Chapter 21
21
March
Rose’s phone screen displayed a close-up view of Aunt Max’s jowls, chin, and pensive expression. The image occasionally shifted to show the ceiling of Max’s Watertown condo. On her own side of the video call, Rose arranged her choices in furnishing for Max’s approval.
She turned in a slow circle to transmit the video of the main reception area. All of the whaling paraphernalia had been banished, replaced by birdcages painted in bright colors and filled with wooden parrots, feathered hats, and mismatched porcelain bird tchotchkes. The new wallpaper was up. The floors had been refinished. It all smelled like new paint and hot coffee and the casseroles baking in the oven in the next room, which Max couldn’t smell from Boston, but which marked the biggest difference from the day Rose and Tom had entered two months ago. It felt lived in.
“Do you like the curtains?” Rose asked when Max didn’t immediately respond at the end of the tour. Rose liked the curtains, but this was her first time picking out window treatments. She held her breath until Max nodded once, very firmly.
“It’s perfect,” Max ruled.
The wave of relief that swept through Rose was so strong as to nearly leave her dizzy. She’d made so many decisions without any good image of what it was all supposed to look like at the end, she’d been afraid of what the rest of her family would think of the result. If they hated it, she knew she’d cry.
“Yeah?” Rose asked, as eager for Max’s approval as she’d been at eight years old. “What about the suite? You don’t think people will think it’s too frilly?”
“What people?” Max asked grumpily. “It’s my inn. I don’t care what the boys think. Will it all be ready by Thanksgiving?”
“Thanksgiving?” Rose asked, confused. “Don’t you want to come before that? Memorial Day? Or the Fourth of July, maybe?”
Seth and his manager had come by yesterday and begrudgingly allowed that the inn might be ready to reopen by the beginning of the season. If they were a little late in opening the place to tourists, that would be fine though. Rose could work out any issues with, say, housekeeping or landscaping while it was just family here.
Max scowled, reorienting herself to the day’s date. “Of course I do. Just didn’t have a calendar handy.” She sat up straighter, and Rose saw that although it was midafternoon, Max was sitting in bed. “I’ll come for Memorial Day,” she said decisively.
“I’ll drive you down,” Rose said. She brightened as she imagined it—they could do something like a grand reopening party. Get the whole family here to see all the renovations. Soft-launch her relationship with Tom. That was the right tactic: build up a little goodwill with all the improvements, then casually slip into conversation that Tom had been responsible.
“Where is that handsome boy of yours?” Max demanded, punctuated by a dry cough. “I didn’t see him on the tour.”
Rose froze. She hadn’t mentioned anything about Tom to Max yet. Maybe Seth had said something?
“Ah, you know that Tom and I are…working on things?”
“What does that have to do with anything? The little girl who does my hair has been showing me videos. Taken in my inn. I can’t believe you tried to hide him from me. Go put him on so I can say hello,” Max insisted. “Go on, put him on. I promised to show him off for the girls here. They’re big fans.”
Laughing to herself at how the Tomboys were everywhere , Rose went looking for Tom. She found him in the bathroom of the room he’d been sleeping in, supervising Boyd as the other man cut broken tiles out of the shower wall with a grout saw. Tom’s face was concealed by clear plastic goggles and a dust mask, and his shaggy hair was pulled back by one of Rose’s elastics and covered with a bit of scrap fabric from the new throw cushions.
Rose had noticed his laundry piling up in his bedroom and, as an experiment, decided not to do it for him. Today he’d run out of clean T-shirts and simply borrowed one from Ximena, although it was striped in orange and pink and way too small for him. This was a singular look, but one that was really working for him, highlighting his narrow waist below the impressive expanse of his shoulders.
Here’s that handsome boy of mine , Rose thought, wondering if she might be developing a very specific sexual interest in construction workers who were very confident in their gender presentation. She’d ask Snowy if anyone had written that one yet.
“Can you say hi to Aunt Max?” she asked, passing the phone to Tom, who pulled off his dust mask to beam at her, then the phone screen.
“Hellooo,” he trilled. “Max, you’re looking radiant today.”
Max coughed again and waved her hand in front of the screen. “Not you,” she said irritably. The video screen zoomed out, revealing the two health aides who were crowded around Rose’s aunt in her bedroom. “I’ve seen you. I want the other one. The big gorgeous hunk from the movies where things blow up. Boyd! That one.”
Tom made a face when Rose snickered. She’d forgotten Tom wasn’t considered the handsomest boy in the room.
“Do you mind?” Rose asked Boyd, who put down his grout saw and delightedly took the phone from a scowling Tom.
“My niece’s husband got me tickets to your premiere,” Max announced to Boyd, and that was news to Rose, both that she had a husband and that he’d promised Max theater tickets. “Is the show any good?”
“My agent said the reviews were mixed in the Off Broadway run,” Boyd said modestly. “But it was very popular.”
“Because it’s racy?” Max said eagerly.
