15. Greer
Greer
On the morning of Thanksgiving, I am at a coffee shop on Newbury Street with Lena, and her two middle-school daughters are on her phone screen between us doing math homework.
The shop smells of espresso and the cinnamon roll Lena ordered for me.
The window is full of slow gray New England morning.
Lena is in jeans and a sweater I have known her in for three years.
Her phone is propped against the salt shaker so her daughters can hear us and we can pretend, for the next fifty minutes, to be supervising long division.
"Tía Greer," the older one says, without looking up. "Are you eating that?"
"I am."
"Can I have it when we get there?"
"You can have half of it when you get to Boston."
"I am ten."
"Then it is going to be a long wait."
She goes back to the math. Lena puts a finger over the camera lens and slides the phone gently to the side of the table.
"Greer."
"Lena."
"You look better than you did three weeks ago."
"I am."
"How much better?"
"Enough that I am eating a cinnamon roll in front of you."
Lena watches me eat for a beat.
She says: "Tell me about Tuesday."
"I went home with him."
"And."
"It was different than the first time. We were not strangers."
"Okay."
"He told me, last night on the phone, that he would come over today if I wanted him to come over. I told him not to. I told him I would see him at four at his house."
"At his house."
"At his house. With Indie. And Mikko."
She nods. She takes another sip of her coffee. She looks at me the way she has looked at me a small number of times since I was twenty-two and an intern she was supervising in a clinic in Worcester — slowly, without hurry.
She says: "Are you in love with him?"
I do not, for several seconds, answer.
It is the question I have been waiting for somebody to ask, and the question I have not, for eight weeks, let myself ask in my own bathroom mirror, and the question I am going to have to answer out loud in this small warm coffee shop with her daughters two feet away.
"I think so," I say. "I'm not sure what to call it yet."
She closes her eyes for half a second. She opens them.
"Greer. Four weeks isn't long."
"I know."
"And you are sixteen years younger than he is, and you are pregnant, and the only person in the world who can navigate this with you is the one person you can't tell — and she's at the dinner table tonight."
"I know."
"Then today is going to be hard."
"I know."
"Eat the cinnamon roll, Greer."
I eat the cinnamon roll.
The math worksheet, on the screen, gets solved. The older daughter, who was promised a cinnamon roll she did not get, gets a virtual high-five and the promise of a real one the next time Lena drives to Boston.
Lena hugs me at the door of the coffee shop and does not say anything. It's why she's on the small list of people I trust with anything that matters.
She lets me go.
She says: "Call me tonight."
"I will."
"And Greer."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens at that dinner, you do not have to come home alone. You can come to Providence."
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it, Lena."
She gets in her car. She drives back to Providence.
I go home.
I sit on the edge of my bed for forty minutes in the sweatpants Indie left at my apartment last winter and I do not get dressed.
In the mirror on the back of the closet door, the woman looking back at me is starting to be a woman I do not recognize.
Her face has gone slow and round. The skin under her eyes is no longer the color of a healing bruise.
Under the band of the sweatpants, her belly is no longer just bloated.
The thing that has been happening to my body is, in the soft light of late November, visibly happening.
I shower and put on the navy wrap dress Indie gave me for my twenty-sixth birthday — the cut sits forgivingly across the place I cannot, anymore, hide.
The small gold earrings Lena gave me when I graduated from Northeastern.
A small amount of makeup, because that is what my hands have the steadiness for, and no more.
At three forty-five, I get in my car.
***
I sit in the Subaru on Mount Vernon for ten minutes with my hands on the wheel before I get out.
When I do, the door of the brownstone opens before I am at the top of the steps, and Indie is standing in the doorway with a bottle of wine in one hand and the wide easy grin of a woman who has been pre-drinking with her father for an hour.
"GREER. Oh my God. Come in. It is so cold."
She pulls me into the house. She closes the door behind me.
The brownstone is warm and smells of roasting turkey and rosemary and the bread Mikko is doing something to in the kitchen. The dining room, through the open archway, has been set up with the long table I have not, in three years of knowing Indie, ever seen.
"Daddy is carving the turkey badly and Mikko is judging the bread and I have had a glass of wine and a half before you got here." Indie kisses me on the cheek and steers me toward the kitchen. "You look gorgeous. Is that the wrap dress? Of course it is the wrap dress. I told you."
"You told me."
In the kitchen, Mikko, at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand and a dish towel over his shoulder, turns and gives me the small two-finger salute he has been giving me in the medical wing every morning since I started.
"Doc."
"Mikko."
"I did not know you were coming."
"Indie called me on Tuesday."
"She called me Sunday."
"Good."
He goes back to the bread. He does not, in the four seconds I am at the doorway, look at me longer than he looks at me in the medical wing on any other Thursday, but the look has a fraction more weight in it.
He has known Kieran for nine years.
He has known, since when, I am not sure.
Kieran is at the head of the dining table with the carving knife in one hand and the look he wears the morning after a back-to-back, which is to say steady and a little tired and built to last the night. He is in a charcoal sweater and jeans and the sleeves of the sweater pushed up to his elbows.
