8. Oscar
Oscar
The porch comment came out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it. I was at the point where I really didn't want to talk to Ruby at all. She had me staying in the guest room, and I knew if she had it her way, I'd be somewhere else entirely.
I followed her out of the kitchen and watched her grab her keys and go out the door. The hum of the garage door came next, followed by her starting her car.
I hurt her with that comment. Good.
I still couldn't believe what happened. Separation. I knew what that meant, it meant she wanted a divorce but was too chicken to say it. She had probably been waiting all this time, biding her time until Jeremy left for college before saying anything.
But she did say something. Several times. She was right about that.
I pushed those thoughts away.
Back in the kitchen I took a sip of my coffee. Bitter. I set the mug down as I shook my head at it. I used to be able to make a decent cup of coffee. Not as good as when Ruby made me coffee, but still passable. My coffee-making skills seemed to have gotten worse over the past four days.
Everything Ruby made in this kitchen was special. I took the sugar out of the cabinet and saw a box of Kraft mac and cheese and smiled at a memory.
* * *
Ruby was sitting at the kitchen table sketching when five-year-old Jeremy and I entered. He was sweaty from riding his bike. Ruby stood up and filled his water bottle with some fresh, cold water and handed it to him.
"What do you want for lunch?" she asked.
"Mac and cheese!" he exclaimed happily. It was his favorite.
"I can make it," I said, pulling the blue box out of the cabinet.
"But Mom makes it better."
"She does, but she's working right now. It's just following directions on the box. I can do that." I turned to Ruby, who was smiling as she filled a pot with water. "That's all you do, right?"
"No, Mom adds her special ingredient," Jeremy said, looking up at Ruby.
Ruby lowered herself so she could be eye level with him. "That's right, I use my special ingredient whenever I cook for you."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Love," Jeremy said.
Ruby beeped her nose against his, something they did since he was a baby, and mussed his hair.
"It's fine, I can make the mac and cheese," she said, still smiling as she took the box from me.
* * *
I added another spoon of sugar to my coffee. It didn't help.
I dumped the rest in the sink and left for work.
The office was in Jersey City, twelve floors up, with a wall of glass that looked straight across the river at Manhattan.
I bought that view on purpose. On a clear morning you could see all of it, the whole skyline lined up like a thing you could own, and most days I still stopped for a second when I came off the elevator and looked at it.
That morning I didn't. I came down the hall toward my office with my coffee I hadn't finished and my head still four days behind me, and I almost walked right past Dustin Hall asleep on his couch.
His office is near the corner, glass on the inside as well as the outside, so the whole floor can see in and he can see the whole floor.
He was on the couch under a blanket with a pillow, one arm over his eyes against the light.
For a second I thought, he worked late, good man.
Then I saw the pillow had a case on it, and the blanket was a real blanket, not something off the back of a chair, and I understood I was looking at something else.
I knocked on the glass.
He came up fast, the way you do when you don't know where you are, grabbing at the blanket, shoving it down between the couch cushions like that would do anything with me standing right there watching him.
"You know I can see you," I said.
He got up and opened the door. Rumpled shirt, yesterday's shirt, and a look on his face I recognized because I'd been wearing a version of it in my own kitchen an hour before.
"I know," he said. "I forgot to close the blinds last night."
"What's going on?" I came in and shut the door behind me and went to the windows and dropped the blinds myself, all the way around the inside wall. "You don't want anyone else seeing this. Everything okay?"
"Yeah. Everything's fine." He took the blanket and the pillow off the couch and folded them down into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, the wooden one, where the light couldn't get at them.
"It's great. I love sleeping in the office and showering at the gym.
" He shut the drawer with his foot. "Sorry.
I'm dealing with a lot right now. Nicole threw me out. "
I sat down on the arm of the couch.
Dustin had been with us ten years. Somewhere in there he'd gone from a guy I hired to a guy I'd have to dinner, and I hadn't heard a word of this, not from him, not from anyone.
"You were both at the Jubilee," I said. "Last week. She was right there."