“Um,” Boyd said, looking at Tom for help. “I suppose there are suggestive themes? And I have my shirt off for most of the second act.”
“Wonderful,” Max sighed as the nursing aides around her burst into giggles. “It’s a good thing I’m so open-minded. I’ve always supported the theater. It’s just been a couple of years since I’ve been to New York.”
More like five since Max had traveled anywhere except the Vineyard. Max needed a lot of help getting ready in the morning, and that meant Rose always had a health aide or a family member scheduled to assist.
“Where’s she going to stay?” she whispered to Tom.
“With us?” Tom said innocently, unveiling a ton of assumptions about Rose’s apartment and their future living situation. Oh boy.
Rose made big eyes at him. “Us?”
“In our apartment?” Tom said, recognizing the challenge and not backing down from it.
“ My one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville?” she said, stressing the singular possessive adjective.
“Oh, is that where it is? You hadn’t mentioned,” Tom said, innocent tone not matching the devilish sparkle in his eyes. “That’ll be convenient. We can take the same train to Midtown.”
“It’s pretty small,” Rose said.
“I don’t mind getting rid of my furniture,” Tom said.
“Your aunt can stay with me,” Boyd said, briefly lifting his face from his conversation with Max. “I’m renting a four-bedroom townhouse in the Village.”
Max gave a happy gasp. “Oh, yes. That would be wonderful.”
“Well, there you go,” Tom said, waving one dusty hand, and Rose thought that meant he’d backed down on the question of their living arrangements, so she backed herself out of the room to go have a long think about the implications of Tom having proprietary thoughts about her own apartment.
When her eyes landed on Tom’s dirty clothes, piled in the corner by the bed, she felt guilty about her experiment, since Tom was busy doing manual labor. Tomorrow he’d probably turn up in Ximena’s maternity pants. She filled one laundry bag to the brim and headed for the door before Tom came out and intercepted her.
“Don’t do that,” he said heatedly. They had a brief tug-of-war over the full sack before he won and pulled it out of her arms.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“You’re not doing my fucking laundry, babe,” he said.
Tom’s face was alarmed far beyond what the situation called for, so Rose held up her hands in surrender.
“I was going to do it later,” he muttered as he headed to the hallway and the back stairs, which led to the kitchen and utility room. Rose rounded up an armful of socks and underwear that had escaped the initial collection and followed him down.
“I’d like it noted that I know how to do laundry,” Tom said when he’d loaded the big industrial washer. His movements as he added soap and collected the last odds and ends from her hands were rattled, but as Rose watched, he smoothed his face and turned on the charm like he was flicking a light switch.
“I’m noting it,” Rose said cautiously.
“And did you notice that I have fixed many broken things around this place?”
“Yes, of course I’ve noticed,” she said, backing up a step, because she was wary of any conversation where Tom felt like he needed to pour it on thick.
“I’m downright handy,” Tom said, following her. She was backed up against the line of washers, caught between his body and the counter. “I can also reach much higher shelves than you.”
“That’s true,” Rose allowed. So that’s where this was going. Tom was still pressing the point about her apartment. He leaned forward to prop his palms on either side of her and trap her between his arms, looming big and dusty over her.
“But not only am I useful around the house, I’m also decorative,” he declared. He ducked his head to press a kiss to the point of her jaw, ticklish and open-mouthed, which was cheating because he knew she liked that.
“Uh-huh,” she said, because Tom had slipped one hand up under her shirt to cup her rib cage with the spread of his fingers, and he was nuzzling down her neck. He made several very fair points, which deserved due consideration, but she had counterpoints.
“You have your own apartment,” she said. “I’ve been there. It’s not bad.”
“My apartment doesn’t have a Rosie in it,” he said, lips brushing her collarbone.
Tom had nostalgia goggles on if he thought that would be an unqualified good thing. Rose had ruthlessly assessed the parts of herself that were difficult for other people to deal with and knew that she was unable to be the best version of herself on a sustained basis. For the length of a weeklong holiday vacation? She could ooze Christmas spirit from dawn to dusk. For a date night in Chelsea? A cast party in the Village? She could sparkle. She hadn’t lived with anyone since Tom though, because she knew there were nights when she’d come home from work drained of her ability to be a good Rosie. Sometimes she was nothing but work.
“It wouldn’t be like this,” Rose warned him. “Everyone likes me better in short doses. I’m not actually that fun to deal with every day. Remember? You didn’t like living with me.”
Tom froze with his face in her cleavage. “That’s not true,” he said. “We lived together for a whole year before we got married. Best time of my life.”
Best of hers too. But it was important to pay attention to why.
“That wasn’t just us. It was us, and Adrian, and Ganima and Meagan,” Rose said firmly. Three other people who’d done not just housework but a lot of emotional care and feeding for Rose. She tried to scoot to the side, out from under Tom.
