16. Chapter Sixteen
Penelope
The dress is laid out on my bed before I’ve been in the house forty minutes. Gray silk, long sleeves. I didn’t bring it, I didn’t ask for it, and it fits, because she has my measurements. There’s a note on the pillow in her handwriting. The Harringtons at seven.
At seven I come down the stairs in the gray silk with my hair up, and my mother looks at me the way a foreman looks at a finished wall.
“You look stunning,” she says with a smile full of pride.
At dinner, I’m seated beside Charles Harrington’s son, who is twenty-six and does something with commercial real estate and is, to be fair to him, perfectly fine.
He asks what I study. I tell him. He says his mother wanted to be an architect, and I say a great many people did, and he laughs as though I’m being charming.
Across the table, someone asks how the internship is going, and my mother answers.
She answers all of it. The Chicago project.
The two-year build. The position waiting the spring I graduate.
She names the corner it’s going on. She gives them the square footage, which I don’t remember ever telling her.
She is warm, self-deprecating in the right places, and she says we twice.
I sit with my hands in my lap and let it happen, because interrupting my mother in front of the Harringtons is a thing that has never once occurred to me as a possibility.
Down the table, my father catches my eye. He gives me the look. The sorry one. The one that’s been crossing tables between us since I was nine years old, that says I know, darling. I see it. Isn’t she something?
Then he reaches for the bottle and refills his wine.
In the hall afterward, my mother touches my elbow and says, “You were lovely tonight.” She means it. She means it in a kind way.
“Thank you,” I say.
I always say thank you.
I text Percy on Thursday.
Me: I’ll be back tonight. The Calder is 53 feet tall, and there was a man eating a burrito under it.
Nothing for four hours.
Percy: Cool.
Cool.
I read that word an unreasonable number of times during my flight. Then I text him about the transom at Bellweather, a thing I noticed that I want to show him. Nothing until nine at night.
Percy: Yeah.
He can’t be serious.
Me: Are you okay?
Percy: Yeah.
I stop, because I have never pursued a person in my life, and I do not intend to start with a freshman hockey player who has decided, for reasons he hasn’t troubled himself to share, that I’m someone he’ll get back to.
Fine.
It’s fine. I have a semester, a job, and a portfolio, and I have never once needed anyone at the other end of a phone. I’m irritated. Irritation is clean, portable, and easy to hold.
On Friday, I sit down at my drafting table and get nothing done for two and a half hours.
I sharpen the pencil. The apartment is empty and silent.
I sit with my hand over my drawing and understand that I am angry the way a person is angry when they’re frightened of losing something.
I get my keys and leave. I know where to find him.
The Camerie is dark except for the bar. Two chairs are still down. A man is counting the till.
Percy comes out of the kitchen with a bus tub against his hip and stops dead when he sees me standing inside the door in my coat.
“Penelope.”
He looks exhausted. He looks like someone who’s been on his feet for eleven hours and will do it again tomorrow. And something happens in his face — something opening, and then something closing it down fast, before it gets anywhere.
The bartender looks at the two of us, puts his jacket on, and says he’ll lock the front. Then it’s just us in the beautiful, empty restaurant.
“You stopped answering,” I say.
That’s all I have. I drove here at half past ten at night to say three words. It sounds ridiculous, so obviously insufficient, and my face is hot. I have never done anything like this. I have never once in my life confronted someone like this.
He sets the tub down on a table. “I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Doubles.”
“Percy.”
That stops him. He goes still with both hands flat on the back of a chair, and he looks at the floor for a long moment.
“You went to Chicago,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You told me there was nothing there for you.”
“There isn’t.”
“But you went.” It isn’t an accusation. He says it the way he says everything, flat. “And you’re going back in two years.”
There are two offers sitting in my inbox that nobody in the world knows about. I don’t tell him either. The tips of my fingers go cold in my coat pockets.
“You never asked me,” I say. “In all the time I’ve known you, you have never asked me one question.”
“Maybe,” he says, and I don’t know if that’s an argument or an agreement.
“Why not?”
He looks up. Whatever’s in his face, I can’t read it.
“Because I didn’t want to know,” he says.
He flips two chairs down off a table by the high windows, and we sit. I don’t take my coat off. The bar lights are out. One lamp burns over the service station, and the whole beautiful room stands in shadow around us.
He doesn’t speak for a long time. I don’t fill it. I’ve learned that much about him.
“The house is empty,” he says eventually. “Everybody left for the break.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Working.”
“You didn’t want to go home?”
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t do anything at all.
“To Maine?” I add.
“I told you there’s nothing there for me.”
“I’m sure you have family. Somebody who wants to see you.”
“I don’t,” he says.
I open my mouth to take it back, but I already said it.
The man who was counting the till comes over and says, “I’m going to lock up in a minute. You kids have to get going.”