"I asked her to come. If I showed up alone it'd get around, people would ask." He rubbed a hand down his face. "And I figured maybe a night out, dressed up, a few drinks. Maybe it'd remind her of something."
"It didn't."
"No." He sat down in his desk chair and it sank under him.
"I don't even know what happened, Oscar.
That's the truth. She says I ignore her.
She says I don't talk to her, I don't listen, she says things to me and they go in one ear and out the other.
" He shook his head at the carpet. "I keep telling her I hear her fine. She doesn't believe me."
I didn't say anything for a second, because he'd just said my wife's lines back to me in his own voice, and it landed somewhere I wasn't ready for.
"So you've been sleeping here since when," I said.
"Off and on a month." He said it to his hands.
"First few nights I got a hotel. But every time I put the card down I got angrier.
I've got a beautiful house sitting there empty and I'm paying two hundred a night to sleep away from it?
So I stopped. I come here. Set an alarm, hit the gym before anybody's in, shower, come back up.
" He tried to smile and didn't get there. "It's a system."
"Dustin."
"It's fine. Really." He straightened some papers that didn't need it, and I recognized that too. "Anyway. Enough. How's Ocean City? Adam's been chewing on it for weeks."
"It's nowhere," I said. "Adam got us one more shot with the council. But I think we're just not the guys for it."
He frowned. "Since when? We're exactly the guys for it.
That whole stretch of the shore opens up if we land this, you know that better than I do.
" He leaned back. "Adam and I were talking about it a while back.
Did he ever get Ruby to look at it? I never worked with her, she was gone before my time, but I've seen the old files.
Her floor plans, the notes in the margins.
That's not normal, what she does. That's a different thing entirely. "
"We've got a floor full of architects," I said. "There's nothing she'd add."
Dustin looked at me for a second, and I thought he was going to say something, and then he decided not to, and I was glad, because I didn't want to hear it.
* * *
It was dark by the time I got home.
The porch light was on around the side of the house, and when I came through the mudroom I could see her out there through the glass, Ruby, sitting with something in her lap, her head down over it.
Working at something. I couldn't tell what and I didn't go out to find out.
We hadn't traded ten words in four days that weren't about the coffee or the mail, and I wasn't going to walk out onto that porch and stand there while she waited for me to leave.
I watched her for a second through the door. The way she sat when she was into something, one foot tucked up under her, had not changed in twenty-three years. I missed her. She was thirty feet away with the light on her and I missed her like she'd already gone.
I went upstairs.
The guest suite was the same as I'd left it except for the boxes.
Two of them, open, sitting out on the floor by the closet, and around them her old things, sketchpads gone soft at the corners, a couple of folders with paper sliding out, a tin of pencils.
She must have been in here while I was at work, digging for something, and left in enough of a hurry that she never put it back.
That wasn't like her. Ruby didn't leave things out.
I crouched down to pack it in. I wasn't reading any of it, just squaring the pads and sliding the folders back the way they'd come, and I had a stack of it in my hands when a napkin slipped out of the bottom of one of the folders and dropped to the floor.
A bar napkin. Thin, gone brown at the folds, soft as cloth from being carried.
I picked it up and turned it over and there it was, in her hand, in pencil that had smeared twenty-three years ago and never all the way gone. The sketch. The first one. Before the company had a name, before it had anything.
I sat down on the floor of the guest room and looked at it for a long time.
Then I put it back where it had been, careful, between the same two pages, and I closed the folders and set both boxes back up on the shelf where they belonged. I don't know why I was careful with it. I just was.
When I stood up I saw the DVDs.
They were stacked at the end of the closet shelf, a dozen or so cases she'd moved in here with everything else, and I went through them without deciding to, the way you read the spines of somebody's books.
Old ones, mostly. Movies we had watched together, some she really loved.
And near the bottom of the stack, the movie I had rented the day after I first took her out.
The one I sat on her front steps holding while I waited for her to get home from work.
Shakespeare in Love. One of her favorites.
I carried the movie down the stairs and was in the car before I had a chance to change my mind. As I sat in the dark of the garage with the engine off, I got out my phone and sent Ruby a text before I left.
I'm making us dinner tonight.