Chapter 17
Emma came back with two takeout containers from a Cuban place on Simonton that Marisol had recommended.
Ropa vieja, yellow rice, sweet plantains and black beans filled the paper bag, along with two small cups of flan she'd bought because the woman behind the counter had held them up and Emma hadn't been able to say no.
Jake was sitting on the porch step when she came through the gate. He'd washed the drill dust from his hands and changed his shirt, and when he saw the bag tucked beneath her arm, he stood.
“You brought dinner.”
“Don't get excited. I didn't cook it.”
“From where?”
“A place on Simonton that Marisol swore by.”
“Was she right?”
“I haven't tried it yet.”
“Then we'll find out together.”
Jake pulled a chair out from the small table on the porch.
“What would you like to drink?”
“Water's fine.”
He went inside and returned with two bottles. Emma unpacked the containers while he sat across from her.
The light had softened over the yard, and a breeze moved through the palm at the corner of the porch. Emma handed Jake a fork and napkin, and for a while they ate without talking much.
The ropa vieja was better than she'd expected, and the plantains were even better.
“These beans have been on a stove since Thursday,” Jake said.
“Is that a complaint?”
“It's the opposite. Nobody's beans are any good on the first day. There's probably a woman in that kitchen who started these before she knew either one of us existed.”
Emma laughed with a bite of plantain still in her mouth and covered it with one hand.
“The posts are all up,” she said when she'd swallowed.
Jake nodded. “Since about five. I'm glad that part's over.”
“That was fast.”
“They're the easy part. The easy part always looks like progress.” He tipped his fork toward the back corner of the yard. “The top is what takes time. Crossbeams, then the slats, and everyone has to sit right or the whole thing looks drunk from the porch.”
“How long before it's done?”
“Couple of days. Longer if people keep interrupting me with dinner.”
“I'll stop.”
Jake smiled. “I'm kidding.”
“I know.”
Emma smiled too and realized how comfortable she felt sitting there with him.
It had been a long time since she'd eaten dinner with someone without checking her phone or thinking about what she needed to do next.
Priya had dragged her to a restaurant in Wicker Park months ago.
Emma had spent half the meal answering a client's messages and couldn't remember now what she'd ordered.
She had a feeling she'd remember this dinner.
They finished most of the food and split one of the flans. Jake carried the empty containers into the kitchen and came back with the second flan still in the bag.
“That was excellent. Thank you.”
“You're welcome. It was nice not eating alone.”
Jake looked at her.
“What?”
“You eat alone in Chicago?”
Emma smiled. “Most of the time.”
“In a city with almost three million people?”
“Apparently it's possible.”
“No boyfriend?”
“Not now. There was someone, but it didn't last.”
Jake nodded.
Emma appreciated that he didn't immediately ask who the man had been or what had happened.
She wasn't ready to explain that relationship, mostly because she wasn't sure she understood it herself anymore.
At the time, she'd blamed the end of it on two people who wanted different things.
Looking back, she wondered how much of it had been because work had always come first and she'd expected whoever loved her to understand.
She didn't want to think about that tonight.
The sky beyond the porch had deepened to darker blue, and the sounds from the neighborhood seemed quieter than they had a few minutes earlier.
Jake turned his water bottle between his hands and looked serious.
“Emma. I want to tell you something.”
“All right.”
“You didn't ask, but I want to tell you anyway. You're going to know eventually, and I'd rather you hear it from me.”
“Jake, you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to.”
“I know.”
He looked out at the garden, and it was a minute before he began.
“Her name was Nora. She was twenty-nine and taught kindergarten at a public school in Little Havana. We were engaged. We'd been engaged eighteen months and were supposed to get married that October.”
He paused.
“We'd put down a deposit on a little house in Coral Gables. It had a lemon tree in the backyard and a porch her mother would have loved. Nora had gone to see it twice before we signed anything because she wanted to make sure the afternoon light came through the kitchen windows. She was thoughtful that way.”
Emma could picture a woman she'd never seen standing in an empty kitchen and watching the light.
“She loved it,” Jake said.
Emma waited.
“Nora was driving to school one Wednesday morning. It was seven-forty. A truck crossed the median on the Palmetto Expressway.”
His voice remained steady, but Emma could see what it cost him to keep it that way.
“I was at work. I hadn't been on an ambulance in years. I'd gone into medical device development and was working for a small company in Miami. That morning I was in a meeting about a battery casing when my phone rang. It was Jackson Memorial.”
Jake looked down at the bottle in his hands.
“A woman said, ‘Mr. Kelleher, we have your fiancé here. You should come now. Nora must have been able to tell them to call me. I was her emergency contact.”
Emma's chest tightened.
“I drove carefully. I remember that more clearly than almost anything else.
I didn't speed. I stopped at every light.
I called two of her cousins from the car and left messages.
I called her mother in Seattle, but I hung up when her voicemail answered because I couldn't think of anything I could say that wouldn't scare her.”
He took a breath.
“When I got to the hospital, a woman at the intake desk took me into a small room and told me Nora was gone. She said it kindly. She said it the way I'd said it to families when I was a paramedic.”
Jake looked toward the yard.
“I remember sitting there thinking she was very good at her job.”
Emma reached across the space between them and put her hand on his knee.
Jake didn't look down at it, but he didn't move away.
“I called Nora's mother again from the hospital.
Her name is Nancy. Nora's father hadn't been around for years, so it was really just the two of them.
I told Nancy what had happened while I was standing in a hallway at Jackson Memorial.
She didn't say much. She said she'd be on the first flight in the morning and asked if I'd pick her up.”
