28. Cat
CAT
I've moved the photograph four times.
First to the mantel, because that's where it belonged — Marguerite and Hélène on their wedding day, six people and a very poor cake.
Then to the shelf in the office, because the mantel started to feel like a shrine.
Then into the kitchen drawer with the string and the batteries and the corkscrew nobody uses, because I kept catching sight of it.
Then back out of the drawer at half past one in the morning, because putting my grandmother's wedding in with the batteries felt like something only a monster would do.
It's on the windowsill above the sink now. I look at it while I wash up. I look at it while the kettle goes.
Two women who waited thirty-three years, and then stood in a village hall and promised each other all the rest of it.
All the rest of it.
I don't sleep much that week.
What I do instead is lie in the dark beside Iris and run the numbers.
She's thirty-two. She has been a lesbian for four months. She walked out of a career, an apartment and an entire life in a fortnight, on a feeling. She stood on our terrace and told her mother to leave.
People don't do that. Not sensible people. Not people who stay.
People do that in the first part. And then the first part ends — it always ends — and they look across at whoever they did it for and think: what on earth was I doing.
I know they do. I watched my mother do it.
She loved this place so much she stole me out of it, and she loved me so much she never once told me why, and she went into the ground with it.
That's what love does when it gets frightened.
It runs, and it takes you with it, and it calls the whole thing a decision.
I don't say any of this out loud. I just lie there and do the arithmetic and let it eat me.
I stop touching her first.
Nothing dramatic. I simply don't reach across the gearstick anymore. I take the far chair. I find reasons to stay late at Les Oliviers, which is easy, because a kitchen will always take more of you if you offer it.
Iris notices on the second day, because Iris notices everything.
"Are you all right?"
"Fine."
By the fourth day she stops asking and starts watching, which is worse.
On the sixth, she gets in front of the door.
"Cat."
"I'll be late."
"You've been late every night this week. Mathilde told me you've been sending yourself home at eleven." She doesn't move. "Talk to me."
And God, I want to. I want to put my head on her shoulder and say I am so frightened I can't breathe, and I don't know how to be anybody's forever, and I keep looking at a photograph of two women who managed it and I cannot find us anywhere in it.
"There's nothing to talk about," I say, and go around her.
The fight happens on a Thursday, and it starts over the distillery schedule — which is not what it's about, which is how you know it's a real one.
"—because you moved it," Iris says. "You moved the whole run to Friday and you didn't tell me."
"It's a still, Iris. Not a merger."
"It's ours. That's the entire point. You don't get to just—" She stops.
Breathes. Starts again in the reasonable voice, which is somehow worse than shouting.
"Something is wrong. Something's been wrong since we read that letter.
Since the ninety days. I have been extremely patient and I am running out. "
"Nothing's wrong."
"You won't touch me."
"I'm tired—"
"You won't look at me."
And something in me — small and cornered and vicious — gets up onto its feet.
"Because I'm waiting," I say.
She goes very still. "For what."
"For you to change your mind."
"Cat—"
"You've been a lesbian for four months." It comes out flat and ugly and rehearsed, because it is rehearsed; I've been running it at two in the morning for a fortnight.
"Four months. After thirty-two years of being somebody else.
You arrived here in a crisis and you fell in love with the crisis, and one morning you're going to wake up and look at me and understand it was a phase — and I'd honestly rather know now, if it's all the same to you. "
The look on her face is like I've hit her.
"A phase," she says.
"I didn't—"
"You think what I feel for you is a phase."
"I think you've never done this before!"
"I've never done any of this before!" She's shouting now.
Iris does not shout. "I've never had a home before!
I've never had a person before! I have never once in my life said out loud what I wanted and then gone and taken it — and I did, I did that, I did it for you, standing on that terrace in front of my mother, and you were there—"
"And what happens when it gets hard?"
"It has been hard—"
"Not like this!" I'm shouting too and I can hear myself and I can't stop. "Not the boring kind! Not ten years in, when I'm just the woman you live with and the farm's just work and nobody's clapping for you anymore! Everybody stays for the good part!"
