Chapter 9
nine
LYDIA
Something had happened in the house and nobody had told me what.
You can feel it in a building. The temperature of a room changes when people know something you don’t.
Jill Lemont had her good earrings in before lunch, which she typically doesn’t do, and Dan kept putting his hand on Zach’s shoulder in passing, and my husband was being enormous. Louder than usual. Filling doorways.
I put it down to the signing. That was the reasonable place to put it.
Jill got me by the coffee urn with both my hands in hers.
“You must be so pleased,” she said.
“I am,” I said, because that’s what you say.
“It’s just wonderful for her. And honestly, sweetheart, wonderful for you. I know it’s been such a lot on your plate.”
And I stood there holding a woman’s hands and smiling at her with no idea on this earth what she was talking about.
Her rings were digging into my fingers. She has an enormous emerald that turns on her and she never notices.
“It really has,” I said.
“Well. There you are, then.” She patted my knuckles and went off to find her husband.
It didn’t feel like suspicion. It felt like being the last person in a class to understand a set of instructions. That hot, prickling, stupid feeling, where everyone else has started and you’re still looking at the page.
Magda got me next, on her way through with a vase.
“You’ll have some help now,” she said. “About time. You’ve been carrying far too much of it on your own, sweetheart, and don’t think I haven’t seen it.”
“Help?”
“Mm.” She stopped and looked at the vase. “Is this the one from the blue room? Who moved this?”
And she went off down the hall with it, and that was that.
I stood in my great room and turned the word over.
Help. It could have meant a cleaner. It could have meant a girl in the Denver office.
It could have meant anything, and there were nine perfectly ordinary explanations, and I was so tired of being the woman who picks at things that I picked up a tray instead.
I went and found the only person in that house who tells me things.
Simon was in the laundry room with three of Shayna’s jackets over his arm.
“Why have you got her coats?”
“Because she’s a maniac and she left them all in the trunk of a rental car overnight and one of them is suede.” He held it up. “Look at this. Look what she’s done to it.”
“Simon.”
“I’m going to steam it and she’s going to owe me for the rest of her natural life.” He was delighted. He was absolutely delighted. “She’s asked me to come and look at the Telluride place with her in October, by the way. Just to see it. She wants an actual opinion instead of a Denver opinion.”
“She’s good, you know,” he said, at the jacket. “I keep waiting for her to be awful and she just isn’t.”
“I know.”
He looked right at me, this somber expression on his face that didn’t quite fit. “Do you hate that I like her?”
“No,” I said, and meant it, which was somehow the worst part of the whole day.
“She’s asked you to Telluride?” It came out flat, hardly a question at all.
“Only to look.” He glanced up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Lydia.”
“Nothing. That’s nice.”
And it was nice. That was what I couldn’t get past. Somebody had asked my best friend for his opinion, which is what he has wanted his entire working life, and it hadn’t been me and it hadn’t been Zach.
I found my husband on the phone on the back steps and waited until he was done.
“What’s going on with the Lemonts?”
He put the phone in his pocket. “What do you mean?”
“Jill’s got her good earrings in. Dan keeps touching your shoulder. Something’s going on.”
“The paperwork’s moving.” He came down a step and put his hands on my arms and rubbed them, because it had gone cold. “That’s all it is. Dan’s a happy man when Dan gets his way.”
“And has he gotten his way?”
“Mostly.” He kissed my forehead. “Have you eaten anything? You look wiped.”
He was already looking past me at the house, mildly curious about whatever was going on there.
“Zach. Jill Lemont just took both my hands and told me I must be so pleased.”
“Jill says that to everybody.”
“She held my hands.”
“Jill holds everybody’s hands.” And he laughed, and it was a real laugh, because he wasn’t hiding anything from me in that moment. He was simply somewhere else. “So, have you?”
“Have I what?”
My husband sighed, cupping my cheek.
“Have you eaten, baby?”
I nodded… but
I hadn’t. I wanted him to keep going, and he didn’t, because Petey came out for him about the boat trailer.
He glanced at me over his shoulder and gave me his good smile. “Two minutes.”
Then he went around the side of the house and I stood on the steps in the cold for a while.
By the time the drinks started I had done what I always do, which is decide it was nothing.
There were people everywhere. There have been people everywhere since we arrived, and I built the room they were standing in, and I couldn’t find a wall to put my back against.
Magda had Shayna by the fire, showing her something on a phone.
Dan and Zach were at the map table with a bottle between them and their heads down.
Simon was steaming a suede jacket in the laundry room and enjoying his life.
And I went from group to group being lovely, which I’m very good at, answering questions about paint. At some point I realized I’d been going around that room for an hour and not one person had asked me anything I actually knew the answer to.
Simon came and found me in the pantry again.
“You’re in the pantry again.”
“I like it in here.”
“You do not like it in here. It smells like onions and regret.” He put the flat of his hand on the shelf beside my head. “Talk.”
And I opened my mouth to give him the tidy version, the one where I’m fine and the week is nearly over.
“I want to go home.”
It came out of me all at once, and it came out wobbling, and I heard how much I meant it about half a second after it was already in the room.
Simon’s face did something complicated.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“Not tonight. I know. I know we can’t.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “I want to be in my kitchen. I want to be in my house with my husband and nobody else in it.”
“Then say that to Zach.”
“And say what? That I’d like to leave his grandmother’s party because I feel funny?”
“Yes.”
“He’d take me home.” I wiped under my eye with a knuckle. “You don’t understand. He would. He’d put me in the car tonight and drive me down that mountain and miss the signing. He’d never once say a word about it. And I’d have to live with having done that to him.”
Simon didn’t have an answer for that.
He put his arms around me instead, and I stood in a pantry with my face on my best friend’s shoulder and got about fifteen seconds of it before somebody called his name from the great room.
He looked at the door. He didn’t mean anything by it.
“Go,” I said.
“Girl, I can?—”
“Go, I’m fine. Go and be brilliant.”
So he went. I stayed in the pantry a minute longer. Then I fixed my face in the little mirror by the coats and went back out and was lovely to everybody.