Chapter 18
eighteen
LYDIA
My husband has taken to sanding the banister.
He’s not good at it, but he’s doing it anyway, in the evenings, in a shirt he has already ruined, and he asks me questions about grit and then does not do what I tell him.
I gave him the hall to work on and plenty of space to do it. He asked me what ought to be on that table and I told him. Then I kept going, and he wrote all of it down on the back of an envelope with extreme concentration. Maybe if I wasn’t still frustrated with him, I’d find it cute.
He hasn’t asked me for anything since. Not once. He sleeps in the guest room and doesn’t make a production of it. There’s coffee made the way I like it every morning. He goes to work. He comes home. He sands. There’s food at some point. And he goes to bed.
Shayna Lemont came to my house.
I heard a car and went to the window with a rag still in my hand, and there she was in a coat that was probably worth the same amount as the car, not getting out. She sat in it a while. Then she got out.
“I know,” she said, when I opened the door. “I know. Just give me ten minutes, please.”
“Come in.”
“I’d rather not, actually.”
“It’s freezing. Come in.”
So she came and stood in my kitchen and would not sit down.
“I told him I couldn’t be in a room with you,” she said. “I meant it. That’s exactly why I’m here. I am never going to be in a room with you again, so it has to be now.”
Honestly, it stung, but it made sense and I couldn’t help but agree. “All right.”
“He came up to the lodge. He said it out loud, just like I thought he wouldn’t be able to do.” Her jaw did something and stopped. “That it’s over. That it’s been over since Jackson. So, there’s that…”
“Good,” I said, and found that I meant it.
“Also, I turned the job down.”
I dropped the rag on the counter.
“You did what?”
“I turned it down.” She looked straight at me for the first time since the car. “He didn’t tell you.”
“No.”
“My father pulled us out of the shares.”
I felt the breath rush out of me, and I was trying to pack it all back in, shaking my head. “I don’t understand.”
“We pulled out. All of it.” She watched me take it in. “Zach could have stopped him but he didn’t. He could’ve told him that it was a misunderstanding, that he hadn’t done anything wrong to me, but he just stood there. And my father wasn’t having it.”
I had to put my hand on the counter.
“You genuinely didn’t know any of this?” she asked.
“No.”
“Right.” She looked at my ceiling for a second. “Well. That’s annoying of him.”
All I could wonder was why my husband hadn’t tried to smooth things over with Dan. He’d told me about talking to Shayna, but not the rest of it. And I couldn’t figure out why.
“This might be out of left field somewhat, but I’ve been thinking about something else and since I’m here and this is the last time, I’m just going to say it.”
It seems like that is something she’s made a habit of doing.
“Magda told me you’ve been trying to get pregnant,” she said.
I didn’t answer her. It wasn’t her business, especially after her lovely comment about Zach never wanting kids.
“I’m not going to be strange about it. I can’t have them and I have never wanted them, and I always took that for one of the things about the two of us.
” She pulled her coat straighter. “He never wanted them either. That’s what I would have told you, right up until last week. I’d have said it with my whole chest.”
“And now?”
“And now I have watched that man drive up a mountain to have the worst conversation of his life so that he could go back down it to you.” She shrugged, and there was nothing graceful in it.
“I was wrong about him. He isn’t the one I was waiting for.
The one I was waiting for wouldn’t have driven up. ”
She went to the door.
“Lydia.”
“Yes.”
“He’s an idiot. He isn’t a liar, and he’s not a cheater. The man has zero poker face.” She got the door open. “For whatever that is worth coming from me, which I understand is nothing at all.”
He was on the third stair with the sandpaper when I came through into the hall.
He put it down and got up, and I watched my husband decide not to ask me a single question.
“Shayna was here.”
“I thought I heard her.”
“She told me about the lodge. And your grandmother. And Dan.”
He nodded. Once, slowly.
“You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you never asked me to do any of it.” He came down onto the hall floor.
“You told me not to touch her job, and I didn’t.
I did the rest because it needed doing. If I carry it home and put it on the table in front of you, then you owe me something for it.
And you have owed me nothing for the past four years. ”
So I told him what I wanted.
“It isn’t a job, Zach.”
He waited.
“You are wonderful to me where nobody can see it.” My voice went and I let it go.
