Chapter 5
five
LYDIA
There’s a lift in the bar top where the wood meets the steel, and it has been quietly ruining my life since June.
You can’t see it, but you can feel it if you run your palm along the join, and once you’ve felt it you can’t stop feeling it. I got down on the floor behind the bar with a scraper and a sanding block and started taking the higher bit down a hair at a time.
“Please tell me somebody’s paying you for that.”
Shayna, leaning over the bar, holding two Cokes she’d helped herself to out of my fridge.
“It’s my bar.”
“It’s a very nice bar.” She set one of the bottles down where I could reach it and came around and sat on the floor. In good pants. On the floor. “Show me.”
So I showed her. I put her hand where the two ends met and moved it.
She made a face. “That’s awful.”
“I agree. Hence all this.”
“How did nobody catch that?”
“Everybody caught it, but it’s just one of those things that gets swept to the side and ignored. I’m not one for ignoring things.”
She sat back against the cabinets with her Coke and watched me work. She asked reasonable questions. She didn’t fill the quiet.
I liked her. Sitting on the floor of my bar with sawdust on her good pants, I liked her.
Shayna pulled her knees up in an unassuming way that still looked elegant. “Can I say something?”
“Sure.” I highly doubted she’d accept a ‘no,’ anyway.
“You’re much better at this than anyone here seems to understand.”
I laughed, because what else do you do?
“I mean it. They think it’s taste.” She picked at the label on the bottle. “It isn’t taste. It’s work. Nobody claps for work.”
“Everybody claps for you,” I said, before I could stop myself. My cheeks burned.
She snorted. “Nobody claps for me. They’re just fond of me. It’s not the same thing.”
“It looks like the same thing from where I’m sitting.”
“Hm.” She set the bottle down on the floor.
“You know, I’ve been coming into this building since I was seven years old.
My father brought me. Magda taught me to ski on the bunny hill out there, badly, and shouted at me the whole way down.
” She pulled a face. “And I’m still, at this age, in this room, Dan’s girl.
That’s my job, if you think about it hard enough. Turn up, be charming, be Dan’s girl.”
I lifted a shoulder, still sanding away. “You could do something else.”
“I did do something else. Nobody remembers.” She said it lightly and it didn’t come out light. “You built up a lodge and they don’t know. I ran a gallery for four years and my mother still tells people I did a bit of art.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute, still working at the joint.
“That’s rotten,” I finally said, feeling awkward for the silence.
“A little, yeah.”
And I sat there on the floor of the great room with a scraper in my hand, feeling seen by the one person in that building I did not want to be seen by.
Just my luck.
Magda does dinner the old way. One long table down the middle of the great room, place cards in her own handwriting, four courses with a break in the middle so people can change seats. It runs until somebody’s grandchild is asleep across two chairs and gets carried up.
Magda did a toast. She does one every year and it’s the same one and everybody cries anyway. She stood up with her hand on the back of Zach’s chair and talked about a man with a broken motel sign and no money. How he used to say a guest will forgive anything except a cold room and a rude word.
Then she said, “And now it goes to the boy,” and had to sit down.
Zach kissed her hand. Not performing, either. He went red, which he does about twice a year, and Dan started clapping and the whole table went up.
The Denver people came up for the handover and one of them, a woman named Romina who runs acquisitions, spent the first course looking around the room the way I look around rooms.
“Who did this?” she said. “Honestly. Who did this room?”
And there it was, sitting on the table in front of everybody, and I felt Zach’s hand find my knee under the cloth.
Magda said, “We were so lucky. We had a firm out of Denver and they just understood it, didn’t they, Zachary?”
“Mm,” Zach said, around a mouthful.
And Shayna, warm, wanting to bring me in, wanting to be kind, said, “Lydia does all the softer things, don’t you? The cushions and the throws and all that. She’s got such a knack for it.”
Romina said, “Oh, lovely.”
Zach’s hand was still on my knee. He squeezed once, which he means as I know, and I put my hand over his, which I mean as it’s fine.
It wasn’t a lie. In that moment it was fine, because it didn’t start hurting until the plates went out.
“Thank you,” I said, dabbing at the corner of my mouth, even though I’d hardly touched my food.
Romina turned to Dan about the Telluride land and the table went with her, and the room closed over the top of it the way rooms do.
Down the far end, Simon had stopped eating and was looking at me. I didn’t want to meet his eyes.
I sat there and ate a very good piece of lamb and thought about the number of hours I’d spent on the phone to a mill in Montana about the width of a floorboard.
Then I got up, because I couldn’t sit in it any longer. There was nothing to carry. Magda has people for that and they’re good at it, and I hired two of them myself. So I went into my kitchen and stood in it with my hands empty, and after a minute one of the girls asked if I needed something.
Simon found me in the pantry afterward with my hands flat on the shelf.
“I know what you’re going to say.” I sighed, watching him from the corner of my eye.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to say a great deal of something.”
“She didn’t mean it like that.” He leaned on the doorframe. “I think she was trying to include you. She got it wrong, but she was trying.”
“I know she was.”
“Then why are you hiding in here instead of being out there with everyone else?”
I hadn’t noticed I was hiding. It felt more like a reprieve than anything.
“Because Magda said it was a firm out of Denver,” I said, “and I hired that firm to do the plumbing schedule. I did the rest of it—and only because I’m not exactly a professional plumber.”
“And Zach’s been going to sort my contract out since our first anniversary. It’s on a list somewhere. It’s been on a list for two years.”
Simon was quiet a second.
“Okay,” he said. “That one’s fair.”
“Don’t be nice to me, I’ll cry in the pantry.”
“You’d be amazed how often that happens in pantries.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed, and then he said, “Come out, come on, she’s got the brandy out,” and I went out and was lovely to everybody for another hour and a half.
Upstairs, I got my earrings out and sat on the end of the bed and rehearsed it.
I sat on the end of a bed with the pearls in my fist, working out how to ask my husband a question in a way that wouldn’t backfire on me.
He came out of the bathroom with his shirt half unbuttoned, still laughing at something from downstairs.
I had three versions. One was breezy, which I couldn’t make my mouth do. One was direct, which I was too frightened of. The third one was a joke, and I knew even while I was building it that a joke would let him answer it as a joke and then I’d have nothing.
So I sat there holding my earrings and waited for the right one to arrive, the way you wait for a bus you know isn’t coming.
“Romina is a menace,” he said. “She tried to buy the Telluride land off me at a dinner table.”
“Zach.”
“In front of Dan.”
“Zach.”
He stopped. He heard it. He always hears it, that’s the awful thing, and I can’t think of the last time he made me repeat myself.
“What’s up?”
After all that rehearsing, all I had was the true question.
“Did you know she was going to be here?”