Chapter 11
eleven
LYDIA
Somebody had set a glass down on the walnut without a coaster and left it there all night.
I found it before I found the light switch. There was a ring in it already, white and perfect, and I stood in the dark in my husband’s sweater with my thumb on the mark like I could press it back out of the wood.
So I went and got a tray.
I guess that’s what I do. There were glasses tucked behind the log basket, a napkin somebody had folded into a swan, an earring down the side of the chair I found in Cheyenne.
I went around that room in the dark putting it back the way I built it, and I felt better with every single thing I picked up.
My mother used to say you can’t cry and busy yourself with work at the same time.
She was wrong about a great deal and right about that.
Shayna came down while I was on my knees at the hearth.
“Oh, thank God. Somebody else is awake.”
She had last night’s cardigan on over something she’d slept in, and her hair was up in a way that had taken effort. She went straight through to the kitchen without asking me anything. I heard her doing the coffee, and she came back with two mugs and set mine on the hearthstone beside my hand.
“You take it with a horrifying amount of milk,” she said. “I’ve been watching.”
“It’s not that much milk.”
“It’s practically a milkshake.”
And I laughed, because it was funny, because she is funny, and because I hadn’t had the chance to set my face right just yet.
She sat down on the floor. Not in a chair. On the floor with her back against my sofa, holding her coffee in both hands like a kid at a bonfire.
The fire had gone down to nothing. The windows had gone that flat gray they go before the mountains come back.
And I heard myself say it.
“In the car. You said he never ended it.”
She didn’t move.
“I want you to tell me what you meant. Not the polite version. You’ve been telling me the polite version all week and I’ve just been accepting it, and frankly I’m done taking it.”
She gazed into her cup for a while. When she looked up, something had gone out of her face that I understood, right then, had been switched on since the day she arrived.
“All right,” she said.
“All right.”
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t want him.”
Something settled in the grate.
I’d had the denial ready. I’d been holding it for days, turning it over, deciding what I’d say back to it. She didn’t give me one, and I had nowhere to put my hands.
“But you told me you weren’t carrying a torch.”
“I told you I’d never make it difficult for you.” She said it evenly. “And I meant that. But those are not the same thing, and I think you knew that when I said it.”
Something raw scraped at my insides, climbing its way up my chest and into my throat. “Then why are you here?”
“Because my father does business with his family, and my mother has been planning her outfit for this whole thing since March.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “And because he’s here. Both of those are true. I’m not going to insult you by pretending only one of them is.”
I got up off the floor. I had to. I stood there holding a tray like somebody they’d hired for the week. In some cruel way, I guess I sort of was.
“He ended it,” I said. “He told me. Before I ever met you. He sat on the end of our bed and told me the other night, in fact.”
It was done a long time before you. It had been done for years. We just kept picking it back up.
“I’m sure he believes that,” Shayna said, scoffing to herself.
“He believes it because it’s true.”
“Lydia.” And she said my name so gently I wanted to throw the tray right at her.
“He got in a car and never looked back. There was no conversation. There was never a conversation, because there had never been one any of the other times either, and every other time he came back. So please do explain to me how that’s a whole conversation that we apparently had. I’ll wait.”
“That isn’t the same as?—”
“He still texts me on my birthday.”
Everything in me froze.
“Every year,” she said. “Same day, always in the morning. He takes me to lunch when he’s down in Denver, at the place on Larimer with the tin ceiling.
He sent flowers when my grandfather died.
Not from the company. From him. He even wrote the card himself.
And it was a very sweet, kind note because that’s the kind of man Zach is. ”
She was watching me while she said it, and I watched her keep watching me, and I understood that she was not telling me a secret. She thought she was reminding me. She thought the two of us were grown women having a hard, honest conversation about a set of facts we both already had.
“You knew that,” she said.
And I said, “Yes.”
The lie was almost too easy, and I don’t know why. It came out of me before I had decided anything. There was a version of that morning where I said no and let her deal with the fallout of it. I couldn’t stand in the middle of a room I built and be the last person told.
“Then you understand,” she said. “I’m not inventing something out of nothing. A man who is finished with you does not just keep texting you on your birthday for four years.”
The room was too quiet for me and I fought the urge to run off and maybe not look back.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I want you to know that. I haven’t touched him and I’m not going to. If you asked me to leave today I would go, and I’d tell all of them it was my idea.”
I narrowed my eyes down at her. “Then leave.”
She looked up at me from the floor. And for a second, one second, I watched her work over my response in her head. I wasn’t calling her bluff and she knew it.
“Ask him,” she said. “Ask him to ask me to leave and I will. But Lydia? He won’t.”
Somebody came down the back stairs and the house started up around us. Shayna got off the floor, picked up her mug, touched my shoulder on her way past. It was not unkind, and it was the worst thing that happened to me all week.
“Thank you for asking me straight,” she said. “Nobody in this family ever does.”
I finished the room.
I did every bit of it. I got the ring out of the walnut with mayonnaise and a soft cloth, because that is what my mother used.
I did the glasses. I did the swan. The earring turned out to be Jill’s, so I put it on the hall table where she’d find it and think well of herself for looking.
I filled the log basket. I opened the drapes on the long windows in the order I open them.
By the time people came down that room was better than it had been the day we arrived, and everybody said so, and one of them asked me who did the flowers.
And I couldn’t tell a living soul.
I went through the whole morning working out why, and it kept coming out the same.
Simon likes her. Simon is going to Telluride in October to give her an actual opinion.
If I took him into the laundry room and told him Shayna Lemont had said out loud that she wants my husband, he would put his cloth down, and he would ask me, kindly, whether that is really what she said. And then he would ask me if I’d eaten.
And then I would’ve screamed in the middle of the damn laundry room like a lunatic.
Magda had her in that family before she ever had me.
And Zach.
I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and I ran it through. Baby, she said what? In the car? And then his face doing the patient thing it does. It’s been a long week. Everybody’s tired. That’s just how she talks.
And I would hear myself saying it, and I would sound exactly like a jealous wife, because I am one. I have been one for four years. I am the woman in that house with a hang-up about Shayna Lemont, and every person under that roof knows it, including me.
So I dried my hands and went in to breakfast and asked Dan Lemont about his golf.
Zach came in behind me and put his hand flat on my back on his way to the coffee, the way he does, and said, “There she is.”
And I let him. I stood in my husband’s hand and said good morning and thought: tonight. After the signing, when it’s quiet and it’s only us, I’ll ask you tonight.
Then Dan set his cup down and said he couldn’t possibly wait until tonight, and would everybody come through, because there was something they wanted to say before the day got away from them.