Chapter 11
11
It was overcast the next day, with a steady drizzle threatening to turn to snow. Tom was fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep. Even dousing his room in Febreze had failed to completely cover the musty odor that pervaded the inn, but it was his urgent, itchy sense of things left undone that had kept him up.
His only real sense of time was now and later , and he’d learned that later usually meant never , so when something absolutely had to be done, he wanted to do it now . He wanted to finish having it out with Rosie now , tease out everything else he’d done wrong now , start fixing things now .
I stopped inviting you to come out with me because you always had to work and I felt like I was rubbing it in your face that I got to have a social life. Bad call?
I know you were dating that douchebag Brent from our geology seminar before our divorce was finalized because when you dumped him he fucking texted me about it like he wanted to form a sad little club. Nevertheless, I forgive you, because you apparently dumped him in a Duane Reade.
In the future, if you are overworked and unhappy and I have, for example, just watched you shred an entire rotisserie chicken with your bare hands like it said something nasty about your mother, would you prefer that I offer to have vigorous, life-affirming sex with you amid the wreckage of its carcass instead of slinking out the door so that you can finish your meal-planning in peace? It’s no trouble.
His body felt driven like a motor, and it took all his restraint to channel that into productive work at the inn rather than lurk around the pink cottage he’d rather be in. Rosie didn’t appear until midmorning, wearing a long, puffy black parka over a red knit dress, which made her look like a little round songbird. She looked calmer this morning, back in order.
“I have really appalling news,” she said, shuffling her feet until she stood right in front of him, peering up through curling eyelashes. “I slept and ate, and now I feel better.” Tom let out a relieved breath because he hadn’t been sure what her temperature on him was going to be that morning. Her little rosebud mouth tilted up, and she gathered his hands loosely in hers. He relaxed at her touch like he’d shed the weight of entire continents.
“I hate it when that happens,” Tom deadpanned, squeezing her hands back.
Her eyes flicked up toward his face and away. And it was sweet, the way she did that, but it tore his heart in two directions. He wanted to kiss the hesitation off her mouth.
“How’s the inn this morning?” she asked, looking around the foyer.
“Um, I’ve been working on the bee situation,” he said, not sure if she was checking on his progress. He’d learned that his options for dealing with the bees were, one, allowing an exterminator to pump the walls full of a poison gas that had also been employed in several Geneva convention violations or, two, contracting with a painfully earnest white woman whose Instagram portrayed her scooping bees out of car trunks with her bare hands to a soundtrack of early Taylor Swift anthems. Neither could commit to an arrival window narrower than eight a.m. to eight p.m. the next day.
Rosie frowned in concern, eyes tracking the multiple problems visible even in this room, which had no storm damage. Her shoulders bunched.
“Tom, I—I think I made some unfair assumptions about you. Not just yesterday, but ten years ago. I am not at my best when I’m sorting through a giant mess like this. I become part of the mess.” She hesitated again. “Maybe we should hold off on clearing the air until we’re back in New York and can go to—”
“Marital counseling?” Tom suggested, perking up.
Her eyes rounded at him. “—dinner,” she finished, voice fainter.
“Oh.” He supposed dinner would be better than nothing. And it would be good to give Rosie a glimpse of his normal, Boyd-free, Rosie-friendly life at home, since he wanted to coax her back into it. “But what would you do?”
She sighed. “I’d stay. I would have come out here even if you couldn’t. I know it looks terrible now, but—okay. Just after our divorce was finalized, I was…pretty low. It was right before the holidays. Max had me come out here for three weeks with my dirtbag teenage brothers and a couple of my younger cousins. And we did a big Christmas. You know, the whole twelve days, big white elephant party for her friends, homemade fruitcakes and new stockings for the babies, and I—I felt better. Like even if my life wasn’t going to look at all like I’d thought it would, I’d be okay. Because Max had a wonderful time. The whole family did.”
“Yeah,” Tom said softly, because he got that feeling.
