Chapter 20
Astrid
I'd told him to take the slot. I'd meant it. That was the part I had to keep telling myself.
I woke up on Sunday morning alone in my own bed for the first time in three weeks, and the first thing my hand reached for on the chair beside the bed was his gray Hartsdale Fire shirt. My hand caught on the way to it. I put on my own sweater instead.
The kitchen had the wrong shape. Moose was on the rug by the back door, where he'd been every morning since I moved to Hartsdale.
The two mugs on the windowsill were the two I'd brought up from Boston in my carry-on, the only two I'd picked out myself.
The cold of the tile was coming up through my socks.
I saw the car at ten-fifteen. A silver sedan pulled into Easton's driveway.
A man got out in a navy blazer with a folder under his arm.
A woman came out of the passenger side a beat later in heels that did not suit Maple Avenue.
The sign was up by eleven. FOR SALE in block letters at the top, the name of the agency under it, and a phone number under that.
Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved twice. She looked at the sign. She looked at my window. I stepped back from the glass before she could decide to come over.
The bell over the clinic door rang six times on Monday.
Every count between every ring and my looking up was a count in which it was not going to be him.
Nobody told you that about a person leaving—the not-being-him of every door.
Audrey came on Wednesday at one with a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.
She didn't say his name. She ate hers half-standing at my counter, watching me eat mine, and she told me she was going to be on that stool every Wednesday until I was eating without her there.
I saw the first box leave on Thursday morning.
He came out of his front door with a flat brown box on his hip, walked it down the front walk, and set it in the bed of his truck.
He did three of those before he saw me at the window.
He stopped on the front walk on his way back up.
He looked across Maple. He lifted his free hand once.
I lifted mine. I closed the curtain over the kitchen window for the first time since I'd moved in.
Moose blew past me Thursday afternoon when I opened the door for the mail.
He didn't run. He sat on the strip of grass at the curb and looked at Easton's porch the way a dog looks at a door he's been waiting for someone to come through.
I crouched in my socks with my arms around my dog's neck and pressed my cheek to the top of his head, and I made him a promise I had no right to make.
That was the first time I cried since the lake.
The knock came at half past seven on Friday.
I'd been making a dinner I didn't plan to eat. Two even raps a beat apart. I hadn't opened the door to that knock in six days.
I looked through the peephole. He was on the porch in jeans, a navy long-sleeve, and his Hartsdale Fire jacket, a brown bag from the diner in his hand. He hadn't asked. He'd just come.
I opened the door.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
I had a sentence ready. The sentence had can't in it and please in it.
What came out was different.
"I'm tired, Easton."
He looked at me a beat longer.
"Yeah."
He didn't fight it.
I'd wanted, in some small, mean place I hadn't let myself look at, for him to fight it. To stand on my porch in the cold with a bag of takeout and tell me I was wrong. He didn't push.
He started to turn.
He turned back.
"Can I stay tonight?"
The smallest line a man could ask.
I let him in.
We didn't pretend. He set the bag on the counter, took his coat off, and hung it on the hook by the door. We ate at the counter. We did the dishes after—he washed, I dried, and our shoulders bumped once at the sink when he reached for the towel. Neither of us moved.
He hung the towel back on the hook.
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"Tell me where you want me."
He meant the bed. He meant the side of it. He was asking me to decide, the same way he'd asked me on the bank of the lake and in his grandmother's bedroom on the first night he'd ever slept beside someone.
I led him to my room.
I got in on the side away from the door.
That was the side I'd slept on at twenty-six because that was the side a woman slept on when her husband let himself in late, and she didn't want to be the first thing he found in the dark. I'd been sleeping on the side toward the door for a month. Tonight, I got in on the side away.
He got in on the side toward.
He didn't say anything about it.
I put my hand on his chest. He put his hand over mine.
I'd thought, getting into bed, that I would not be able to do this without breaking. The opposite was what happened. I lay on my side and held very still, and so did he, and we didn't say anything for a long count.
His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch.
The same quarter inch his hand had tightened the first morning he slept beside me.
He held the quarter inch on my hand and breathed against the top of my head, and I let myself be held by a man I'd told, six days ago, that I was not in a place to be held by.
I told myself this was for the best.
I told myself again.
The second time landed a little worse.
I didn't sleep. The window over the dresser went gray a long time before either of us moved.
At some point, I felt his thumb start to move along the back of my hand, a small, slow circle through the rest of the gray and into the first of the light.
He never said anything. I never said anything.
The thumb was the entire conversation we had in bed all night.
He was up at six.
He showered. He came out in jeans and a fresh long-sleeve, and made the coffee at my counter the way he'd been making it for a month. He poured two mugs. He drank his standing.
"What time?"
"Truck's got to be on the road by eight."
"Okay."
He came around the counter. He put his hand on the side of my face and kissed the side of my head. He went.
I gave him a count of sixty at the kitchen clock. Then I put on my sneakers and crossed Maple in my sweater.
He was on his front porch with a box in his hands when I came up the walk. He saw me. He stopped on the top step and waited.
"Where's it going?"
"Bed of the truck. I got the heavy ones."
"I'll take this one."
He handed me the box.
We worked. The boxes that had been flat in his hallway for eighteen months were not flat anymore.
I carried the recipe tin that his grandmother used for the Sunday pot roast. I carried a box of photos in old envelopes, Queens written across the top one in handwriting that was not his.
I carried the guitar case he played on my couch the morning he told me he loved me back. He carried the heavy ones.
We didn't talk.
Twice our hands met at the same box.
Mrs. Halloran's curtain moved at the third trip across the porch. She didn't come out. I would be grateful for that version of her for the rest of my life.
The last box was the brass lamp his grandmother read by. He carried that one himself. He set it in the bed of the truck and tucked a folded jacket around the base so it would not shift on the highway.
The truck bed was full.
He turned around.
He was in front of me at the back of the truck. His hand was on the tailgate. I was on the curb in my sweater and my sneakers, no lipstick, the wind off Maple moving my hair all morning.
He looked at me.
I put my hands flat on the front of his coat.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"Do great things."
His jaw worked once.
I kissed him.
Properly. On the mouth. Not the way I'd kissed him at the lake six days ago, which was a kiss with a door behind it. This one had nothing behind it. I kissed him the way you kiss a man you love when you've decided to let him go.
He kissed me back. His hand came up to the side of my face. His thumb found the corner of my mouth.
I pulled back first.
I had to.
I didn't say, I love you. I'd already said it. The not-saying-it again was the gift.
"Go."
He looked at me a beat longer.
He didn't say it back.
The not-saying was his gift.
He got in the truck.
I stood on the curb. The brake lights came on. The truck pulled out of his driveway, turned at the end of Maple, and went. I watched it the entire way. I was the only thing on Maple Avenue not moving.
When the truck was gone, I stayed at the curb for another count I didn't track.
I crossed Maple back to my own porch. Moose was on the other side of my front door, his shoulder against it, his weight there. I let myself in. I closed the front door. I slid the deadbolt across.
I'd told him I wasn't ready.
The truest thing I had said all week was the lie.