21. Aster
— ? —
Aster
The papers are on the kitchen island when I come down.
I didn’t sleep. I lay in our bed with her back against my chest and her breathing slow and even, and I listened to the house, and at some point near dawn she got up and I let her go without asking, because I’d told her the decision was hers and the least I could do was not follow her down a staircase to watch her make it.
She’s standing at the island in my Stanford shirt with a mug of coffee in one hand and the envelope in front of her, and she doesn’t look up when I come in.
“You said you’d make my coffee,” she says.
“You beat me to it.”
“I’ve been up since five.” She turns the mug in her hand. “I read them. Properly, this time. I didn’t, in Vermont. I signed where the woman pointed and I got on with my day.”
I stand on the other side of the island. There is a granite countertop between me and my wife and a piece of paper with both our names on it, and I’ve never in my life wanted to be on the other side of anything more.
“There’s a paragraph about the house,” she says. “About who gets it. I remember thinking, in that office, that I didn’t want it. That I’d never wanted it. That I’d picked out every lamp in it for a man who was never going to sit under one.”
“Flora.”
“And there’s a paragraph about the music. The songs. Who they belong to.” She finally looks at me. “I remember reading that one and thinking, he can keep those. They were never mine anyway.”
“They were always yours.”
“I know that now.” She sets the mug down. “I found the notebook.”
Then she picks up the papers and tears them in half.
She does it slowly, along the fold, the way you’d tear a page out of a book you were keeping, and then she puts the two halves together and tears them again, and puts the four pieces on the island in a neat stack and squares the edges with her fingers.
“I’ll call the attorney Monday and tell her to stop it,” she says. “That’s the last thing I’m doing for you. I’ve done the leaving and I’ve done the coming back and now I’ve done this. The rest is yours. Every single day of it.”
I come around the island.
I don’t rush it. I’ve rushed everything with her for four years, the diner and the ring and the house and the decisions, and I walk around a kitchen island like a man who has finally understood that the whole point is to arrive.
She watches me come. When I get there I put my hands on either side of her face and she lets me, and her eyes are wet and steady and she doesn’t look away.
“I’m going to get it wrong,” I say. “Not this. Not her. But I’m going to take a call I shouldn’t take and I’m going to say something stupid about a schedule and you’re going to have to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you.”
“And I’m going to hear it. The first time. Not the third time across a table.”
“Prove it.”
“Every day.”
I kiss her. It isn’t the cabin and it isn’t the night before I left, when I was trying to convince her of something with my mouth. This one is slow and it asks. She answers it with her hands in my shirt.
We don’t make it out of the kitchen for a while.
I lift her onto the island next to the torn papers and she laughs against my mouth, and then she isn’t laughing, because I’ve got the shirt up over her head and my hands on her and she’s saying my name in the voice she uses when she’s stopped thinking.
I get on my knees on the kitchen floor. That’s where it starts.
My wife on the counter of the house she furnished for a ghost, her heels on my shoulders, my mouth on her while the morning comes in through windows she chose, and I take my time about it because time is the thing I owe her and I’m going to pay it in every currency I’ve got.
She comes with her hand in my hair and the other hand flat on the granite, and I stay where I am until she pulls me up.
“Bed,” she says.
“We have a bed?”
“We have a bed. Somebody picked it out. He should try it.”
We use the stairs. We don’t use them well.
She stops on the landing and turns around and I take her there with her back against the wall and her legs around me, fast and hard and not at all what I’d planned, and she bites my shoulder through my shirt when she comes and I can’t hold on after that.
Then the bed, finally, the real one, slow and face to face with the lights on and every curtain open, and I watch her the whole time and I don’t say anything, because I said the list in her mother’s kitchen and there’s nothing to add to it, and she watches me back, and when it’s over she doesn’t turn away.
Afterward she lies across my chest with her hair everywhere, and the house is very quiet, and for the first time since I bought it the quiet doesn’t feel like an accusation.
“I forgive you,” she says.
I go completely still.
“Flora.”
“I’ve been carrying it around for weeks trying to work out when I’d know. Whether there’d be a moment.” She props herself up so she can see my face. “There wasn’t. It wasn’t last night, either. It wasn’t the party and it wasn’t the shed and it wasn’t any single thing you did.”
