19. Arielle
ARIELLE
Claire calls me on a Wednesday morning in the last week of February and asks, in a careful voice that signals she’s taking a small professional risk, whether I’d like to have lunch.
"Not a business lunch, Arielle. Not an integration lunch. A lunch lunch. The kind where my brother is not on the calendar invitation and where I am not, technically, allowed to bring a binder. Are you available Friday?"
"I'm seven months pregnant, Claire. I am available every Friday for the rest of my life if there is a chair involved."
"There is a chair. There are also several chairs, in case one of them does not work out for you. I will pick a place with chairs and a back booth and a menu that has something other than oysters on it. Twelve-thirty?"
She picks a French place on Wells with the kind of natural light that makes everyone look five years younger and a waiter who calls her by her first name.
She is in a black turtleneck and a long camel coat she does not take off, and when I slide into the booth across from her she pushes a small glass of sparkling water with a slice of orange in it across the table at me without explaining how she knew, which is its own kind of warning.
"Bianca told you," I say.
"Bianca and I have an arrangement. I do not call it a friendship out loud because I do not want to alarm either of you. But yes. She told me about the orange."
"What else has she told you about?"
"Nothing I would not have figured out myself given another month. Don't be paranoid. I asked you to lunch because I like you, Arielle, and because I have not had a sister-shaped person in my life for thirty-four years and I am, at my age, no longer above admitting that out loud over salad."
It is the most generous thing anyone in Nolan's family has said to me in any room I have shared with them, and Claire does not stay on it.
She moves us through the menu in the brisk way she moves a board through an agenda, asks me three questions about the cantilever I do not expect her to know about, tells me a story about her own pregnancy at thirty-one that makes me laugh into my water glass, and only at the end, while the waiter is putting down the check she has already paid, does she look at me steadily across the table.
“Two things,” she says. “First: Nash loves you. Not because he told me to say it — he’d probably seize if he knew I was bringing it up over lunch on a Wednesday.
I’m saying it because you already know, and eventually you’ll have to choose what to do with that knowledge.
Better you choose knowing the rest of us see it as clearly as you do.
Two. If you ever need to leave the room he is in and you do not want to explain why, you can call me, and I will call you back inside of ten minutes, and I will not ask you a single question I have not earned the right to ask.
That offer is good for the rest of your life. Don't lose my number."
"Claire."
"Don't say anything. Eat your dessert. I ordered the chocolate thing for you because Bianca said you would pretend you didn't want it."
I eat the chocolate thing.
Bianca is at my apartment that night because she has been at my apartment every Wednesday night for two months on what she calls Black Girl Mandatory Check-In and what I call Bianca will not let me hide.
She is on my couch with her boots off and a bowl of popcorn on her lap, in a turtleneck the color of merlot, and the second I come in from the kitchen with the kettle in my hand she points at me with a kernel.
"You had lunch with Claire Ashford."
"Bee."
"Don't Bee me. You had lunch with Claire Ashford, and you came back here with that face. Sit down. Put the kettle down. We are going to have the talk I have been politely not having for six weeks."
I sit. I put the kettle down.
“Ari.” She turns the popcorn bowl in her lap, slow.
“I love that you’re happy. I want that on the record, because what I’m about to say is going to sound like the opposite, and I don’t want you misfiling it.
I love that you laugh on the phone now. I love that you eat dinner with someone.
I love that there’s a man who knows your cracker brand by heart and texts me when you skip breakfast. These are good developments in the life of my favorite person in the world. ”
"But."
“But you’re in his apartment four nights out of seven, Ari.
You drive a car his driver repositions for you.
You eat food his housekeeper stocks. The doctor delivering your baby works in a hospital his foundation helped build.
The reporter who was ready to take you apart in Crain’s somehow ended up covering real estate in Detroit.
The senior partner at Holcomb’s firm who went after you on that project somehow took a board seat in Cleveland three weeks after you shut down his motion.
I’ve been keeping a list, baby — because that’s the kind of cousin I am.