He exhaled in frustration, but he followed her to pin her again, with his hips this time. “Well, Adrian and Caroline are moving to New York in two months. Or what are Ganima and Meagan doing these days? Do any of them want to go in on a three-bedroom in Brooklyn? We could have them over, feel them out on it—”
Tom’s expression was so deadly serious that Rose couldn’t help but giggle.
“That’s your plan? Get Adrian drunk and see if he wants to join the Wilczewski-Kelly polycule? If he had any interest in having sex with either of us, pretty sure he’d have let us know at some point in the last fifteen years.”
Tom wrinkled his nose in mock outrage and leaned over to rub it against hers. She matched his face and snarled back at him until he laughed.
“I was just making a point about being creative,” Tom said, stealing a brief kiss from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t want some tiny space in your life just because you’re afraid of my dirty clothes all over your apartment. I’ll fucking become a nudist. I’ll wear a single pair of vinyl fishing waders every day and you can hose me down in the hallway.”
“I am being creative, and I don’t care about your dirty clothes on the floor,” Rose said, even if he didn’t seem to believe her. Not living together, not falling right back into the same patterns they’d failed at before—that was her being creative. That was her thinking about which parts of her life he’d actually want to live in. “We’ll just have to see what works.”
“What more do you need to see me do?” Tom asked, and there wasn’t any self-pity to it, but there was a whole lot of worry in those words.
Be happy with me , she thought, but that wasn’t something she could actually ask someone else to do. In any event, she didn’t have to answer, because she heard the doorbell ring.
“Must be the basement furniture I ordered,” she told Tom, making an effort to seem bright and cheerful and not at all worried that Tom would spend one Tuesday night eating reheated pasta on the couch with her and remember all the better options he had for his time.
She hurried out the front door to greet the big moving truck that was laboriously backing up the gravel drive.
“We have the budget for new furniture?” Tom asked.
“It’s not new. A department store closed, and I bought a bunch of the used furniture. Snowy found it, actually.”
Tom looked glum, but Rose didn’t think that expression was going to last past her reveal. She’d been incubating this surprise for several weeks. Tom might have thought the basement project was going overboard, but what was in the back of the truck was going to change his mind.
The delivery guys rolled up the back of the truck and set up the ramp to unload a big white leather couch and several groups of café tables and chairs. But the very best thing in the lot Rose had purchased was in the rear, covered in blankets and belted to a dolly. Tom’s eyes landed on it, narrowed in concentration as he wondered what it was, and then flew wide open when he figured it out.
“An upright piano?” Tom breathed, his voice joyous. He jumped into the back of the truck and peeled back a corner of the blankets. The piano was slightly battered, lacquered in blinding white, and embellished with a rainbow of exotic butterflies.
“I got it real cheap,” Rose bragged.
The piano straddled the line between beautiful and tacky in a way that precisely fit the vibe Rose was cultivating for the basement event space, even if it was butterflies rather than birds. It was going to be the centerpiece. Of her vision , as Boyd put it.
“You bought me a piano?” Tom said, wheeling around with an expression of delight spreading across his face. No, Tom was a stage actor; he smiled with his entire body. “ Rosie. Baby. I always wanted a piano. This is amazing. You bought me a piano?”
“I…well. Technically I bought myself a piano for the downstairs bar,” Rose said, feeling her pulse tingle in her fingers. She’d been sure he’d love it. Maybe part of her had also wanted to remind him that there were benefits to being in a relationship with her too.
Tom grabbed her wrist and held up her hand to splay his much-larger palm against hers. “But nobody in your family plays the piano. Because you all buy gloves in the children’s section.”
“Rude and true. But other people play the piano besides you. Adrian plays.”
Tom snorted indelicately and put his hands on Rose’s hips, pulling her closer. “You didn’t buy this queer-ass butterfly piano for Adrian Landry so that he can play you a little anxious Shostakovich when he’s out here once a year.”
“Also rude and true,” Rose admitted. She let her conspiratorial grin bloom on her face. “Okay, yes. I bought you a piano. I thought this summer, you know, if you do come, we could have musical trivia night with my family.”
Maybe they wanted to try some new things too—not the same old bocce ball tournaments and fried turkeys from Rose’s childhood. She couldn’t imagine a better rainy-day activity than Broadway standards with Tom in the new airy pink space.
“This summer? But what about tonight? This is what we’re doing tonight, right?” Tom asked, hands vibrating on her waist.
“Of course,” she said.
“And you’ll sit next to me and turn the pages on the music, right?” Tom asked, expression as sweetly intent as when he’d waited for her at the end of the Simboli Hall Chapel aisle.
“Of course I will,” Rose said.
“And everyone will have to say nothing but nice things about my singing?” Tom concluded.
“Or they’re turkey chow,” Rose promised.
Tom whooped and ran off to gather enough people to move the furniture into the basement. Rose pressed a palm over her heart.
It was a bigger space than he thought, that she was making for him in her life. It was going to be the best part.