Rosie bit her lower lip hard, but she didn’t let go of his hands. “I wish everyone else wasn’t too busy to come out and help, but, you know, most of them have kids now, or a lot more going on at their jobs than I do, so…it’s just on me, I guess.”
“And me,” Tom insisted.
With all the yearning and hurt and anger that had been tied up in thinking about Rosie for years, he’d forgotten what it was like to hold her hand and feel like he could stand between her and the entire world. He wasn’t going anywhere she wasn’t. Not when she’d already told him she’d like to see him actually accomplish something for once.
He knew he could be a better partner this time. He just had to finish this before he got the chance.
He took a deep breath. “I think we cleared the air enough already. And, you know, I’m used to living in a giant mess. I’m amazing with mess. You can count on me.”
“Oh good,” she said, expression brightening. “Because I am actually so glad not to be in charge of the bee stuff.” Her face relaxed into a real smile.
She did an adorable little bounce of her knees, releasing his hands to curl her own into excited fists. She smiled up at him, pretending to jab at the air in a one-two punch. “What did you have planned this morning? You wanna go into town to look at wallpaper with me?”
Wallpaper wasn’t at the top of the list of things he wanted, which contained higher-ranking items like I sleep in the big bed and Someone with a clue about construction comes and tells me what to do , but he supposed it was on the list.
“Yeah, I’d love to go check out some wallpaper with you,” he said earnestly.
···
It was raining hard by the time they got into town, but there were still workers out stripping the gold wire ribbons and lighted artificial greenery from the street lamps and store awnings, heedless of the precipitation as the holiday decorations came down on schedule.
Rosie handed Tom a battered umbrella emblazoned with the name of a multinational consulting firm before cracking the car door and unfurling a much nicer umbrella in poppy-red polka dots. It matched her dress and rain boots, and Tom would have told her she was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen if he’d been certain that was allowed. As it was, he scurried after her to the wallpaper shop, a charming little shingled storefront just off the main drag.
As the doorbell rang in the wallpaper shop, Tom felt as though he’d picked up the script for a different version of himself, a man who hadn’t wrecked his marriage and was walking in with his wife of twelve years. His mind jumped to fill in the character details in this new role: Did he have the six kids he’d never been sure Rosie was joking about? Did they still live in New York? Did Rosie bring her embroidery hoop to his rehearsals and sit in the third row, stage left, until they broke for the evening, or had he quit theater a few years back so he could coach peewee soccer and order pizza if Rosie had a call with Hong Kong?
He had to blink rapidly so that he didn’t stumble into a display counter.
The only employee in the shop, a middle-aged man in chambray and suspenders, was on the phone when they entered, so Rosie nodded at him and drifted to the far corner, lifting a book of samples at random. She flipped through a few pages before she replaced it and took another.
“Do you have an idea what you’re looking for?” Tom asked.
Rosie trailed her fingers along the texture of one page and shook her head. She browsed through almost a dozen books, finally finding one that interested her. She took it to a table and unfolded a pale green paper that was festooned with tiny woodland creatures doing bucolic, vaguely British things, like wearing funny hats and gardening.
“That’s cute, isn’t it?” Rosie murmured, fingertips brushing a hedgehog with a picnic basket and a deerstalker hat.
Tom nodded.
“Or there’s this one. Look, it has bees. Friendly bees.”
“An alternate history of the place,” Tom said, playing along.
“I could put it in the suite. But Max would say it’s too sentimental.”
“I’m pretty sure Max would be okay with whatever makes you happy,” he pointed out.
She paused with her hands on the pages. “Maybe. There’s just this part of me that thinks that there is a right wallpaper. A perfect one. And if I find it, my family is going to be thrilled. They’re going to see this perfect wallpaper, and they’re going to love it, and they’ll love being here…” Her voice trailed off.
Tom didn’t quite understand the hurt in her voice, but he knew she didn’t deserve it.
“Babe, nobody loves you for your taste in wallpaper.”
Rosie frowned like he’d missed the point. “I know this intellectually,” she said.
“No, people love you because of your amazing rack,” he said.
She hadn’t been expecting that, and she snort-laughed through her nose, bending over to hide her face from the store staff.
