Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lucy
I heard the truck door. I heard boots on the packed snow. Then nothing.
He didn’t knock. He didn’t come up. My phone buzzed on the drafting table.
I’m downstairs. I don’t know what happened. Can I come up?
I read it. I looked at Juniper, who was looking at me over her shoulder with her whole face asking. Downstairs, Owen’s shop was dark; he’d gone home at five. There was nobody to hand this to.
Yes, I wrote.
He came up slowly. He stopped on the landing, just inside the door, snow melting on the shoulders of his jacket, and Juniper shoved her head under his hand and he rubbed her ears without looking at her.
He was looking at me. He still had the look he’d had in the hallway at HQ, like a man who’d walked into a glass door he didn’t know was there.
“Dev called me,” he said. “He said you left in the middle of Schedule A. He said you were fine and then you weren’t. He doesn’t know why. I don’t know why. Luce, what happened? Did somebody say something? Was it Margot’s office? Because I can—”
He heard himself and stopped.
I was standing by the drafting table. I didn’t sit. I didn’t want to be lower than him for this.
“Is this about the deal?” I said.
He blinked. “Is what about the deal?”
“This.” I moved my hand, a small circle that took in him, the landing, the snow on his jacket, the tea he’d brought every Saturday, Christmas Eve, the river path. “You. Here. All of it. Is it about the deal?”
“No. God, no. Why would you—”
“Dev’s laptop was open on the table.” I said it flat, like reading a label. “November second. Eleven forty-eight a.m. To his investment committee. Spoke with Rhys this morning. Rhys says getting Lucy back on side is key to closing Q1. He’s on it.”
I watched it land.
I’ve watched a lot of things land on Rhys’s face since the day I met him. Good news. Bad news. A lender saying no. A lender saying yes. I’d never seen this. The color went out of him from the top down, and his hand stopped moving on Juniper’s head, and she looked up at him, puzzled, and nudged it.
“Did you say it?” I asked.
He could have lied. I watched him know that he could. I watched every door a salesman keeps propped open swing past behind his eyes: Dev paraphrased. That’s not what I meant. You’re reading an internal email out of context. All true, probably. All available.
“Yes,” he said. “I said it.”
Something in me that had been holding its breath since noon let go, and it didn’t feel like relief.
“Tell me,” I said. “Exactly.”
He took his hand off Juniper. He put both hands in his jacket pockets, which I’ve learned in the last three months is what he does now instead of doing the thing with his palms.
“Dev called at eight that morning. I’d been home maybe four hours.
I hadn’t slept. The deal was dead in the water, the board wanted my head, Summit was a week from walking for good.
He said, ‘Rhys, is there any version of this that closes?’ And I was standing in our kitchen, and I could still—” He stopped.
Swallowed. “I could still feel your floor. And I said, ‘Not without Lucy. The brand doesn’t work without her.’”
“Getting me back on side.”
“That’s his phrase. Not mine. But I didn’t correct it.
I didn’t say, she’s not a side, she’s my wife.
I said, I’ll handle it, because that’s what I say to Dev.
That’s what I say to everybody. I said it badly, Luce.
I said it in the only language I had on at eight in the morning.
” His voice cracked, and he let it. “But it’s true.
The brand doesn’t work without you. It never did. And neither do I.”
The radiator ticked. Snow slid off the roof somewhere with a soft, heavy sound.
And there it was. The worst part. Because I believed him, and it didn’t help.
“Do you hear it?” I said.
“Hear what?”
“It’s the same sentence.” I heard my own voice climb and I couldn’t bring it down.
“The brand doesn’t work without her. I don’t work without her.
You said one to Dev at eight in the morning to save a four-hundred-million-dollar deal, and you’re saying the other one to me now at six at night to save—what?
Us? Me? And they sound exactly the same, Rhys.
I can’t tell the difference. I don’t think you can either. ”
“I can.”
“How?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came. It was the first time I’d ever seen him reach for the words and find the drawer empty.
