out of the windows, I think a thought I don’t run past the room, or Coach, or the bit, or even her.
I would run this entire ridiculous, doomed, paperwork-heavy lie a hundred more times, start to finish, contract and all, if every last one of them set me down right here, with her boot against my shoe at a table full of people who are certain they already know how this story ends.
Then I shut it down. Fast.
Because that’s a great deal of feeling for a Thursday.
And because there’s pie.