14. “The Conversation” #2
The understanding that I could fail and it would be okay. That I could stumble and Eden wouldn’t leave. That I could become something bigger than I’d been. That I could let someone change me and it wouldn’t destroy me—it would save me.
Eden came back inside ten minutes later.
She had been on the porch alone. I had been in the kitchen heating the cast-iron pan and breaking eggs into a bowl and getting very deliberate about which knife I used to slice the bread, because I was a man who had just promised a senator he was going to make his daughter breakfast and I was going to do it correctly.
She came up behind me.
She put her arms around my waist.
She put her face against the back of my shoulder.
“Atlas.”
“Eden.”
“He’s not angry with you.”
“He has been angry with me before. This is not that.”
“He told you Eve made him promise.”
“Yes.”
“He’s never told me about that promise.”
“He just did, Eden. We were both on the porch.”
She was quiet for a long time. The pan was hot. I cracked the first egg into it. The white set in a pale ring around the bright yolk.
“I don’t think I knew, until this morning,” she said, “how much he has been carrying.”
“He carries a lot.”
“He carried it alone for eight years.”
“Yes.”
“I should — “
“You should not. He has been carrying it the way he wants to carry it. He has not asked for help. He has chosen to do this. You do not need to repair him. You need to be his daughter. You can be both his daughter and a married woman. You can be both at once. He wants you to be both.”
She let out a breath against my shoulder.
I cracked the second egg. The third.
She did not move.
I let her stay like that until the eggs were almost done.
Then I said her name.
She let go of my waist. She leaned around to my side and watched me lift the eggs out of the pan with the fish spatula my grandmother had given me when I had moved into my first apartment in 1998.
“You move differently in this kitchen,” she said.
“Do I.”
“You move like a person who lives somewhere. Not like a person staying somewhere.”
“I do live here. Or I have. Some weekends a month. For ten years.”
“You are going to live here with me.”
“Yes. As often as you want.”
She kissed the corner of my mouth.
She took the eggs to the table.
I followed with the bread and the small jar of orchard honey from the farm two miles up the road and a single nasturtium I had pulled out of the herb pot on the porch on the way in, because Mrs. Cain — my mother — had taught me very strictly that you put a flower on a plate when you were trying.
She had died of a stroke in 2005 at her house in New Canaan and I had been carrying the small specific habits she had given me ever since, the way other men carried watches inherited from their fathers.
We ate.
We talked about books. About the manuscript she was editing.
About a poem I had been trying to memorize for a month and could not quite get.
About Caleb. About Sloane. About the small green linen napkins my mother had embroidered with her initials before she died, and how I had been using two of them as kitchen towels for fifteen years and only that morning realized they were not towels.
We laughed.
We laughed for a long time.
We made love on the kitchen counter because we couldn’t wait to get to the bedroom. Because the kitchen was where we’d cooked together. Because the space mattered. Because everything mattered now.
We didn’t leave the house.
We didn’t answer the phone.
We didn’t think about the firm or the clients or the wedding or anything beyond this moment. This day. This barn.
We just existed in the space that I’d built a decade ago when I was waiting for something I couldn’t name.
The space was a home now.
Because she was here.
At 12:43 p.m., I drove Eden back to the compound.
She had told her father at breakfast, on the porch, that she wanted to come to lunch. He had said *only if you bring the man you mean to marry.* She had said *I’m bringing him.*
The drive was short. The light was already starting to angle. The fall colors had come up another quarter-tone since the morning.
We pulled into the gravel of the compound.
Mrs. Harris was on the porch.
Aspen was in the kitchen.
Sloane was at the long pine table with her laptop.
The senator was in the library.
I came in carrying a paper bag of nasturtiums I had pulled from my porch. I had not asked Eden if I should bring them. I had brought them because I had not, in twenty-five years of coming to this house, brought a single thing to it that was not a bottle of wine or a tin of cookies.
Mrs. Harris looked at the nasturtiums.
She looked at my face.
She nodded.
That was all.
Lunch was a small thing. Mrs. Harris had made tomato soup and cheese sandwiches with the kind of bread that crumbled in your hand. The senator came in from the library and sat at the head of the table the way he had sat at the head of the table for forty years.
He treated me, at lunch, exactly the same way he had treated me at any of the four hundred lunches I had eaten in this kitchen.
He passed me the salt without being asked.
He told me a small joke about a freshman senator from Idaho.
He asked after Caleb.
He let his daughter put her hand on my forearm at the table.
The new thing was very small.
But it was real.
I left the compound at 4:47 p.m.
Eden walked me out to the car. She did not kiss me at the door. She kissed me at the car, in the gravel, with one hand on the back of my neck and the other hand on her own hip. She kissed me the way a woman kissed a man she had decided on, before either of them had been allowed to say so out loud.
“Drive safe.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever happens tonight, hold your face.”
“I will.”
I drove out of the compound at 4:52.
I took the Merritt. The drive was long enough that I started seeing things — a hawk in a tree, a stand of maples that had gone a particular color, an old farmhouse with three porch lights already on at five — and ascribing meaning to all of them.
I got home to the apartment at 6:14 p.m.
I poured a bourbon I did not drink.
I read the Robinson for ten minutes.
I made a sandwich. I ate it.
At 9:47 p.m., my phone buzzed on the kitchen counter.
It was a news alert.
I had not, in fifteen years, paid for a news app that pushed alerts to my phone. The app belonged to Caleb. He had set it up on my phone three years ago. He had told me at the time it was so I would know if there was a school lockdown. The app, that night, was being used differently.
The headline ran across my home screen in two short lines.
*Senator Whitlock’s daughter spotted at home of close personal attorney. Sources speculate engagement imminent.*
I read it twice.
I set the phone down.
I picked it up again.
I called Eden.
She picked up on the first ring.
“I saw it,” she said. “Mrs. Harris saw it. My father is in the library with Sara on the phone.”
“I’m coming back up.”
“Don’t. Stay there. We need you in the city tomorrow morning. My father is going to manage the storm from the compound. He told me you should be in the city to handle the legal calls. Atlas — “
“Yes.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
“I know.”
“Hold your face.”
“I will.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Whoever wrote that headline is going to be very surprised by how little it changes us.”
“Yes.”
I hung up.
I poured the bourbon I had not drunk back into the bottle, because I did not want it.
I sat at my kitchen island in my own apartment in Manhattan with my phone still warm in my hand.
I did not pour the bourbon again.
I sat there for a long time, in the quiet of an apartment that had never once, in fifteen years, felt as full as it did that night, and I let myself believe her.