Chapter 5 #2
The investigator — a man named Wallace Trent, whose card I taped to the front counter when he handed it to me, and whom I subsequently treated with the absolute courtesy of a person who hates someone's job but recognizes that the someone is, after all, a person — interviewed people.
He interviewed Sienna, who delivered a performance so lavish and so detailed that Wallace Trent had filled three pages of notebook just trying to keep up.
He interviewed Diesel, who, by Wallace's later report to Knox, had said exactly two words during the interview and stared at Wallace for the rest of it until Wallace had thanked him and left.
He interviewed Liam, who had produced spreadsheets showing the inter-business synergies between Navarro Custom Cycles and Ironwright Forge with the patient thoroughness of a man whose road name was Ledger for excellent and demonstrable reasons.
He interviewed Sadie at the bakery, who told him that Beckett came in twice a week to buy cinnamon rolls because his wife was particular about her cinnamon rolls.
I did not know I was particular about cinnamon rolls.
I asked Sadie about it later and she said, "Honey, I made it up. Just go with it."
I went with it.
The performance was working. The performance was working too well, because the performance was beginning to require me to perform less and less.
I caught myself, more than once, reaching for Beckett's hand when nobody was looking.
I caught myself looking forward, on Tuesday afternoons, to him humming in the kitchen while he cooked, that low tuneless humming of a man who was concentrating on a sauce.
I caught myself, one Sunday night, sitting at the kitchen table with the bills in front of me and a glass of wine in my hand, listening to him in the bathroom brushing his teeth, and feeling — without any prompt, without any cause, without any new event having occurred — a small, warm, steady happiness, the kind I had not felt since I was a child.
The way he said my name was the thing I noticed most.
Alma. Two syllables. The second one softer than the first, the L a little long, the M gentle.
Most people pronounced my name as if it were a brand.
He pronounced it as if it were a word he had thought about.
I had never, in my life, been called by my name in a way that made me feel that the caller had considered the syllables.
The fourth week of the investigation, Wallace Trent came to the apartment.
He came on a Saturday, by appointment, the way a real estate agent comes.
He took photographs of every room. He photographed our living room with both our books on the coffee table — Beckett's poetry, my mysteries.
He photographed our kitchen with the two coffee makers (we had compromised by keeping both, because his percolator made better coffee but my drip was easier in the mornings, and we had agreed that domestic harmony required redundancy).
He photographed the bedroom — the bedroom, the master, which now contained a small set of his shirts in the closet, his razor on the dresser, his books on the nightstand, his work boots in the corner, and a small framed picture of the two of us that Sienna had taken at the Halloween gathering and which I had ordered printed and framed and placed deliberately on the dresser as documentation.
The second bedroom, by then, contained mostly storage.
Wallace photographed everything. He thanked us. He left. We stood in the living room in silence for a long minute after he was gone.
Beckett said, "He's going to file."
I said, "He's going to file in our favor."
Beckett said, "Yes."
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "Yes."
I said, "When this is over. The investigation. The case. When Diego loses. We need to talk about the timeline."
He said, "Okay."
I said, "I want to talk about it now."
He said, "Okay."
We sat down on the couch. Not at opposite ends. Closer than that. Close enough that the side of my thigh almost touched his, and the almost was getting harder to maintain, because the almost had become the only available form of self-protection I had left.
I said, "We're at month four."
He said, "Yes."
I said, "The case is failing. We're going to win. Once the judge rules, the marriage clause is satisfied. Permanently. The shop is mine and stays mine. We could — we could begin planning."
He said, "Planning what."
I said, "The exit."
He was quiet.
He looked at me. He did not look at me angrily. He did not look at me hurt. He looked at me the way a man looks at a woman who is testing a piece of glass for cracks by tapping it gently with a coin.
He said, "Is that what you want."
I said, "It's what we agreed to."
He said, "That's not what I asked."
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "Alma."
We stared at each other across six inches of couch cushion. The laptop was open on the coffee table, with a half-finished spreadsheet on it that I had been working on before he had come into the room and sat down next to me. The screen had gone dim. The numbers had blurred into colored bars.
I said, "This was supposed to be simple."
He said, "Nothing worth building is simple. You know that."
I closed the laptop. I closed it slowly. I set it on the floor.
I said, "I need to think."
He said, "You always need to think."
I said, "And you always need to feel."
He said, "Do I."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Is that a complaint."
I said, "No."
He said, "Then what is it."
I said, "It's an observation. We balance."
He smiled. I had not seen that particular smile before. It was small. It was tired. It was warm. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting for me to say something and had just heard the first syllable of it.
He said, "We do."
I stood up. My legs did not work as well as I would have liked them to. I said, "I'm going to my room."
He said, "Okay."
I said, "Goodnight, Beckett."
He said, "Goodnight, Alma."
I went to my room.
I closed the door. I sat on the edge of the bed — our bed, theoretically, though in practice still mine alone — and I did not turn on the light.
I sat in the dark for a long time. The investigator was going to file.
The case was going to fail. Diego was going to lose.
The shop was going to be permanently, irrevocably mine.
The marriage was going to be, on paper, dissolvable.
I did not make a list.
I sat in the dark and did not make a list, and I felt, for the first time in my adult life, the columns recede.
They were still there. They would always be there.
I was still going to be an accountant; I was still going to organize my pegboard and my cards and my receipts.
But the columns were not the answer to this.
The columns could not tell me what to do about the man on the other side of the apartment door — the man with the forge scars and the Mary Oliver paperback and the patience of someone who built things for a living, who had moved into my home and not put a single item in the wrong place, who had said my name like it was worth saying, who had covered me with a blanket and not woken me to ask whether I wanted to be covered.
I lay back on the bed.
I did not undress.
I closed my eyes, and I said, into the dark, very quietly, I don't want the exit.
I said it for myself.
I said it once.
I did not, then, say it to him. Not yet. The metal of us, I knew without him having to tell me, was not quite ready. But it was coming. The heat was climbing.
He just needed to keep his hammer near.