“I told her I would.”
Emma left her hand where it was.
“I picked her up at Miami International the next day. I was still wearing the shirt I'd put on the morning before. Nancy walked up to me at baggage claim and didn't hug me. She didn't cry either. I drove her to the medical examiner's office, and we identified Nora together.”
Emma swallowed.
“Nancy did most of it. She was her mother. She'd held Nora as a baby. It felt like she had the right to be the one who looked at her.”
The last of the light had disappeared from the yard.
“I left the company within a month. The two doctors who owned it tried to get me to take a sabbatical instead, so I did.
I just never went back. I sold my truck because I couldn't stand looking at it. I emptied the apartment Nora and I had shared. I gave Nancy the things she wanted and donated almost everything else.”
Jake looked toward the cottage.
“I put what I had left in a duffel bag and drove south. That was three years ago in July.”
“You signed the lease a week later.”
He nodded.
“I met Arthur in a coffee shop on Duval. I didn't ask enough questions about the paperwork because I wasn't in any condition to ask questions about anything. I signed the lease, paid the first month and moved into a cottage on a lane I'd never heard of.”
A faint smile touched his face.
“Then I started pulling weeds out of a lily bed.”
Emma thought about Gloria's lilies and the years Jake had spent taking care of them without knowing whose hands had planted them.
He was quiet for a while before he spoke again.
“There's something else.”
Emma waited.
“Six months after Nora died, Nancy sent me a check. It came here, to this address.”
“For what?”
“Life insurance. Nora had a policy through the school system, and Nancy was the beneficiary. She sent me a substantial part of it.”
“Why?”
“She wrote that she wasn't going to keep money that came from Nora dying, but she couldn't bring herself to spend it either. She said that as far as she was concerned, it was mine to do with what I wanted.”
Jake's voice grew quieter.
“I cashed the check.”
Emma looked at him.
“I put it in an account, and I haven't touched a dollar of it in three years. I've never told anyone about it.”
“Not even Nancy?”
“She knows I got it and that it was cashed. She doesn't know what I did with it.”
He rubbed one hand over the back of his neck.
“I've felt guilty about taking that money since the day I deposited it. I didn't know how to send it back to a woman who had buried her only child. I couldn’t press the point and tell her she had to keep money just because I didn't want it either.”
Emma's hand tightened slightly on his knee.
“Maybe you took it because she needed you to.”
Jake looked at her.
“I don't know.”
“She sent it to you for a reason and at that time you were in no condition to argue with her. It makes sense.”
He looked back toward the garden.
“I used to think I'd eventually figure out what to do with it. Three years later, it's still sitting there.”
“You don't have to decide tonight.”
“No.”
They were quiet again.
After a while, Jake said, “I haven't been able to say Nora's name out loud for a long time without it hurting so much.”
Emma looked at him.
“It still hurts. But tonight it was different. I don't know what to do with that.”
“You don't have to know what to do with that either.”
Jake nodded.
Emma understood what he had trusted her with, and she wasn't going to make him explain any more of it.
She didn’t know what else to say so she said, “I’m so sorry, Jake.”
He nodded but didn’t look at her.
She also wasn't going to cry. The tears were there, but she knew if she let them come, Jake would turn his attention to comforting her. He'd spent enough years taking care of what everyone else needed. Tonight she could sit beside him and let him be the one who didn't have to hold somebody else up.
So Emma stayed where she was with her hand resting on his knee.
Minutes passed.
Then Jake looked toward the paper bag on the table.
“There's a flan left.”
Emma smiled.
“I know.”
“I'm not going to eat it tonight.”
“Neither am I.”
“Then it keeps.”
They both smiled, and the ordinary little question of what to do with the second flan gave them somewhere easier to focus on.
Eventually Emma took her hand from his knee.
She didn't want to. That surprised her less than it would have a few days ago.
Sitting beside Jake after everything he'd told her, Emma was aware of him in a way she hadn't allowed herself to be before. She wanted to move closer. She wanted to put her arms around him, and if she did that, she wasn't sure she would stop there.
Tonight wasn't the night for any of it.
Nora had been part of this evening. Emma didn't want Jake's first time telling her about the woman he'd planned to marry to end with him kissing someone else on the porch.
She could wait.
The realization made her heart beat a little faster because waiting meant she had finally admitted there was something she wanted.
When it was time to leave, Jake walked her to the gate.
Emma turned to him.
“Thank you for telling me about Nora.”
“Thank you for dinner.”
“You're welcome.”
He looked into her eyes. “And for listening.”
Emma wondered if he was going to kiss her. Part of her wanted him to. A larger part didn't want it to happen tonight.
Jake seemed to understand. He reached for her hand instead and held it.
“Drive carefully.”
“I will.”
He let go.
Emma got into the rental car and drove back to Winslow's.
By the time she reached the bungalow, she had held herself together long enough.
She sat on the patio in the dark and thought about Nora, a kindergarten teacher who had wanted a house with a lemon tree and afternoon light in the kitchen.
She thought about Nancy in Seattle writing a check she couldn't bear to keep.
And finally, Jake putting the money into an account because he hadn't known how to give it back.
There was more Emma wanted to know, but she wouldn't ask. Jake had given her what he was ready to give, and the rest belonged to him.
She cried a little for all three of them. Then she thought about the moment at the gate when Jake had taken her hand. Emma had wanted him to kiss her. There was no point pretending otherwise.
She went inside, changed for bed and lay awake for a long time thinking about the man who lived in her grandmother's cottage and the woman he'd loved before Emma ever knew his name.
When she finally fell asleep, she slept better than she had in a very long time.