“Then what was it?”
“It was all of it. Every day since Vermont.” Her voice isn’t steady and she lets it not be.
“You got up every morning in a cabin across the yard from a woman who wouldn’t speak to you, and you did the work, and you didn’t ask me for anything.
For a whole week you never once said the word forgive.
” She puts her palm flat on my chest. “And then you stood in my mother’s kitchen and told me what you did, all of it, in order, and you didn’t ask for anything then either.
That’s what did it. Last night was just the last day of it. ”
My eyes are wet. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t. That’s what makes it forgiveness instead of exhaustion.” She leans down and kisses me. “I’m not going to keep it in a drawer to take out during arguments. It’s done. It happened, and it was terrible, and I’m putting it down.”
“I don’t deserve that.”
“No,” she agrees. “But you’ve stopped arguing about what you deserve and started just showing up, and that turns out to be the only thing I ever actually wanted.”
I pull her back down against me and hold on hard enough that she has to turn her face to breathe, and neither of us says anything for a long time.
Mara comes by at four.
She doesn’t call first, which is how I know Flora texted her, and she walks into the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a face I recognize from the wings of a wedding three years ago, when she pulled me aside during the photographs and told me she’d put me in the ground if I made her friend cry. I laughed at the time. She didn’t.
“You look like you’ve been sleeping on a closet floor,” she tells me.
“Closer than you’d think.”
“Good.” She puts the wine on the island next to the torn papers, looks at them, looks at Flora, and something in her shoulders comes down an inch. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It is,” Flora says.
“You tore them.”
“I tore them.”
Mara nods slowly. Then she turns to me, and the inch goes right back up.
“I want to say something and I want you to let me finish,” she says.
“I called her every day for a year. Not the last month. The whole year. I called her on your anniversary at half past eight because I knew where you weren’t, which was at the table.
I sat at her birthday table and watched you put your jacket on.
I was on the phone with her in her car outside the foster place when she handed off that dog.
She texted me at one in the morning after your launch party, from your bed, while you were down the hall in your studio.
” She lets that one land. “She was twenty feet from her husband and she reached for me. I’d like you to remember that. ”
“I remember.”
“You don’t. You weren’t there. That’s the point.
” She’s not shouting. Mara doesn’t shout.
“She’s my best friend and I watched her get smaller for a year and I could not make it stop because it wasn’t me doing it.
So I need you to understand that if she’s tearing up paper today, that’s hers.
That’s not yours. You didn’t earn a single square of that. She decided.”
“I know.”
“Say it properly.”
I look at her. She’s a foot shorter than me and she has never once in four years been afraid of me, and I’ve always liked her for it, and I’ve never once until this moment understood what it cost her.
“She decided,” I say. “I didn’t earn it. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to have earned it after the fact, and I know that’s backwards, and I’m doing it anyway.”
Mara holds my eyes for a long second. Then she picks up the wine.
“Fine,” she says. “Get three glasses. And you’re driving her home from things now. All of them. Even the ones you’re not going to.”
“Especially those,” Flora says, and she’s smiling, and Mara looks at her and I watch a year go out of my wife’s best friend’s face.
We drink the wine in the kitchen with the torn papers still on the island because nobody wants to be the one to move them.
Mara tells a story about a man at the shelter fundraiser who tried to adopt a cat as a tax write-off, and Flora laughs so hard she has to put her glass down, and I sit at my own island in my own house and watch two women who love each other and understand that I’m being allowed to be in the room, and that being allowed is the whole gift.
Later, when she’s asleep, I lie there and listen to her breathe and think about the diner.
Not the first night. The second one, when I came back and she looked up from the register and rolled her eyes and said oh, it’s you, and poured me a coffee I hadn’t asked for.
That’s the moment. Not the ring or the wedding or any of the songs.
A woman deciding that a man was going to keep turning up, and pouring the coffee anyway.
My phone is on the nightstand. Dylan.
You told me to hold the date and not ask why. I’ve held it. I’m asking why.
I look at Flora, asleep on my chest in a house that’s finally got two people in it.
Book it, I type. And don’t tell her.