And the list is long. Suspiciously long. ”
"Bianca."
"I am not saying he is doing it. I am saying things are happening around him in a pattern, and the pattern has your name on every page, and you are seven months pregnant and tired and in love and not in a position to be the person who notices the pattern, so I am noticing it for you, because that is the deal we made when we were nine. "
"I am not in love."
"Ari, please."
"I am — I am something, Bianca. I do not know what to call it yet. I am not going to call it the L word in a sweatshirt on my own couch on a Wednesday night before I have called it that out loud to him."
"That's fair."
“You’ll notice it regardless.”
“So will I.”
I sleep at Nolan's on Thursday because we have a thirty-week appointment Friday morning, and because he asked, and because I have stopped pretending I do not prefer the bed at his place to the bed at mine.
He is in the kitchen when I come in, in soft pants and a worn gray T-shirt, putting something into a small saucepan that smells like ginger.
"I made you the soup," he says, before I have said hello. "The one with the lemongrass. Bianca said you had a hard afternoon and that you would eat soup but not pasta, and I did not feel like guessing wrong tonight."
"You made it."
"I made it. I had Marisol walk me through it on the phone.
She thinks I am a disaster in the kitchen, and she is correct, but I followed her instructions.
I also bought the bread you like from the place on Damen.
Not the place on Halsted. The other one.
The one where the man behind the counter calls you baby.
Don't make a face at me. I have been listening. "
"I never told you which bakery."
"You told Bianca. Bianca told me. I have not, contrary to current rumor, broken into your phone."
He sets the bowl in front of me and slides into the chair across from mine and does not eat.
He watches me eat. He has been doing this lately, watching me eat the way other men watch sports, and I have stopped telling him it is unsettling because the truth is it is not unsettling, it is the most cared-for I have ever felt at a kitchen counter, and I do not want him to stop.
"You okay tonight, Arielle?"
"I had lunch with your sister."
"I heard. She called me from her car at one-thirty to tell me to mind my own business about it."
"She told me you love me."
He sets his water glass down. He does not pretend to be surprised, which I appreciate, because pretending to be surprised would be the first lie he has told me in two weeks, and we have a good run going.
"Did she?"
"She did."
"And how did you take it?"
"I had the chocolate thing."
"That's not an answer."
“It’s the only answer I’ve got tonight, Nolan. I’m thirty weeks pregnant, exhausted, and your sister made me cry into a sparkling water at lunch. I’m not finishing this thought on an empty kitchen counter at nine p.m.”
"Then don't. Eat the soup."
I eat the soup. He eats half a piece of bread out of the basket and watches the snow do its quiet thing on the balcony rail. He has not said it back. He has not said anything at all. He is, I realize, waiting, and the waiting is somehow worse than if he had pushed.
I open my mouth at one point and I have the words almost arranged in the order they want to come out — I think I love you too, Nolan, I think I have for a while now — and I look at him, and his face is so open, so unguarded, so already-mine, that the words fold up in my mouth like a piece of paper and slide back down my throat.
I cannot say it tonight. Not yet. Not until I know what the chocolate thing in Claire's voice was, and what the pattern in Bianca's notebook is, and what Holcomb's firm did with the seat in Cleveland.
I take my laptop into the study after dinner and tell him I need to redline a structural memo before the appointment in the morning, and he kisses the top of my head and tells me he will be in bed when I am done, and he leaves me the lamp.
I open the city's procurement portal. I pull up the south parcel approvals from the last six weeks.
I am looking for the variance reissue timeline, which by my calendar should have taken thirty days minimum and which, by the portal, took eleven.
I scroll down to Holcomb's motion. The motion came off the docket at 3:47 a.m. on a Tuesday.
I scroll down to Donnelly's Crain's byline.
Three weeks ago, on the same Tuesday, at 4:02 a.m., she was reassigned to the Detroit real estate desk.
I sit at his desk with my hand flat against my stomach and the lamp making a small warm circle on his ledger, and I do not call him into the room.
I just keep scrolling.