Chapter 2 #2
Nobody had closed it. That was the thing she had never been able to explain to Frankie, who had been there, who had watched.
There had been no day. There had been a Tuesday in the second year when she pushed a client meeting because they were flying to Lisbon, and a month in the third year when the Rockport job needed her on site and the house needed a decision about the north wing and she made the decision about the north wing, and then a year when she took nothing new because the foundation building was going to be so much better than anything a two-person studio could get on its own, and it was, and it had his name on the door of it.
She had not quit. She had simply been reasonable, over and over, for nine years, and at the end of nine years of being reasonable there was nothing left to quit.
She had made herself small so there would be room for him, one decision at a time, and every decision had felt generous when she made it, and he had watched her do it and concluded that she was leaving.
And then he had told a woman half his age that he had settled.
Celia put the phone down.
“Oh,” she said, out loud, to nobody, in a completely level voice.
Something in her chest that had been holding a shape for nine years let go of it.
* * *
She did not cry. She kept waiting for it and it did not come, and eventually she stopped waiting.
Instead she got up off the floor at twenty to midnight and went into the kitchen and got a legal pad out of the drawer where she kept the drawing pads, and she sat at the island and began to write a list.
It was not a list of grievances. She had no interest in a list of grievances. It was a list of what needed to happen, in order, and it looked exactly like the punch lists she used to write on job sites at twenty-nine, and her handwriting on it was the handwriting she had not used since the studio.
She wrote: Margaret’s wedding — Saturday. Not before.
She wrote: Mom and Dad leave Sunday. Not before.
She wrote: Lawyer.
Then she sat and looked at that word for a while.
At twelve-forty in the morning she took the phone into the pantry — the pantry, because it was the one room in that house with no window and no speaker, which was a thing she knew because she had specified it — and she called a woman named Roslyn Ashworth, whose name she had gotten eight months ago at a lunch from a woman who had said keep this, you might not need it, and whose card Celia had put in the back of her wallet and never once looked at and never once thrown away.
Which was, she thought, standing among the preserves at twelve-forty in the morning, its own kind of answer to a question nobody had asked her.
It went to voicemail, as she had expected at that hour.
“My name is Celia Hollister,” she said. “I’d like to make an appointment. It isn’t urgent — I’d like it to be Monday, if that’s possible. Not before Monday.” She paused. “I have a wedding to get through first.”
She hung up.
Then she went back into the kitchen and looked at the list and picked up the pen and wrote one more line at the bottom, and read it twice, and did not cross it out.
Saturday. In the garden. Everyone.
* * *
The rehearsal was Thursday at five, and it rained, which everyone had been promised would happen and nobody had believed.
They ran it in the tent instead. Margaret walked the aisle three times with her hand on her father’s arm and got smaller each time, and on the third pass Celia stepped in and moved the whole thing eight feet closer to the doors, and it worked, and Margaret said, “Oh,” and stood up straighter, and Roman laughed out loud.
Celia went back to the edge of the tent. Rain came off the seams in two places, both of which she had predicted on Tuesday to a man who had told her the seams were fine.
Lawrence came and stood next to her. He did not touch her. He had not touched her in five days, which she assumed he thought of as restraint and which she had privately started thinking of as the first honest thing he’d done all week.
“You moved the aisle.”
“The doors were behind her. She was walking into a wall of light and couldn’t see anyone’s face. She thought that was nerves.”
“Was it not nerves?”
“It was a west-facing door at five o’clock,” Celia said.
He was quiet a second. “You’ve always been able to do that.”
“Yes.”
“I mean it as—”
“I know how you mean it.”
The rain got briefly louder and then eased. Out on the grass a man in a poncho was doing something inadvisable with a ladder.
“Celia.” His voice had gone careful. “Are we — is Saturday going to be all right?”
She turned and looked at him properly for the first time in five days. He had lost weight in five days, which she had not expected and did not want to have noticed. He was forty-six and frightened and standing in a tent she had specified, waiting for her to tell him it was fine.
“Saturday will be beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for a year.”
His whole body let go about an inch. “Thank you. God. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.”
“No, I —” He half laughed. “I know I don’t get to. I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She looked back out at the rain. “Go tell your father the ceremony’s at four, not four-thirty. He’ll want to have heard it from you.”
He went, because she had given him something to do, and because a man who has been given something to do will take it every time.
She stayed at the edge of the tent until the light went, checking the seams, and thinking about how many times in nine years she had handed him a small task to end a conversation, and how not one single time had he noticed her do it.