Chapter 7
seven
LYDIA
Magda needed somebody to go into town for the cake.
I’d woken up decided about it myself because it sounded like a good excuse to get out and get some fresh air.
That’s something I’ve gotten good at it. You open your eyes and you decide you’re going to be fine, and then you are, mostly, as long as nobody asks you anything gently.
Zach made me French toast. He doesn’t cook.
He made me breakfast anyway, badly, standing there in yesterday’s shirt looking pleased with himself.
Then he kissed the top of my head on his way out to Dan, and I sat with a plate of lumpy overly-sugared toast feeling so much love for him it was hard to breathe around.
It’s an hour each way to a bakery in a town with one traffic light, and she has used the same woman there since before I was born, and there is no arguing about it. I said I’d go. I wanted an hour of road and nobody in the car.
“Take Shayna,” Magda said, without looking up from her list. “She’ll want the outing.”
“I’m happy by myself.”
“Take Shayna, sweetheart.”
I took Shayna because there was no polite reason not to.
She put her feet up on the dash without asking, which I liked, and she found a station out of Grand Junction playing something old, and she didn’t talk for the first stretch, which was a much-appreciated skill.
Then somewhere past the reservoir she said, “Can I tell you something a bit awful?”
“Go on.”
“I was dreading this week.”
I looked over at her.
“Not you,” she said. “God, not you. The whole production. My mother’s been at me about it since March.
My father’s got his folder. And somebody’s going to bring up the gallery, and I’m going to have to be pleased about it.
” She pulled a face at the windshield. “And then I got here and it was fine, because you’re here, and you’re easy. ”
“I’m easy?”
“You’re very easy. You have no idea. You’re the only person in that house who talks to me like I’ve got a job. There aren’t any expectations with you, you know what I mean?”
I laughed. I did. Somewhere in the last few days I had started laughing at things Shayna Lemont said. That was something I hadn’t seen coming.
We got the cake. It took a while, because the woman in the bakery wanted to talk about Magda, and then about her glaucoma, and then about a man who had done something unforgivable to her fence.
It took a while. The woman who runs the bakery has known Magda since the motel days and wanted to go over it at length.
Then it was the glaucoma that had been bothering her.
Then she wanted to tell us about a neighbor who had done something unforgivable to a shared fence.
Shayna listened to every word of it with her chin on her hand, like it was the best story she’d ever heard.
She’s good at people. She really is. I watched the owner of the shop fall in love with her over a fence dispute.
On the way back Shayna went quiet for a stretch, and I was thinking about floorboards, and then she said it.
“Can I say something? And you can tell me to shut the hell up, no questions asked.”
The trip had been easy enough, so I figured I’d grant her that. “Sure.”
“I’m glad we’ve finally met for real. I hated being a ghost in your house.”
“You’re not a ghost.” She was definitely a ghost. Haunting our relationship in the very dark corners of our house, but I didn’t want to admit that.
“I was a bit.” She was watching the road, not me. “Everybody’s got a version of me in that family and none of them have ever had to look at me while they said it.”
“Shayna—”
“No, it’s all right. It’s fair.” She shifted, tucked a foot under herself. “I just want you to know I’d never make it difficult for you. Whatever happens.”
I said, “Whatever happens?”
And she said, easily, kindly, with her eyes on the road, “Well, he never actually ended it. So.”
There’s a bend after the reservoir where the guardrail runs out for about the length of a car.
I know that because I was looking at it very hard.
My hands had gone cold on the wheel. Everything below my ribs dropped away and my hands went cold and I kept the car exactly where it was on the road.
“Sorry? What do you mean?” I fought the urge to pull over.
“Oh, God, no. That came out horribly.” She put her hand on my arm, briefly, warm.
“I only meant that it fizzled. There was never a conversation. He got in a car in Jackson and that was it, and I spent about a year waiting for the phone to ring like an idiot.” She laughed at herself.
“And then it was you. Which is completely fine. I’m not saying it isn’t. ”
“That’s not what you said.”
I don’t know where I found that. It came out of me flat and even, in a voice I don’t use, and for a second I was proud of myself.
“It’s exactly what I said, I just said it badly.” She squeezed my arm and let go. “Lydia. I promise you I’m not carrying a torch about it. I’m thirty-six years old.”
And then she asked me where I’d got the chairs by the north windows, because she’d been meaning to ask all week.
I told her. Cheyenne. A supper club that closed.
I drove the rest of it with a cake in the back and my hands at ten and two like a girl nervously trying to pass her driver’s test.
She talked the whole rest of the way. About the chairs, about a hotel in Mexico City with a courtyard she wanted me to see photographs of, about her mother. She was easy and funny and she touched my arm twice more, both times to make a point, both times without a thought in the world.
And I sat there and drove and thought: she doesn’t know she said it.
That was the worst part. She didn’t know she’d said it.
My husband had told me emphatically that he’d ended it.
And she just admitted to me he hadn’t.
I found Simon in the mudroom polishing something that didn’t need it.
“Where’s the cake?”
“Kitchen.”
“Is it the good one with the?—”
“Simon. She said something to me.”
He put the cloth down straight away, which I loved him for.
“Tell me.”
I did as he told me and as I heard it come out of my mouth, I watched it land on him and I understood, in real time, exactly what I sounded like.
“She said he never actually ended it.”
Simon waited for the rest.
There wasn’t any rest.
“That’s it?”
“Simon.”
“No, girl, I’m with you. I’m just making sure I’ve got all of it.” He rubbed his forehead. “She said he never ended things with them. Then she said she didn’t mean it like that. Then she apologized and said she isn’t carrying a torch?”
“Yes.”
“And she said all of it in a car, on her own, with nobody else there.”
“Yes.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Do not say sweetheart.”
“I’m going to say sweetheart, because I love you, and because that woman has spent four days being nothing but nice to you and you’re about to build this whole private investigation on top of one badly worded sentence.
I mean, I hear you because you know I love a good research project, but girl. Come on.”
“She’s been nothing but nice to me,” I said. “I know. I’ve been saying it to myself since we’ve been here.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Badly.”
He wasn’t wrong. He was being kind and he wasn’t wrong and I could hear how it sounded.
He ran it back one more time and I hated how much it made me cringe.
It sounded like a woman with a hang-up.
“Right,” I said. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m great. It’s fine. She’s fine.” I straightened a coat on a hook that didn’t need straightening. “Is the cake the good one?”
“It’s the good one.”
So I went and was lovely to everybody until the house went quiet, and I didn’t say another word about it to a living soul.