Chapter 2
The place Lina picked is one of those patio restaurants where the tables are too close together and the string lights make everything look better than it is.
We’re outside because Lina doesn’t believe in air conditioning she didn’t pay for.
The menu is all small plates and fourteen-dollar cocktails.
The couple next to us is on a first date, obvious from the way he keeps straightening his silverware.
Lina orders a second margarita before I’ve finished my first. “You’re behind,” she says. “This is unacceptable.” She tears a chip in half and loads both pieces with guacamole.
I like watching Lina eat. She does it with complete investment and zero apology.
“So, what’s new? How’s the house?”
“The house is good. I got patio furniture.”
“You told me. The blue ones.” She eats the chip and wipes her fingers on her napkin, already reaching for another. “What else?”
“I hired a pool service.” I push a chip through the salsa, eat it, lick salt off my thumb. “It’s two guys. They come on Thursdays.”
Lina sets her margarita down and leans forward on her elbows. The first-date guy at the next table is explaining cryptocurrency, and his date is holding her smile like a hostage.
“You said ‘two guys’ and your voice did a thing,” Lina says.
“My voice didn’t do a thing.”
“Your voice absolutely did a thing.” She folds her arms on the table. “What do they look like?”
I pull another chip through the salsa and take my time with it.
“One’s quiet. Does the water chemistry, the mechanical stuff. He reached inside the pool filter without even looking. Just knew where everything was. The other one’s bigger. Does the hauling, the skimming. Took his shirt off halfway through.”
I brush the salt off my fingers. “I kept looking up from my laptop.”
Lina picks up her menu, scans it without reading it, puts it down again. She has the look she gets when she’s about to say something I don’t want to hear. “Jenna, you’re smiling right now. That is the most your face has done in six months.”
“I’m allowed to look out my own window.” I finish my margarita and push the glass to the edge of the table. The waiter is somewhere behind me. The first-date couple has moved on from crypto to hiking, which seems like progress.
“You are,” Lina says. She steals a chip from my side of the basket, still watching me with that look, the one where she’s already decided something and is waiting for me to catch up. “You like them.”
“I don’t know them.”
The waiter appears, and I order another margarita, which is an answer to a question nobody asked.
“You like looking at them,” Lina says. “That counts.”
She’s telling me about a client who sent back a logo revision eleven times when I see him.
Three tables away, near the window. He’s sitting across from a woman with short blonde hair and a sundress.
She’s laughing at something. He’s leaning back in his chair the way he used to at our kitchen table, one arm over the back, ankle on his knee.
I know that posture. I spent four years across from it.
My hand tightens on my glass. I look away, take a drink. The ice has melted, and the margarita tastes like lime water.
“What?” Lina says. She follows my gaze, finds him, and then turns back to me. “Do you want to leave?”
“No.” It takes a second to know if I mean it. I do.
He looks good. The woman looks nice. My stomach is doing something, but it’s not what I expected.
Not seizing up, not falling apart. But it is something.
He’s sitting across from someone he wants to be sitting across from.
That’s what people do. I haven’t wanted to sit across from anyone in a long time.
“I’m fine,” I say. And right now, I am. But I can feel it sitting somewhere behind my ribs, waiting for later. The car, probably. Or two a.m.
Lina reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I know.”
We pay. Lina hugs me in the parking lot, holds on a second longer than usual, and I let her. She points at me over the roof of her car. “Thursday,” she says. “I want a full report.”
I drive home with the windows down. The air is warm and smells like cut grass and someone’s charcoal grill. I turn the radio up then off. The highway is empty enough that I can stay in the left lane and let the speedometer climb without thinking about it.
At home, I lock the front door, drop my keys on the counter, and then stand in the kitchen. The backyard is dark. The pool light is off. The patio furniture is a row of shapes out the window.
I brush my teeth. I get into bed. I lie there with my phone on my chest. The ceiling fan turns. The house is quiet the way it always is, and tonight, I notice it.