22. Izzy #2
“Manny, I could never forget about you.” Wilson hugs him back just as hard. “This is Izzy. My wife.”
“Your wife?” Manny turns to me with his eyebrows raised. “This is the Izzy? The famous Izzy?”
“I didn’t know I was famous.”
“Famous?” Manny laughs and gestures at the specials board behind the counter. “Lady, you’ve got a sandwich.”
I look at the board. There, in faded chalk between the Reuben and the Italian combo, is a sandwich called THE IZZY. Turkey, mustard, extra pickles, no tomato.
“Wilson.” I turn to stare at him. “What is this?”
“You used to buy my lunch almost every day that first year.” He’s rubbing the back of his neck and not quite meeting my eyes. “Manny thought you were my boss because you always paid.”
“I thought she was the boss!” Manny is delighted. “She’d come in here with her wallet out and order for both of them, and this one would just stand there looking at her like she hung the moon.”
“I did not look at her like that.”
“You absolutely looked at her like that.” Manny points at him. “Every single time. I remember.”
I’m not sure I can speak yet, so I just look at the board with my sandwich on it, my order from a decade ago preserved in chalk, a little piece of us that never left this place.
“Wilson, the office moved uptown years ago.” I finally find my voice. “How is this still here?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and when I look at him his ears have gone red.
“I kept coming back.” He says it quietly, the way you admit to a crime. “After the office moved. For about three years, actually. It was forty minutes each way on the subway, but I’d come down here for lunch a couple times a week anyway.”
“You never told me that.”
“I didn’t really know how to explain it.” He shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets. “This place reminded me of when everything was simple and I was just some kid trying to make it, and you believed in me before anyone else did. Coming here felt like visiting that version of us.”
“Forty minutes each way, Wilson.”
“The sandwich is really good.” He’s smiling now, that crooked smile I fell in love with in this neighborhood back when neither of us had anything. “And Manny always asked about you.”
“Every time!” Manny chimes in from behind the counter. “Every time he came in, I’d say, where’s the boss today? And he’d get this look on his face and say she’s busy, but she says hello.”
“I never knew you said hello for me.”
“I said a lot of things for you that you never knew about.” Wilson reaches out and takes my hand. “I was bad at saying them to your face. I’m working on that.”
Manny is already making two sandwiches without being asked.
I stand there in this tiny deli on Orchard Street with my name on the specials board and my husband’s hand in mine.
I think about all the lunches I bought him back when we had nothing. All the times I handed over a few dollars I couldn’t really spare because I wanted him fed more than I wanted anything for myself.
He came back here for three years after he didn’t have to. Forty minutes each way. I never knew.
“Two Izzys, on the house.” Manny slides the sandwiches across the counter with a wink. “For the boss and her husband.”
***
Wilson comes home at four in the afternoon with his tie already off and stuffed in his pocket.
I’m at the kitchen table in the narrow brownstone he’s been renting in Cobble Hill since he put the penthouse on the market, eating cold pasta straight out of the pot, because the studio ran out of coffee and I ran out of excuses to stay there.
He sits down across from me, takes my fork out of my hand, eats a bite, and hands it back like that’s a completely normal thing to do.
“Well?” I look at him. “Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?”
“Isaac’s taking over and I’m stepping back. I’ll only come in three days a week, home by five.” He says it like he’s telling me it might rain later. “If anyone has a problem with that they can figure it out without me.”
I put the fork down and stare at him.
“Wilson, are you sure about this?” I reach for his hand across the table. “You built all of that from nothing. I don’t want you to give it up because of me.”
“I’m not giving it up, Izzy. I’m just done letting it run my life.” He squeezes my fingers. “Isaac tried to talk me into four days. I told him the fourth day belongs to you, and if he had a problem with that he could take it up with your mother.”
I laugh but I’m still not convinced.
“Won’t you get bored?”
“I’m never bored when I’m with you.” He pulls my hand up and kisses my knuckles.
“And what’s the point of building all of this if I can’t actually live my life?
If I can’t be home for dinner, if I can’t wake up next to you without running out the door, if I can’t just sit here and steal your cold pasta on a Wednesday afternoon? ”
I look at him for a long moment, waiting for him to look away or blink or do any of the things he used to do when he was saying what I wanted to hear. He doesn’t. He just looks right back at me.