“For three months,” I said, “every time you carried lumber, every time you asked before you picked something up, every time you brought me tea the right way, I thought, he’s learning.
He’s finally looking. And now I’m going to wonder, every single time, whether that was a Saturday or a quarter.
” I pressed my hand against the edge of the drafting table, into the old T-square groove, and held on.
“I can’t un-read it. I tried. I sat in my car in the HQ lot for forty minutes trying.
I drove the whole lake road trying. It’s in there now. ”
“Then tell me what to do.”
“There isn’t anything to do. That’s the point. That’s always been the point. Not everything is a problem you can work.”
He stood there. Juniper leaned against his knee. He didn’t move toward me, and I was grateful and I hated that I was grateful.
“Luce. Please. Let me—”
“Stop coming.”
It came out quieter than anything I’d said all night. It was the hardest thing I had ever said to him, harder than the napkins, harder than don’t come tonight.
“Saturdays,” I said. “The site. Here. Mom’s. Please stop coming.”
He looked at me for a long time. I watched him want to argue. I watched him want to make one more case, one more beautiful, honest, perfectly built case, and I watched him understand that making it would prove every word I’d said.
“Can I ask one thing?” he said finally.
“No.”
He nodded. Just once. He bent down and put his hand on Juniper’s head, and held it there, and said something to her too low for me to hear.
Then he turned around and went down the stairs, slowly, one hand on the rail Owen built, and I heard the door at the bottom, and the truck, and the headlights swung back across the snowbank and were gone.
Juniper stayed at the top of the stairs until well after it was quiet.
* * *
“You want me to hate him?” Owen said on Wednesday, leaning in my doorway. “Because I can. I’ve had practice. I hated him for a solid year in 2016 just for marrying you too fast.”
“I don’t want you to hate him.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know. I want to not have read it.”
He nodded slowly, like that made sense to him, which is one of the things I love most about my brother.
He didn’t tell me I was wrong. He didn’t tell me I was right.
He just went downstairs and came back ten minutes later with a grilled cheese on a paper towel and set it on the corner of my table, away from the drawings, and left.
Cilla called Thursday. “Summit’s asking if you’re still signing.”
“Tell them I don’t know.”
“That’s a legitimate answer. It’s also the first time in a year I’ve heard you say it.” A pause. “Do you want me to come up?”
“No. Yes. Not yet.”
“That’s three answers, Luce.”
“I know.”
My mother didn’t call. My mother came, on Friday, with soup, and sat with me at the drafting table in the gray afternoon while I didn’t draw, and didn’t ask me anything, which is its own kind of question.
When she was buttoning her red coat to leave, she stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at the blank sheet pinned to my table.
“You know what I used to tell my students when they couldn’t draw?” she said.
“Draw what’s in front of you.”
“No, that was for the easy days.” She pulled on her gloves. “On the hard days I told them to put the pencil down and look. Just look, for as long as it takes. The drawing waits. It’s very patient.”
“And if it doesn’t come?”
“Then you were looking at the wrong thing,” my mother said, and kissed my forehead, and went down the stairs.
* * *
Saturday morning I was up at six, because my body didn’t know yet that the week was different.
I made coffee. I fed Juniper. I stood at the north window while the light came up gray and slow over the snow on Owen’s lumber stacks, and I didn’t look at the clock, and at five minutes to nine I looked at the clock.
Juniper had gone to the door.
She was lying across the threshold at the top of the stairs, where she’d lain every Saturday since October, chin on her paws, nose to the crack under the door, the way she always did at five to nine, listening for his truck in the alley.
Her tail thumped once against the floorboards when a car went by on the street, and then went still again when it didn’t stop.
Nine o’clock. Nine-ten.
She lifted her head and looked back at me, gray muzzle, patient brown eyes, asking the only question she knew how to ask.
I went and sat down on the floor beside her, and put my hand in her fur the way he had, and rested my cheek against the old wood of the door.
“Not today, Juni.”