"I am not your mother!"
And there it is.
She knows it the second it's out. I watch it land on her — the horror, the reaching after it.
"Cat, I didn't mean—"
But it's in me now, and the fear has both hands on the wheel.
"No," I say. "You're not. You'll be worse. She at least had the decency to leave when I was twelve."
The silence is enormous.
"Maybe you should have listened to her," I say. "Your mother. Maybe you should have got on the plane. Gone back to Chicago and found someone easier to love."
I want it back before the sentence is even finished.
Iris doesn't cry. That's the part I'll be seeing at three in the morning for the rest of my life. She just stands in our kitchen and puts the armour back on — piece by piece, exactly the way she took it off. Three months, in reverse, in about four seconds.
"Is that what you want?" she asks. Her voice is calm. Polite, even. "For me to go?"
No. God, no. Please.
"I don't know what I want," I say.
She nods once, the way you'd accept a delivery.
Then she walks away. And she doesn't slam the door.
She just closes it.
The house is enormous when you're avoiding someone inside it.
She moves back into her old room — the one she hasn't slept in since June. I stay in ours, a word I keep saying to myself in an increasingly unconvincing tone.
We are unfailingly polite. We say excuse me in the hallway. She makes coffee and leaves half the pot, and I drink it cold at eleven, because drinking it warm would mean going in while she's still in there.
On the second night I cook a four-course dinner for two at half past nine. I plate both. I sit down. I eat neither.
I have run kitchens through Christmas. I have faced down two hundred covers with a dead oven and a sous chef crying into the beurre blanc.
I cannot walk down one hallway and knock on a door.
Sophie lets herself in on the third day, because nobody in this village has ever knocked in their lives.
She takes one look at me.
"Oh, Catherine."
"Don't."
"You've done it, haven't you." She perches on the edge of the table, arms folded, entirely unhurried. "You've gone and done the thing you always do."
"I don't need—"
"She rang me," Sophie says. "Iris. Yesterday."
Everything in me stops.
"To say what?"
"To ask whether you were eating."
I look at the floor.
"She's down the hall, Cat." Sophie stands, collects her bag, pauses on her way past me.
"She isn't on a plane. She isn't in Chicago.
She has spent three days sitting in a spare room, in a house she could walk out of at any moment, ringing me to find out whether you've had your dinner.
" She squeezes my shoulder hard enough to hurt.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do about that.
You know precisely what to do about that.
You've simply decided you're not allowed. "
She lets herself out.
I sit in that kitchen for a very long time.
It's dark when I go and get the letter.
It's in the drawer of the nightstand, in with the tin of buttons and the reading glasses I don't need yet. I've read it forty times. I know it by heart. I take it out anyway, because there's a difference between knowing a thing and looking at it.
You have spent twenty-four years believing you did something wrong. You did nothing.
You are not hard to love, my petit chat. You were the easiest thing I ever did.
And then, near the bottom, in that hard upright hand of hers — a line I have skated straight past every single time.
So cook in my kitchen. Sleep in my house. And stop leaving before people can leave you.
I sit down on the edge of a bed I've been sleeping in alone for three days, in a house a dead woman gave me, and I read it again.
Stop leaving before people can leave you.
She knew.
She knew. She watched me do it at twelve years old in the back of my mother's car, and she knew I'd do it again the first time anybody offered me something worth keeping.
And she was dying — she had months, and a farm to arrange, and two granddaughters to gamble on — and she still sat down and took the time to write me the one sentence I would need on the exact night I'd need it.
And I have had it in a drawer for three days.
I've been so busy waiting for Iris to leave me that I never noticed.
I'm the one who left.
I've been gone a week.
I get up.
I don't shower. I don't rehearse. I don't cook anything, which for me is very nearly a religious experience.
I go down the hall. The fourth board creaks. The seventh one creaks.
I stand outside her door with my grandmother's letter crushed in my fist and my heart going like a bird in a box.
Then I knock.