Chapter Three
The week that followed was the kind that ate a person from the inside: a wholesale order gone missing, a walk-in cooler that died on the hottest Tuesday of the summer, a part-time hire who quit by text message during the Friday rush.
By the time Ivy locked the shop on Friday evening she had the particular hollowed-out feeling of someone who had been performing competence in public for nine hours straight and had nothing left to perform it with at home.
She thought about not turning the light on.
That was allowed. That was, in fact, the entire architecture of the thing: a want expressed by a light, not a light expressing a want that wasn’t there.
But she found herself standing at her bedroom window anyway with the switch under her thumb, and what she wanted, underneath the exhaustion, was simple enough that she didn’t have to interrogate it: she wanted not to be alone in the house tonight, and, more than that, she wanted the particular kind of not-alone that came without her having to hold up her end of a conversation to earn it.
She flipped the switch, texted him nothing (they never texted about it, that was rule four, unwritten because it didn’t need writing), and went to lie down on top of the covers in her sleep shirt at nine-fifteen, meaning only to close her eyes for twenty minutes before his truck pulled in.
She woke at eleven the next morning.
She lay there a moment, disoriented by the wrongness of the light through the curtains, before her stomach dropped with the specific, particular understanding of a person who has slept through something they’d meant to be awake for.
The house was silent. She was alone, on top of the covers, just as she’d left herself the night before, her sleep shirt undisturbed, and when she checked her phone there was nothing.
No note, because they didn’t leave notes; that wasn’t the arrangement either.
She got up and looked out the window. His truck was in the driveway. His kitchen light was on.
She showered and dressed with a feeling she couldn’t quite name, somewhere between relief and a strange, unwelcome disappointment, and she was still turning it over when her phone buzzed with a text from her sister, Dana, who lived forty minutes away and had opinions about the amount of time Ivy spent, in Dana’s words, becoming one with your own furniture.
Brunch. Today. I’m not asking twice, the text said, and Ivy, grateful for a reason to leave the house and stop replaying a night she couldn’t account for, went.
Over eggs and a mimosa Dana didn’t finish, her sister studied her with the specific squint she’d been using on Ivy since they were kids, the one that meant she’d already diagnosed something and was deciding whether it was her business to say so.
“You look tired in a new way,” Dana said finally.
“I run a flower shop through a heat wave with no walk-in cooler. I’m tired in the usual way.”
“No,” Dana said. “This is a different tired. This is the tired where you’re not sleeping because you’re waiting for something.” She tilted her head. “Is there someone?”
Ivy thought of a truck in a driveway, a porch light through a curtain, a man two hundred feet away who had, for whatever reason, let her sleep straight through the one night in eleven days she’d asked him not to.
“No,” she said. “There’s no one.”
Dana didn’t believe her — the half-second pause before her sister let the subject drop gave it away, filed for later the way she filed everything.
“Fine. No one.” Dana speared a piece of egg she had no intention of eating.
“But if there were someone, hypothetically, I’d want to know two things.
One, is he decent. Two, does he make you laugh, because you used to laugh at things before you bought a house with a porch and started talking about mulch like it was a personality trait. ”
“I like mulch.”
“That’s exactly my point.”
Ivy turned her water glass a slow quarter turn, a gesture she didn’t notice she’d picked up from someone else until it was already moving.
“If there were someone,” she said carefully, “he’d be decent.
Almost aggressively decent. The kind of decent that makes you suspicious, honestly, because you keep waiting for the part where it turns out to be a performance, and it never does. ”
“And the laughing?”
“He doesn’t make jokes so much as say true things very dryly and wait for you to catch up.” The corner of her mouth moved before she could stop it. “It works on me more than it should.”
Dana set her fork down entirely. “That was a whole answer. That was not a hypothetical-person answer.”
“It was very hypothetical.”
“Ivy.”
“Dana.”
Her sister studied her a moment longer, then let it go with the grace of someone who’d decided the fight wasn’t worth having yet — she’d gotten enough to work with, for now.
“Okay,” she said. “Hypothetically. But if hypothetical-he ever hurts you, I will hypothetically end him, and I have a truck and no alibi requirements since I work from home.”
“Duly noted.”
“I mean it. I still have Caleb’s email address memorized out of spite.”
“Please don’t email Caleb.”
“I would never,” Dana said, in the tone of someone who absolutely would, someday.
Ivy laughed for real, the first unguarded laugh she’d managed all week, and the week’s hollowed-out feeling loosened its grip.