“I do have great tits, don’t I,” she said in a slightly less aggrieved tone.
“The best,” Tom said loyally.
The shop clerk finished his call and came over to quiz Rosie about the project. Tom zoned out a little as the clerk weighed in on the many options available to the modern wallpaper enthusiast. Something struck him about the way the guy was looking at him though, and it took Tom a moment to put his finger on it.
The clerk was deferring to him. This wasn’t the reaction Tom usually got from store staff, especially in nice places, but, then again, he was wearing Boyd’s thousand-dollar jacket, he was on Martha’s Vineyard, and he was accompanied by polished, shiny Rosie.
Maybe he could pull off this performance.
“I think this paper will be too cutesy for a big room,” the clerk told Rosie, cutting his gaze to Tom.
“We’ll see,” Rosie said, eyes narrowing.
She flipped to the next page of the sample book, which was printed with abstract white birds, like gulls or albatrosses, on a bright yellow field.
“I like this,” she said to Tom, looking up through her eyelashes at him. “We could replace the shiplap in the suite, maybe paint the floor and trim white? And do white linens on the bed?”
“That would be pretty,” Tom said, not just because he could tell she liked it, but because he had not lasted as long as he had in theater without learning how to execute the creative visions of better-informed people than himself.
The clerk made a small noise of disagreement in the back of his throat. He put his hand on the sample book as though ready to take it out of Rosie’s hand.
“You don’t want that,” he told her. “Bird prints are very dated.”
“Do you have it in stock though?” Rosie asked.
“No, maybe you’re too young to remember, but put a bird on it was a thing a few years ago. Nobody wants bird prints anymore. It’s not on trend. We’re doing a lot of geometric prints right now.”
“I like birds,” Rosie said with a stubborn tilt to her chin. She pulled the book away, but the clerk didn’t let go. “What, will you not sell it to us?”
Tom had done enough improv exercises to recognize a yes, and moment when he saw one. “Yeah, if she wants birds, show us some more birds,” Tom said, subtly aligning his body with Rosie’s.
“I like this one,” Rosie said.
The clerk put his hand on Rosie’s shoulder, which made her back go absolutely rigid. Rosie was only five feet tall, which many people took as license to treat her like a child, and patting her around her head or shoulders was a good way to lose a hand.
“You can buy something fun without going twee or saccharine,” the clerk confided. “Wallpaper is too important a decision in a decorating scheme to pick on impulse.”
Rosie jerked the book to her chest and glared.
“Maybe I love twee and saccharine. Maybe that’s my decorating scheme. Maybe I want to fill the entire suite with my collection of Precious Moments dolls.”
The clerk looked over Rosie’s head to meet Tom’s eyes in a silent plea for help. Make your woman be reasonable , his face said.
Tom audibly scoffed at the idea that he’d weigh in on the clerk’s side. Were there men who publicly disputed their wives’ takes…on wallpaper? If so, how was it that these men were still married and Tom was divorced? He was a dumb motherfucker, but he wasn’t that dumb.
“I think Max would be happy if we doubled down on birds,” he suggested. “Owl clocks over reception.”
“Birdcage planters by the front door,” Rosie replied.
“Flamingo print on the chaise lounge.”
“Wingback chairs by the fireplace.”
“Roosters in the kitchen.”
“You do love cock.” Tom grinned down at Rosie’s flushed cheeks and dangerous expression.
The sales clerk’s face was both horrified and uncertain as he tried to determine whether Rosie and Tom were lunatics or just doing a bit, but he must have decided on the former, because he backed two steps away.
“Makes all the design decisions easier if we just default to bird ,” Rosie said. She looked back at Tom. “Right?”
“Baby, if you wanted to set the world on fire, I’d hand you a match. You want to cover the place in birds? That’s not even illegal. Let’s do it.” He watched a flash of gratification cross her face before she looked back down at the wallpaper samples and rolled her eyes.
“Drama queen,” she muttered, but Tom marked the way the corners of her little curling mouth turned up before she ducked her head to her chest.
I got my lines right in this scene.