“You’re really doing this.”
“I’m really doing it.” He stands up and comes around the table, pulling me up out of my chair. “I should have done it years ago. I was just too stubborn to see what actually mattered.”
Back in October he thought he’d lost everything. Now he’s giving it away on purpose, piece by piece, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look this light. Like someone finally took a weight off his shoulders that he didn’t even know he was carrying.
“So what are you going to do with all this free time?” I wrap my arms around his neck and grin up at him.
“I don’t know. Learn to make pasta, maybe. Your grandmother’s. Without murdering the dough this time.”
“That’s very ambitious for a man who lost a fight with a caulk gun.”
“You’re absolutely a gremlin, you know that? Eating it cold out of the pot like that.” He pulls me closer and rests his forehead against mine. “You’re my gremlin though. And I’m going to spend a lot more time with you from now on, so you’d better get used to it.”
“I think I can handle that.” I’m smiling so hard my face hurts. “I think I’d really like that, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I pull him down into a kiss. “Welcome home, Wilson.”
***
The call comes on a Monday afternoon when I’m not expecting anything to interrupt me.
I’m in my studio stretching canvas for Thursday’s opening, hands tacky with rabbit skin glue, hair escaping from my bun and sticking to my face. Every time I push a strand back I get more glue in my hair, and I’ve just accepted I’m going to have to cut it out later.
My first show. Twelve pieces in a converted garage in Bushwick, run by a woman who stood in my hallway back in December and refused to leave until I said yes.
Four months ago I wasn’t painting at all. Four months ago I had divorce papers in my bag and I was crying in my mother’s kitchen and wondering if I’d ever feel like myself again.
Now there’s a waitlist for my opening, which sounds insane until you remember the entire internet watched my marriage fall apart and get put back together in real time.
Half of them are coming for the paintings.
The other half are coming to see the woman who took him back.
I’ve stopped checking my email because it’s starting to freak me the fuck out.
My phone buzzes with a number I don’t recognize.
I almost let it go to voicemail. I grab it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Linda from Mr. Carter’s office, I’m calling to confirm the cancellation on the Singapore travel arrangements.” Papers shuffle in the background. “I have you down as the contact for the car service?”
“Linda.” I almost laugh. “It’s me.”
There’s a long pause.
“Izzy.” She sounds mortified. “Oh my God. I pulled the wrong contact from his phone. You’re right under the car company. This is really embarrassing.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.” I wipe my hands on my jeans, not that it helps. “But what cancellation?”
“They needed him in Singapore this week. Tomorrow through Saturday.” She pauses. “But he canceled everything. Flights, hotel, all of it.”
My heart stops for a second.
“He canceled a work trip?”
“He said your gallery show was more important.” Her voice goes soft, like she’s telling me a secret. “He said Singapore has taken enough from you, and if they needed someone there that badly, it wasn’t going to be him.”
I sink onto my work stool.
“He didn’t tell me any of this.”
“I assumed you knew. He didn’t even hesitate.” She’s quiet for a second. “Izzy, I’ve been answering his phone for seven years. Every time they called, he got on the plane. Every single time, no matter what was happening at home.”
She takes a breath.
“Until today.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. My throat is too tight.
“Thank you for telling me, Linda.”
“Of course.” I can hear her smiling through the phone. “And for what it’s worth, he’s different now. Happier. Whatever you two are doing, it’s working.”
I hang up and just sit there, staring at the canvas I was stretching.
He canceled a work trip. To Singapore.
The city he ran to after my father died instead of staying with me.
The city he disappeared to on our sixth anniversary, when the peonies showed up the next morning with a card in somebody else’s handwriting.
The city that took him away from me over and over again while I told myself it was temporary, it would get better.
He said no.
For a little gallery show in Bushwick that most people have never heard of. For me.
I think about the man who used to leave in the middle of dinner when his phone rang. The man who missed my birthday and our anniversary more times than I want to count and always had an excuse, always promised he’d make it up to me later.
That man would never have canceled this trip.
But that man doesn’t exist anymore. Wilson killed him somewhere between the rooftop and the orchard and all those Tuesday nights when he showed up even though no one was watching.
I grab my jacket off the hook and head for his place with the glue still tacky on my fingers.
***