He looks up when I come in.
He says, in his work voice: "Greer. Welcome. Glad you came."
"Coach."
"Kieran is fine in this house."
"Kieran."
Indie looks between us once, fast, and then she starts talking, the way my best friend talks when she is in a room that is a little tense.
"Greer, sit. Mikko, the bread. Tell her how cold you are. Tell her about your sister in Vantaa."
Mikko obliges. He has a sister in Vantaa, just outside Helsinki, who is, by his account, the only person who has ever beaten him at Scrabble in any language.
The next ten minutes pass in the warm shape they pass in when Indie is running a room and her father and her father's oldest friend are letting her.
The turkey gets carved. The bread gets sliced. The mashed potatoes come off the stove. We sit down.
Indie has cooked the same dinner she has been making for her father and Mikko in this house every year since her mother died, which I know because Indie has told me, in three years of telling me about her mother, every detail of every Thanksgiving she has made in this kitchen.
I have spent every previous Thanksgiving with my parents at their house in Worcester.
This year my parents are in Sarasota for the week with my sister, and Indie said come , and I said yes, and Indie did not, in the asking, know what she was asking.
Indie says grace.
Kieran's eyes are closed. Mikko's eyes are open.
He is looking at me.
He looks at my hand on the edge of my water glass. He looks at my face, briefly, with the unhurried attention of a man who has known Kieran for nine years. He does not say anything.
He goes back to the bread on his plate.
The dinner moves on.
Indie tells the story of the cranberry sauce, which is the same story she has told every Thanksgiving since I have known her.
Mikko tells the story of the time he tried to make sauerkraut in 2018 and almost burned his apartment down.
Kieran tells a short story about a third-line center who has, in two months, learned to read the high-low pinch off the boards exactly the way Kieran has been teaching him to.
I eat what I can eat.
What I can eat is a small portion of the dressing, three bites of the turkey breast, half of the cranberry sauce on my plate, and most of the mashed potatoes.
The morning sickness has, in the last week, started to loosen, the way the books said it would around eleven weeks, and I have eaten more in the last seven days than I ate in the four weeks before them.
It does not show on my plate yet, but it shows in my body, which is starting to be the body of a pregnant woman and not the body of a tired one.
By the time the pumpkin pie comes out, Indie is sitting on my left with her hand on my arm. She looks at me.
She says: "You okay, hon? You've been quiet."
The dining room goes still for a beat.
Mikko is across the table with his eyes on his pie. Kieran is at the head of the table with his hands folded in his lap.
"I'm fine," I say. "Just tired. It was a long road trip."
She rubs the small spot on my forearm with her thumb the way she has always rubbed that spot when she is being kind to me.
"You've been tired for two months, Greer."
"I know."
"Are you sleeping?"
"Mostly."
"Eating?"
"More than I was."
She nods. She lets it sit.
I do not, for a long second, dare to look at Kieran.
When I do, finally, look at him, he is looking at his plate the way he has been looking at his plate for the entire meal, holding the steady motionless composure he has been holding, since I came through the front door, against any direct look in my direction longer than the host duties require.
It is the discipline I have asked of him without saying so, and the discipline he has been doing, all night, for me.
Indie squeezes my arm.
"I love you. You'd tell me if something was wrong, right?"
"I would tell you."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She lets my arm go. The conversation goes back to the pie. Mikko goes back to the sauerkraut story. Kieran goes back to his plate. Nobody, when I look up again, is looking at me.
I make it through the rest of the pie.
After dinner, in the front hallway, Indie hugs me the way she has hugged me for three years.
She says, against the side of my hair: "Thanks for coming. Dad really likes having you here. He said so."
"He did?"
"In the kitchen. When I asked if you were okay coming. He said you were always welcome in this house."
I close my eyes against her shoulder.
She lets me go.
Mikko, behind her, gives me the small two-finger salute one more time. Kieran, behind Mikko, gives me the small nod he gives me in the hallways of the practice facility, and I give him the small nod back.
I put my coat on. Indie opens the door. I walk down the three steps to the sidewalk.
I do not, until I am in the driver's seat with the door closed and the engine off and the dashboard dark, allow my face to do what my face has been holding for the last four hours.
Then I cry.
I cry for ten minutes with my forehead against the wheel.
I have just lied through a Thanksgiving dinner to the person I love most in the world, with the man I also love at the same table watching me do it, and the only other adult in the room who knows what is happening did the careful, quiet work of not breaking the secret for me.
I cry because I have, all night, been loved.
I cry because the cost of the loving is going to be paid, eventually, by the only person at that table who is not, yet, in on it.
When the crying stops, I lift my head off the wheel.
I wipe my face with the sleeve of my coat.
I start the car.
I drive home in the dark of late November in Boston with both my hands on the wheel and the radio off.
In the rear-view mirror, halfway down Mount Vernon, the dark blue door is still closed.
I do not, when I get home, call Lena.
I will call her in the morning.
Tonight, the only thing I have any energy left to do is lie on my bed in my clothes with the lights off.