Chapter 5 #2
Which made no sense whatsoever. She had blocked his number. She had sent back a car. She had told his sister to have a good weekend. She had built the entire wall herself and had been proud of every course of it.
And some part of her, apparently, had assumed he would come anyway.
The one bad night was the second Thursday.
It came from nowhere. She was doing the dishes at nine and the kitchen radio played four bars of a song, and it was not even a song that meant anything — it was a bad song from a bar in Camden that they had been to exactly twice in the first summer.
And she was on the floor.
Not crying. Sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinet again, with the water still running, breathing wrong.
Because for a second — for about a second and a half — she had missed him so much she couldn't stand up.
Not the version on the staircase. The other one.
The one on the end of a dock in July who had touched the inside of his own wrist and said he was going to make an absolute mess of this and did she want to come along anyway.
Twenty minutes of a man in a hospital room with his hand flat on the blanket next to her hip.
She let herself have it. She had learned somewhere in the last month that if you don't let yourself have it, it comes back at four in the morning and stays longer.
Then she got up, turned off the tap, dried her hands, and wrote four hundred words about a woman on a floor.
They were the best four hundred words in the book.
She hated that and used them anyway.
Owen asked her on the last Saturday in October.
He did it badly, which she found she liked.
He came up the outside stairs with a box that did not need to come up the outside stairs — a shipment of children's paperbacks, damaged spines, free to a good home — and stood on her landing with it and said the thing about the books and then, in exactly the same tone, with no gear change at all:
"Also I wondered if you'd want to have dinner. Not — I'm aware of the situation. You can say no and I'll bring you damaged books forever regardless."
Erin stood in the doorway.
Here is what she noticed, and she noticed all of it inside about two seconds, because five years in that family had made her extremely fast at reading a room:
He was not making a move on a woman in trouble. He'd have known about her for a month. He had waited until she'd started coming down at one in the afternoon to use the back chair, which is to say he had waited until she seemed like a person again.
He was not nervous, exactly. He was prepared to be embarrassed and had decided it was survivable.
And he had asked her at four in the afternoon on a Saturday, at her own door, in daylight, in a town where six people would see him climb those stairs.
"No," she said. "Thank you — genuinely, thank you. No."
"Okay." He put the box down inside her door. "That's fine."
"It's not that I'm—"
"You don't have to do the second part," Owen said. "The second part's always worse than the first. I'll see you Monday."
And he went back down the stairs, and she heard the shop door go, and she stood there with a box of damaged children's paperbacks at her feet.
She was thirty-six years old. She had been asked out by a man for the first time since she was thirty and had said no, and she had meant it, and it was not a close thing.
It landed anyway.
Somebody had looked at her — not at Mrs. Lockwood, not at the wife of, not at the poor thing who'd only just found out — and seen a woman worth walking up a set of stairs with a bad excuse.
She had forgotten that was a thing that happened.
She had genuinely forgotten. Somewhere in the last five years she had filed it under things that were over, along with the harbor at six in the morning and cooking badly for two.
She carried the box inside and put it on the table and stood there.
I could do this, she thought.
Not him. That wasn't it, and she was too honest with herself to pretend otherwise even for a second. Not Owen Dalton specifically.
This. A shop bell. A school on Union Street.
A library card in her own name. A boy with a paper crown who thought everyone's mom was in the car.
Four hours a day at a kitchen table with the door open and nobody to hide the screen from.
A life about this size, with nothing in it that had to be performed.
She could do it for forty years and be happy. That was the thing she understood standing in her kitchen on the last Saturday in October with her hand on a box of damaged books. Not I'll survive this. Not I'll be all right eventually.
She could be happy. Actually happy, all the way down, for the rest of her life, and never once go back.
That night she got Wyatt into bed and came out and sat down at the table and did not open the laptop.
She sat there for a while instead, doing an accounting.
It was the twenty-eighth of October. She had left on the ninth of September. Seven weeks.
And somewhere in the last seven weeks — she could not have said when, and it bothered her that she couldn't, because she had a written record of nearly everything else — she had stopped waiting for the phone.
She checked. She made herself do it properly, standing at the counter, going back through the day in order the way she'd have written it in the ledger.
Woke at six. Wrote. School run. The harbor with Shannon. Groceries. The box on the stairs. Owen. Dinner, bath, two chapters of the dinosaur book.
Not once. Not one single time in fourteen hours had she thought about Graham Lockwood.
She stood in her kitchen and waited to feel good about that.
And what came instead, entirely uninvited, was the understanding that this was the actual loss.
Not the marriage — the marriage had been over for five years and three days and she had known it better than anyone alive.
This. The specific hour, sometime today, when a man she had loved since she was thirty had quietly stopped being the thing her mind went to when it wasn't doing anything else.
Six years of somebody being the background noise. And it had gone out, at some point, on a Tuesday, while she was buying groceries.
She put both hands flat on the counter.
Then she took her phone out and did something she had not done in seven weeks, which was unblock nothing, answer nothing, and simply look at the screen to see whether he had called.
He hadn't.
Not that day, or the day before, or the day before that. She scrolled back.
Nothing since the tenth of October. Eighteen days.
And Erin Brooks — who had wanted exactly this, who had built the wall herself, brick by brick, and had been proud of every course of it — stood in her own kitchen at half past nine at night and discovered that she was furious.