8. Priya
PRIYA
Thursday at Lavender House, first week of October, and the patio is in its last good stretch before the rain claims it for winter.
The tables are still out—wrought iron, painted white, the paint chipping in places that Bea has touched up so many times the tables have the layered quality of an archaeological site, each coat of white a stratum representing a different year.
By November most will be inside, and the patio will belong to the weather and the three or four regulars who drink their coffee in the rain as a matter of regional identity.
Inside, the room is doing what it does on a Thursday. Filling. I am at the counter waiting for my Calloway. Bea is humming at the machine. Gerald looks up from his scone.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“Bridge club last night. I took Janet for everything she had.” She finishes my drink. “Which was a sleeve of Oreos and bragging rights, but I intend to enjoy both.”
Marcus is at his table. The burgundy blazer. His chai is between us when I sit down, the steam rising in a curl that catches the morning light through the front window.
“You’re late,” he says.
“I am aware.”
“How’s the project?”
“Marcus, the project is good. The collaboration is more than productive. The writing is becoming something neither of us could make alone.” I hear myself. The enthusiasm in my voice is— it is noticeable. Marcus is noticing it.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says.
“What thing?”
“The thing with your hands.” He cups his own hands in demonstration. “You have a specific gesture for when you’re talking about someone you’re interested in. It’s rounder. More open. Like you’re holding something you haven’t decided to put down.”
“I am not holding anything.”
“Priya.”
“I am reporting on a professional collaboration.”
Marcus looks at me for a long moment. A kind of compassionate certainty, the expression of a man who loves you enough to tell you what you’re doing wrong and who also knows that telling you too early will make you defensive and telling you too late will make him complicit.
“Venus in transit, honey. You already know.”
“I don’t know what I know.”
“That’s a very Venus in Scorpio thing to say.”
From the armchair, without looking up: “You should bring her here sometime.”
Miriam. The sentence is soft. It is also the first thing she has said about Margot in the month I have been talking about the collaboration.
Miriam has listened. Listened to Marcus’s chart commentary and Bea’s protective concern and my increasingly transparent descriptions.
And now she has spoken, and what she has said is not be careful or she has her reasons.
What she has said is: bring her here. Into this room. Into the warmth.
“She doesn’t come in mornings,” I say.
“I know,” Miriam says. She turns a page. “Bring her anyway.”
The door opens, and two women walk in, mid-argument.
“You cannot run a double session the week before preseason conditioning starts,” Lani is saying.
She’s the athletic trainer, solid and broad-shouldered, short black hair pushed behind her ears.
“Their bodies are not ready. I’m telling you as their trainer—”
“I’m telling you as their coach that they need the reps.” This is Sam Rivera, the women’s soccer coach. She’s compact with light brown skin, her hair pulled back into a short ponytail, practical, like everything about her. She has a scar through her left eyebrow.
“And I’m telling you as the person who tapes their ankles that I am not taping sixteen ankles after a double session because you decided reps were more important than connective tissue.”
“Connective tissue is not more important than—”
“Finish that sentence. I dare you.”
Sam does not finish the sentence. Sam is a woman who picks her battles, and the battle against Lani’s position on connective tissue is a battle Sam has been losing for four years and that she has, by all evidence, stopped trying to win.
She picks up her drink from the counter—Bea has it ready, already, because Bea has everyone’s drink ready—and takes a sip and says nothing. Lani knows what the nothing means.
Lani’s golden-brown hand lands on Sam’s shoulder as they turn to leave. Brief, directional, steering her toward the door. They leave. The door closes. The argument continues, muffled, through the glass. I hear Lani say “connective tissue” one more time. I hear Sam say nothing.
Marcus, beside me, is watching the door.
“Four years,” he says.
“Four years what?”
“They’ve been doing that for four years.” He opens his laptop. “I’m not even going to chart it. The stars can’t help people who won’t look up.”
Deenie and Sasha Kowalski-Vance arrive with Felix, five, Professor Wiggles the stuffed octopus tucked under his arm, and Marguerite, two, carrying a cracker she has no intention of eating and every intention of distributing across every available surface.
Deenie is curvy and warm with light tan skin and settles the children with the practiced calm of a pediatric occupational therapist. Sasha is lean and angular, with light brown skin, currently attempting to remove her jacket one-handed because Marguerite has claimed the other hand and is not letting go.
They settle. Felix arranges Professor Wiggles with the solemnity of a diplomat presenting credentials, and begins explaining the octopus’s morning to Gerald, who listens with genuine interest.
I am watching Deenie and Sasha again. Something has shifted. Sasha’s hand on the table, close to Deenie’s but not touching. Deenie’s eyes meeting Sasha’s and sliding away, a half second too soon. The warmth between them is real. The distance between them is also real.
Deenie catches my eye. Studies me. Something registers in her face.
“So,” she says, with the mild tone of a wildlife documentarian. “How’s the project?”
“The project is good. The work is developing in ways I didn’t expect. She has a mind that—” I stop. I hear myself. I have been about to say makes me better, and that is not a thing you say about a colleague’s mind.
“Go on,” Deenie says. “She has a mind that...”
“That complements the ecological approach.”
“Look at her.” Sasha says to Deenie, gesturing in my direction. “She doesn’t even know yet.”
Marcus, from across the room: “For the record, I identified this in September.”
“Nobody asked you, Marcus.”
“I’m noting it for the chart.”
I drink my Calloway. The morning continues. Gerald finishes his scone. Kim types. Marcus reopens his laptop. Marguerite falls asleep in Sasha’s lap, and Sasha looks down at her sleeping daughter with an expression that is tender and tired and complicated.
I think about Margot. The eight inches between our shoulders as we walked. The way she looked on the quad yesterday when something pressed forward for a second before she put it back.
I think about what it would mean to bring Margot here.
Into this room. Into this Thursday morning fullness.
Margot in the armchair. Margot with a tea.
Margot listening to Gerald’s monograph updates with polite precision, and then—and this is the image that holds—Margot relaxing.
The shoulders dropping half an inch. The jaw unclenching.
I don’t know if the structure she’s built permits it. But I want to find out, and the wanting is no longer something I can file under professional curiosity.
Bring her here, Miriam said.
I finish my coffee. I leave Lavender House. I walk to campus in the October mist with Miriam’s sentence in my chest like a seed.