Grace
It’s a good thing I anticipated the snow drinkers.
“Who drinks beer this early?” Zoe murmurs as she passes holding two sixteen-ounce drafts.
I’m behind the bar with her, but I’m not doing much, because Lauren Maxwell will be here in one minute.
The morning news is on one of the TVs. It’s muted, but they’re talking about the storm.
They’ve made some poor junior reporter stand out in Fells Point by the harbor in a parka. A water taxi floats by behind her.
Hector installed a heater above the entrance yesterday that blasts two seconds of warm air whenever the front door opens. I hear it now, an epic whoosh. I don’t look right away because somehow I know it’s her.
“Welcome in,” Zoe says, oblivious. “Grab a seat, hon.”
The shittiest thing so far is that I can’t tell anyone about any of this, because everyone I’d tell loved Tim, too, and I don’t want to ruin that for them.
Tim’s secret is now my secret and, well, Lauren’s secret, too, I guess.
She’s at the entrance now in a winter coat with what I hope is a faux-fur hood, and the burden of that secret is clear.
She’s pretty and put-together. She’s in nice shape and has great, flowy strawberry-blond hair.
But as she looks up at the new photograph of Tim, which is directly above me, I can see that she’s terrified.
I give her a second to stand there not knowing what to do.
Finally, I come out from behind the bar.
“Come on,” I say. “You like cannoli?”
I gave Dom a heads-up yesterday that I needed to borrow the Italian Embassy for a meeting, so he turned the lights on for us at the little bar area behind the host stand where people grab a glass of wine before being seated.
The restaurant is closed to customers until this afternoon, so we’ve got the place to ourselves.
Dom didn’t know who I was meeting with or why, so he turned some Christmas music on for us, and because fate is merciless, I’m sitting across from Lauren Maxwell while Michael Bublé gently sings “Let It Snow.”
“I love this restaurant,” she says.
“Don’t tell the chef,” I say. “He’s insufferable.”
She smiles, but nervously. Sounds of food prep come from the kitchen—chopping, cleaning. There must be a TV back there, because I hear It’s a Wonderful Life playing. Jimmy Stewart is going on about how he wants to live again, and I’m having a tough time not rolling my eyes.
“When I saw you at Costco,” Lauren says. “My reaction to your son. Is that when…?”
“Sort of,” I say.
She shifts in her seat, looks away.
“As far as I can tell,” I say, “Tim didn’t delete a single one of your email chains for the last six years.”
I watch as Lauren is moved by this, then I watch as she tries to hide that she’s moved. For a moment, we sit in this fancy place like any two ladies might. Then I say, “Were you sleeping together?”
Just then, Dom appears carrying a silver tray. “Espressos, ladies,” he says. “Poured slowly over orange slices and brown sugar. Lemme know what you think.”
This is one of Dom’s signature moves: breezing in all handsome with culinary absurdities, then breezing out. Lauren and I sit silently again. She touches her glass but doesn’t drink. “No, we weren’t.”
I so badly wanted that to be the answer, but I’ve prepared myself for every conceivable other answer, so all I can do is breathe out slowly. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But—”
“Grace, I promise.” Then she takes a drink and says, “Wow.”
I sip, too, and she’s right.
“Orange slices?” she says.
“Who knew?” I say.
Someone is blending something in the kitchen. Michael Bublé goes away, and the music becomes instrumental, and I’m not sure how one asks an adult the following question, so I just ask it. “Did you do…other things?”
“Three years ago, I tried to kiss him.”
I say nothing.
“Actually, I didn’t try. I did. Kiss him. And I’m sorry for that. He was your husband, and I kissed him, and that was wrong of me.”
Sad Henry told me once that he gets dizzy sometimes when he thinks about Brynn. That hasn’t happened to me until now, like the room is spinning. “How did it happen?” I ask. “Where?”
“A conference,” she says. “It was for administrators mostly, but some faculty was there from different committees. I technically didn’t have to go, but I went because I wanted to seduce him.”
I close my eyes as the caffeine enters my system.
“He stopped me,” she says.
“He stopped you from kissing him?”
Lauren nods.
“Why?”
She seems surprised. “Because of you. Your kids, too, probably. Your family. But you, Grace.”
Even though my hands are starting to shake, I take another sip.
“I loved him,” Lauren says. “Like I said, I’m sorry I kissed him because that was a decision I made. But I can’t be sorry for loving him. I couldn’t help that.”
I’m trying to hate pretty Lauren Maxwell right now, but it’s hard to hate someone when they’re right. She couldn’t help it any more than I could. “Do you think he…loved you, too?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “You could’ve at least paused first.”
Somehow, we both laugh.
“Sorry,” she says.
I think of my moment with Dom in the wine cellar.
If I’d kissed him, would he have stopped me?
Worse, what would’ve happened if he’d kissed me?
Would I have stopped him? If I’d met Dom when I was single, we would’ve ended up together.
If Tim had been single when he met Lauren, they’d have ended up together.
But that’s not how it worked for either of us.
“Do you remember being young?” Lauren asks. “Not that we’re old. I mean, young young.”
“Barely.”
“Well, when I was young,” she says, “I thought you could only love one person your whole life. Like bees that can only use their stingers once, then they die. I don’t think that’s true now.
For a long time, I loved my husband. And then I didn’t.
And then I loved Tim. Tim loved me, I think, and he loved you, too.
You can love lots of people, Grace. You can love and love. ”
My espresso is gone, and my heart is a runaway thing.
“That said,” she says. “I don’t know if this makes you feel better. I don’t know if it makes you feel anything. But when it mattered most—when it was time for him to decide—Tim chose you.”