Chapter Six
Sawyer’s son called it a “surprise visit,” which Ivy would later understand was a twenty-six-year-old’s phrase for showing up unannounced because he had a problem he didn’t want to discuss on the phone, and he pulled into the driveway next door in a car with a college parking sticker still on the windshield on the Tuesday after, three days earlier than anyone had planned for.
Ivy was in her own front yard deadheading the roses when he climbed out, and she recognized him immediately from the photograph on Sawyer’s refrigerator: Marcus, dark-haired like his father, with his mother’s jaw, home from his first year of a job in another state and visibly unhappy about something.
“Hey,” Marcus said, polite in the automatic way of someone raised well who hadn’t yet clocked her as anyone in particular. “You’re the neighbor. The flower one.”
“Ivy,” she said. “Your dad’s at a job site till five.”
“Cool. Yeah.” He looked at the house, then at her, then back at the house, with the specific unease of a person recalibrating a mental map. “He mentioned you a couple times. Didn’t say you guys were — I don’t know. Close.”
There wasn’t a dishonest answer to that that wasn’t worse than the honest one, so Ivy went with something true and small. “We’re friends. He rebuilt my porch a couple years back.”
“Right,” Marcus said, in a tone that suggested he was filing it exactly the way Dana had filed her own suspicion at brunch, and went inside to wait for his father, and Ivy stood in her yard holding a dead rosehead in one gloved hand, feeling a precise, unpleasant sensation she hadn’t had to name in two years: being someone’s secret.
It shouldn’t have mattered. The arrangement had never needed anyone’s approval but their own; that had been half the appeal of it, the total absence of an audience.
But watching a twenty-six-year-old boy recalibrate his understanding of his widowed father’s life in real time, something moved in her that she hadn’t let herself name in the two years since the porch: not shame, exactly, but its close cousin, the sense of being a thing a person had to explain rather than simply introduce.
Sawyer invited her to dinner that night anyway, a plain gesture of ordinary neighborliness dressed up as nothing in particular, and the three of them sat around his kitchen table over a chicken he’d clearly overcooked worrying about the conversation instead of the oven.
Marcus asked her polite questions about the flower shop.
She asked him polite questions about the job he’d taken in another state.
Sawyer said almost nothing, passing the bread basket twice as though repetition might fill the silences he didn’t know how to fill with words, and twice their eyes met across the table in a look that carried an entire private apology neither of them could say out loud with an audience present.
“This is good,” Marcus said, at last, of the chicken, which was not good, and both adults understood the comment for what it was: an offering, a small flag of truce planted in the middle of the table for anyone paying attention.
“Thanks,” Sawyer said. “I overcooked it.”
“Yeah, a little.” Marcus almost smiled. “Mom used to say you cooked like you were trying to make sure nothing could possibly still be alive in there.”
It was the first time Marcus had brought his mother up unprompted, and Ivy kept her eyes on Sawyer’s face, gauging how he’d take it.
He didn’t flinch. He laughed, short and real, and said, “Your mother was right about that, same as she was right about most things,” and something in the room settled half an inch, the way a house settles after a door has been slammed, the shaking slowing to nothing.
Marcus turned up again the next afternoon while she was watering the hanging baskets on her own front steps, this time without his father as a buffer between them, and stood at the property line with his hands in his pockets working up to something.
“He seems happier than I remember him being,” Marcus said, not quite meeting her eyes. “Since Mom. I wasn’t sure he was going to get there. For a while I don’t think he thought he would, either.”
“He talks about her,” Ivy said, picking her words. “Not a lot. But when he does, it’s not like he’s trying to get past something. It’s more like she’s just part of how he explains himself.”
“Yeah.” Marcus dug the toe of his shoe into the grass.
“That’s — good, actually. I think I came over here half expecting to be mad about something, and I’m having a hard time finding it.
” He looked up at her then, properly — the first time he’d managed it since he’d arrived.
“Whatever this is. Don’t make him regret it.
He doesn’t let many people in far enough to regret. ”
“I don’t intend to,” Ivy said, and meant it more than she’d expected to, standing there with a watering can in her hand and a twenty-six-year-old’s cautious blessing hanging in the air between them like something neither of them had quite decided to call a blessing yet.
Sawyer found her on her own porch that night, after Marcus had gone to bed early, jet-lagged from a flight that hadn’t actually crossed any time zones, just exhausted in the way twenty-six was sometimes exhausted for no reason at all.
“He asked me if I was seeing someone,” Sawyer said, without preamble, sitting down on the top step beside her, close but not touching.
“What did you say?”
“I said it was complicated.” He turned his glass, water, tonight, not wine, a quarter turn against the wood of the step, the same habitual motion he made with the wine at the kitchen table, and it struck Ivy, small and sudden, that it was just a thing his hands did when he was choosing words, unrelated to what was in the glass.
“Which is the first time I’ve ever described you as complicated to anyone, including myself, and I didn’t love how it felt coming out of my mouth. ”
“What would you have said, if it weren’t complicated?”
A car passed, headlights sweeping the yard, before he answered. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But ’complicated’ undersold you. That bothered me more than the question did.”