“You warm my side of the bed. You put the lamp on. You have never left this house without kissing me. And then we walk into a room with people in it and you belong to all of them. I stand by the door with a drink in my hand, so proud of you I can’t breathe, and so completely on my own. ”
“I just?—”
“I haven’t finished.” I dragged the back of my hand under my eyes and kept going. “I don’t want a title. I want to be the one you’re loud about. I have watched you be loud about every single person in the world for years.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Say something,” I said. “And don’t tell me you’ll work on it.”
“I’m going to do it badly at first.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to overcorrect and embarrass you in a restaurant inside a month.”
“Almost certainly.”
He crossed the hall and stopped in front of me without putting a hand on me.
“I’d like to start now.”
“There’s nobody here.”
“I know that,” he said. “I’d still like to start now.”
And he took my face in both hands, the way his grandmother does, which I have never once told him he does, and he said all of it out loud in an empty hall to nobody at all. He got about halfway through before I had both fists in his shirt.
He carried me up. He caught my ankle on the newel post and apologized to my ankle.
He turned the lamp on.
“Leave it off,” I said, out of habit.
“No.”
He sat me down on the end of our bed, knelt, and took my boots off, one and then the other. He set them side by side under the chair.
Then he took an unreasonable amount of time over me. He got my sweater off, sat back on his heels, and looked until I put my hand across my face. He took it away again, the same as he did the first time and every single time since.
“I like looking at you.”
“You’re looking a lot.”
“I’m going to look even more.”
And then he did the thing I’d asked him for downstairs. In an empty room. With nobody in the world there to hear him do it.
He said it against my mouth. He said it into my throat, the inside of my elbow, the soft place under my ribs that I hate and he has never once let me apologize for.
He told me what I’ve made. He told me what I’m worth.
He told me every single thing he has been too stupid to say in front of another living person, in that low unhurried voice, and he did not stop saying it while he was getting the rest of my clothes off me.
I got his shirt over his head. I have never been shy about that part, whatever else I am.
He went slow. He put his mouth on my hip bone and then lower.
I got both hands into his hair and forgot every single thing that had happened that week.
He is patient about this. He has always been patient about this.
He stayed there until my heels were dug into the bed, until my back was off it, until I was saying his name in a voice I don’t use anywhere else in my life.
Then he stayed longer than that, because on this one particular subject my husband is not a kind man.
When he came up over me I got my hands on his face.
“Look at me.”
“Baby,” he said, “I haven’t stopped.”
He pushed in slow, the way he does. I kept my eyes open. I didn’t put my mouth on his shoulder. I didn’t go anywhere at all.
It was slow and then it stopped being slow. He got one arm under my back and lifted me into him. I got my legs around him. Somewhere in the middle of it he put his forehead down on mine and told me he loved me in a voice that was coming apart in his mouth.
I said it back. I said it into his mouth, over and over, and I meant every syllable of it.
He finished with both arms underneath me, holding on the way he does, and I went with him. Afterward he didn’t move for a long time. He stayed exactly where he was, with his face in my neck and his heart going against my ribs, and I lay there with my hand flat on the back of his head.
And I stayed.
That is the whole of what was different. I was there the entire time. I did not leave once.
Afterward I lay with my head on his chest and his hand moving slowly through my hair.
“I have to tell you something and you aren’t going to like it.”
“Go on.”
“The last night at the lodge. I didn’t put the pillow under my hips.”
His hand stopped.
“On purpose?”
“On purpose.”
He threaded his fingers with mine, and dropped his head closer to mine.
“Okay, baby.”
“That’s it?”
“What would you like me to say?” His chest moved under my ear. “You didn’t want to make a baby with a man who had just handed your job to his ex in front of a room full of people. I mean… I can’t really blame you for it.”
“You’d have done the same?”
“I’d have sulked and cleaned out the garage at the very least.”
And I laughed into my husband’s ribs and cried at the same time, and he let me do both without saying one word about it.
“There’s a dinner,” he said later, into my hair. “Gran’s doing a dinner. Dan’s coming, apparently, which should be a delight for everybody.”
“Are we going?”
“Only if you want to.”
And I lay in the dark with my hand on his chest and thought about walking into a room full of those people.
“We’re going,” I said.