Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Tristan was coming up the stairs. He looked left. He looked right. He paused with the careful, furtive checking of a man who did not want to be seen coming home.
He looked absolutely ridiculous.
The wall-hugging, the over-the-shoulder glancing, the elaborate performance of casualness that convinced nobody. Dalene had done it every day after the breakup until Eliot had opened his door and called her a bad criminal.
She watched Tristan check the landing once more and start up the stairs. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
He'd made this particular mess himself, one bad decision at a time. The sneaking around in the mess he made was simply what came next. She hoped he found his way through it. She genuinely did. From a distance. With no further involvement on her part.
Back in her kitchen, Dalene measured out the cardamom. The brown butter was already in the pan, going nutty and warm and filling the kitchen with the smell of something good about to happen. She cracked eggs. She folded in vanilla.
She turned on the television for background noise while she worked.
The television landed on the wrong channel.
She knew it was the wrong channel the moment the graphics came up — the sleek, national-broadcast graphics of the network that had sent Eliot to Valor in the first place. She reached for the remote.
The anchor at the desk was mid-sentence. Beside him, at the weather wall, stood a man she'd seen exactly once before on Eliot's phone screen at two in the morning — Derek Haines, with his good hair and his confident gestures.
The anchor was smiling.
"And of course a huge congratulations to Derek," the anchor said, "on his permanent appointment as our chief meteorologist. We're thrilled to have you officially in the role."
"Couldn't be happier." Derek smiled back with the ease of a man who had been practicing for this.
Permanent appointment. Chief meteorologist. Official role. That meant Eliot wasn't getting his old job back.
Then the second thought arrived. If Eliot wasn't going back to Philly—
Dalene turned off the television. She stood in her kitchen with the brown butter going darker than she'd intended and thought about what it meant that her first response to Eliot not getting his job back had been — relief. Small and immediate and entirely selfish.
She turned the heat down on the stove. She thought about how things between her and Eliot had been heating up this past week. How it had gone from kissing at the Cloud Festival, to kissing at the trail's peak, to kissing in the garden while Tristan slunk up the stairs.
She was still thinking about it when the doorbell rang.
She wiped her hands on her apron and went to the door. She told herself to pull up compassionate emotions for Eliot. He was going to be upset that he wasn't getting his job back. She had to commiserate with him before she tried to point out the bright side. The bright side being, hopefully, her.
She opened the door. All compassion fled her face. Tristan stood in her entryway.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
Dalene said nothing. She'd learned, from twenty-three eighth graders and one meteorologist, that silence was more useful than questions.
"I broke up with Brooke the first time because things got hard between her and me.
Neither of us had the tools to move through it.
I didn't know how to stay when it stopped being easy so I left.
And then I came back because she was — she was unfinished business.
I thought if I could go back and do it right this time it would mean I wasn't the person who gave up. "
Dalene scrunched up her face. Was this a practice speech of some sorts? She had no idea what it had to do with her?
"Things got hard again the second time around," Tristan continued.
"A different kind of hard, same pattern.
And I—" He stopped. "I tried to run back to you.
Because you always knew what to do. You always smiled and handled it and made everything feel manageable and I thought if I could just get back to that—"
"You wanted someone to make it easy again," she said.
"I wanted someone to carry it for me. I let you carry everything, Dalene.
For the whole time we were together. You cooked, and you organized and you smiled through every difficult thing and I let you because it was easier than learning how to be in a hard moment without someone else managing it.
That wasn't fair. I was a bad boyfriend. I was a worse friend."
The afternoon light came through the landing window and made everything look a little gentler than it was.
"Where is Brooke now?" she said.
"She went back to her hometown." He exhaled. "I'm going to go find her. Try to actually work through it this time instead of running from it. It's going to be hard."
"Good things usually are."
Tristan looked at her as though he were seeing her with new eyes.
Dalene looked back at him and felt — not the absence of feeling.
Not the numbness she'd had at the festival when she'd watched them argue at the tree line.
She was seeing him with new eyes as well.
She had loved him. But she'd loved a version of him.
She'd never seen him in this light. He hadn't shown it to her.
She wasn't sure if she wanted to know more about this version of Tristan. But she did wish him well.
"I hope you do," she said. "Fix it. I mean that."
"I know you do." He half-smiled. Sad and genuine. "That's the thing about you. You always mean it." He looked at the floor. "I'm sorry, Dalene. For all of it."
Dalene opened her arms. Tristan came forward. She hugged him. The hug had the texture of a door closing cleanly on its way to something else.
Tristan pulled back first. When she looked past his shoulder, Eliot was standing at the top of the stairs.
He had two to-go cups of coffees from the place on Main Street she'd mentioned once in passing three weeks ago. He was in his broadcast clothes. He was looking at her over Tristan's shoulder with an expression she couldn't immediately read.
Tristan turned.
He saw Eliot.
The three of them stood on the landing for a moment in silence.
Tristan nodded once — not unfriendly, not anything complicated. "Take care of yourself," he said to her.
"You too," she said.
Tristan headed towards the stairs. When he got close to Eliot, he paused. The two men glared at one another. It was clear they were never going to be friends. Then Tristan walked into his apartment and shut the door.
Eliot came across the landing but he didn't quite meet her eyes. He was looking at a point somewhere past her left shoulder. She felt the first small tendril of worry work its way through her chest.
"He came over to apologize," she said.
"About time."
"He's going to try to win Brooke back. He wasn't here for me."
"I know you would never go back to him. You're too good for him. You always were."
Dalene felt warmth move through her chest. She reached for Eliot. She had her hand at his lapel and was already leaning up when she felt it — the slight stiffening. Not a flinch. Just a body bracing for something.
"We need to talk," he said.
Four words. They were her least favorite. They carried a weight to them. You never knew which side the weight would fall to.
"Come in," she said.
Eliot followed her inside. The television was still on. She'd forgotten about it — had forgotten about Derek Haines and the permanent appointment and the complicated relief she'd felt standing at the counter with cardamom on her hands.
Derek was still at the weather wall, still being congratulated, still smiling with the ease of a man who had inherited something he didn't fully deserve and was delighted about it, anyway.
"I'm sorry. You deserved that job."
Eliot set the two coffees on her counter. He didn't bother to look at the television. He looked at her. "I got another offer."
Dalene waited. She watched him inhale and realized she was holding her breath.
"The National Weather Service. Senior meteorologist. Forecasting division. Federal level. The models that feed every regional office in the country."
She felt her chest go cold from the inside out, the way cold came in through a window left open in winter. "The National Weather Service."
"Yes."
"That's in D.C."
"Yes."
She looked at the counter. At the brown butter cooling in the pan. At the cardamom she'd measured out and the vanilla and the recipe she'd been turning over in her head since second period because she'd wanted to make something new for when he got home.
When he got home.
Eliot's eyes were on her face. Grey-blue and steady and asking something she didn't know how to answer yet.
"It's my dream job."
Of course it was. At least this time it wasn't a dream girl. But it was the second time that Dalene wasn't a man's dream worth keeping.
"Dalene, I wanted to ask. Would you ever consider coming with me?"