Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Dalene closed the door and stood with her back against it for a full thirty seconds. Her heart was going at a pace that would have concerned her doctor.
Eliot had been right. She had been sneaking. There was no version of what she'd just done on those stairs that could be described as anything other than sneaking.
She pressed the back of her head against the door.
Outside, she heard the low murmur of voices on the landing.
Tristan's voice. She knew it the way she knew the sound of each of her students while she was writing on the whiteboard without turning her back.
She had, after all, absorbed that voice for a full year, but at a more intimate distance than any of her eighth-grade class.
She closed her eyes. Four counts in. Four counts hold. Four counts out.
She was fine.
She was completely, entirely fine.
She was going to stand here in her own hallway until the voices moved away from the other side of her door, all while being totally fine. That was a normal and reasonable thing to do.
The voices moved away. Belatedly she wondered what Tristan had told Eliot. Probably everything. Now Eliot would look at her like everyone else in town did; like she was a thing to be pitied.
Dalene opened her eyes. Her apartment looked back at her.
She had loved this apartment once without asterisk or qualification.
The low ceilings and the wide windowsills and the kitchen that was slightly too big for one person and exactly right for two.
She had moved in three years ago with her grandmother's recipe journals.
There had been two other tenants when Dalene moved in.
Mrs. Kowalski in the unit next door to hers; eighty-three years old, sharp as a tack, and now reigning over a retirement community in Florida.
And in the third unit, Gerald Hayes. A retired shop teacher with a wood-burning hobby and a rotating collection of bird feeders on his windowsill, who had left the landing smelling permanently of cedar shavings and who had been exactly the right kind of neighbor.
Present enough to feel like community. Quiet enough to feel like privacy.
Gerald had retired to Tucson eighteen months ago and left the unit to his nephew.
Tristan had shown up on a Sunday afternoon with two boxes and an easy smile. Dalene had been coming up the stairs at the same moment. He'd held his door open and smiled at her. She'd said welcome to the building. He'd said he had a feeling he was going to like it here.
That had been, in the way of most disasters, the beginning.
They'd started dating the same week. Faster than she'd told Lila, slower than it had felt.
During the months that followed, her apartment had acquired the incremental evidence of another person; his coffee mug on the second hook, the blue throw blanket he'd chosen at the market one Saturday because he said the green one she had was too itchy, the non-stick pan on the stove because he'd said her cast iron was too heavy, the framed print above the bookshelf that she had never quite loved and had stopped seeing after a while.
It had been an ordinary Tuesday when it happened. Late October, the first cold snap of the season, the kind of evening that called for blankets and something undemanding on the television. The movie had been about a man who spent the whole film wondering about the girl who got away.
Dalene remembered being charmed by it. The premise, the longing, the grand-gesture in the third act.
She remembered glancing at Tristan halfway through. He'd had a look on his face. She hadn't known, then, what the look meant.
The day after the movie he confessed he'd been thinking about Brooke.
The day after that, he'd said he wanted to call her. Just to talk. Just to get some closure.
The day after that, he insisted he needed to go and see her.
And the day after that — four days, start to finish, the length of a long weekend, the duration of a minor weather system — it was over. Eighteen months of her life folded up and handed back.
And now here she was. Hiding behind her own door.
Listening for footsteps on a landing she'd lived on for three years.
Sneaking up her own stairs because she couldn't bear one more sympathetic look, one more careful smile, one more person in this town arranging their face around the fact that Tristan Hayes had chosen someone else and was marrying her at a vineyard with oak-light that Dalene had described to him twice.
She pushed off the door and went to the kitchen.
The nonstick pan went into the trash. The cast iron pan went back on the hook. Her kitchen. Her hook.
She looked at the blue throw blanket on the couch. She picked it up. She folded it. She put it in the hall closet on the high shelf behind the spare pillows, where it would be out of sight without requiring her to make any permanent decisions about it.
The framed print above the bookshelf she left where it was, because she was working in stages and the ladder was in the storage closet and some battles were for another evening.
She put on Fleetwood Mac.
The Chain first. Then Gold Dust Woman. Then back to The Chain because that was on the agenda tonight; breaking the chain.
She washed her hands. She pulled out the flour.
She opened Vivienne's recipe journal to the page she needed without looking.
The honey oat loaf, page forty-seven. The worn corner and the small brown ring from a coffee mug that had been there since 1987 and was now as much a part of the recipe as the ingredients.
She started measuring. The kitchen filled up with the warm, certain smell of butter coming to temperature. Underneath Stevie Nicks's voice the apartment lost some of its Tristan-shaped quality and started to become hers again.
She was measuring vanilla when she heard the knock.
The bread dough she'd started an hour ago was resting under a cloth. She wasn't expecting anyone. Lila had texted to reschedule for tomorrow. Dalene wiped her hands. Opened the door.
Eliot Brooks stood in the garden passage in dark trousers and a grey henley, sleeves pushed to the elbow.
"Was I playing the music too loud?"
He looked faintly surprised, as though this had not occurred to him as a reason to knock. "No. The Chain; it's my favorite."
"Oh." She waited, a bit impatiently. She was directly in the line of fire. Tristan could step out of his place at anytime and… And see her talking to another man.
"You organize the cloud festival."
Dalene blinked, turning her attention back to Eliot. "I do."
"I'm the weather ambassador."
"Yes, Mrs. Patel said she was going to arrange that."
He quirked a brow. "You don't approve of the choice?"
"Yes. I mean, no. I mean, it's pointless to argue if your opponent is Mrs. Patel. Just nod and do as you're told."
"I'm afraid I'm not good at that; nodding and going along to get along. It's why I'm here."
Over his shoulder, in her peripheral vision, the curtain in Tristan's unit moved. Just slightly. Just enough.
Something crystallized in her chest — not a plan exactly, more like an instinct, the kind that arrived before the reasoning caught up. "Do you want to come in?"
Eliot's brow crinkled. His head cocked to the side. "Why?"
Dalene was mortified. She reached for the I'm-fine-face. When it came, it felt like she was a ventriloquist. The dummy, not the one manning the strings. "Just being neighborly."
Eliot's frown didn't leave. Dalene's lips remained in a forced smile. Across the way, the curtain shifted again as though disturbed by a breeze. But the wind was coming from inside the house.
Tristan was watching. Dalene wanted him, more than anyone, to see that she was fine. And what better way to prove that than by him seeing that another man found her interesting.
"I'm baking," she added. In her experience, very few people turned down a warm kitchen with a baking tray about to be pulled from an oven. Then she remembered; the scone. Her face and the fine-smile fell before she could stop it.
"No, thank you," Eliot said. "I just wanted to introduce myself properly. I'll leave you to your… baking."
And with that, he stepped back and turned to his apartment. Before she closed the door behind Eliot, Dalene was certain she saw Tristan's curtain snap back into place.
Dalene slammed the door closed and pressed her palm against it for good measure. The embarrassment came anyway. Quietly, privately, thoroughly embarrassed. Tristan had just watched another man turn her down.