Percy stands, putting his chair up.
“I can drive you home,” I offer, lifting my chair.
He grabs it from me easily and puts it up. He doesn’t say anything as he takes the tub to finish whatever he was doing. I look at the front door that is now locked, and then I follow Percy to the back. We walk out the back entrance. The guy tells us to have a good night, and then he’s gone.
“I’m walking home,” Percy says to me quietly.
“Percy,” I say. “I can take you home.”
He looks me dead in the eye and says, “I’ll walk you to your car.”
He does. He walks me to my car, opens the driver’s door for me, and says, “Have a good night, Penelope.” Then he closes it gently and walks off.
I sit in my car for a moment and watch him in my mirror. My mind is running a hundred miles per second. No is no is what I land on. I start my car and drive home. I don’t sleep.
On Monday, I walk into Whitmore at one o’clock exactly, and I resign.
I’ve been thinking about this moment since I started.
This isn’t about Percy; this is about me.
I’ve done it a thousand ways in my head, and I’ve planned my escape.
Three weeks ago, in the middle of studying for finals, I sent an email to a firm forty-five minutes north of here and a smaller one thirty minutes south. I have offers from both.
Oliver reads my letter standing up, in his glass office, with the door open. He sets it down and looks at me.
“May I ask why?”
“I want to be somewhere I chose.”
He looks at me. I watch him decide not to ask the second question.
“You know I’d have had you leading a project by twenty-two.”
“I know.”
“And you understand how this will look. To your mother. To Richard.” He isn’t threatening me. That’s what makes it unbearable. He says it gently, a man laying out facts for a person he believes is making a mistake.
“I’ve handed everything off. Ashfield’s done. The Chicago elevations are done. The memos are in the folder.”
In the folder, I have the completed Ashfield sheets, the Chicago east elevation with all markups incorporated, a two-page memo on the outstanding zoning items with every source documented, and clean handoff notes. Everything is finished. I have not left a single thread for anyone to trip on.
He opens it. Reads a page. Flips to the next. Then he closes it and rests both hands on it. He looks at me with something I can only call fondness, and it is so much worse than anger would have been.
“This is very well done,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“The door’s open.” He comes around the desk. He doesn’t come too close. “I mean that. A year from now. Two.” He pauses. “Chicago will still be there. So will I.”
There is nothing in that sentence. Not one word of it is wrong. I could repeat it to any living person, and they would hear a generous man being kind to an intern.
“Thank you, Oliver.”
I shake his hand.
Lyla walks me to the elevator. She looks at the box in my arms, which holds a coffee mug and two mechanical pencils, one of which isn’t exactly mine but ended up in my possession anyway.
“This is good,” she says. That’s all. She reaches past me and presses the button, and when the doors open, she says, “You’ll find somewhere better.”
They close on her standing in that beautiful lobby, walking back to her desk.
My mother calls at seven-forty. She’s already heard.
“Explain it to me,” she says, and her voice is calm. “Because I’ve been sitting here for an hour, Penelope, and I cannot construct a version of this that makes any sense.”
“I don’t want Chicago.”
“You’ve never been to Chicago properly, Penelope. Not as an adult. You’ve been a child here. It’s not what you think it is here.”
“I don’t want it, Mom.”
She sighs, taking a moment. And when she comes back, she’s precise.
“You have thrown away a two-year project. A position that would have made you a junior architect before you were twenty-two, at a firm men your father’s age would have wept for.
You have made Richard Whitmore look foolish for extending himself.
You’ve made me look foolish — every woman at that table on Saturday now knows my daughter was handed the opportunity and selfishly said no.
” A breath. “There are three firms in that city, and all three of them talk. Do you understand what I’m telling you?
You have closed doors tonight that you cannot reopen.
At twenty years old. Over some feeling you can’t articulate. Without once discussing it with me.”
Every word of it is true. Every single word. My hand is steady on the phone. My heart is going like something is chasing me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Then undo it. Call him in the morning. He’ll take you back. He’d take you back tonight.”
I stare at nothing. “No.”
The silence goes on long enough that I look at the screen to see whether she’s hung up.
“I see,” she finally says.
“Mom—”
“I’ll call you on Sunday.”
She hangs up. I set the phone on the counter and hold the edge of it with both hands.
Then I sit down on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and stay there a while.
There is no triumph. Not one particle. Whatever I imagined this would feel like, it doesn’t.
I feel like someone who has broken something valuable on purpose and is sitting in the room with the pieces.
My hands shake for about twenty minutes.
Then they stop. I get up, and I wash the dishes in the sink.
Later, in my bedroom, I take the list out of the back of my sketchbook and unfold it. I look at my list. The building I want. The portfolio. The summer. All of it in my careful architect’s hand across the top two-thirds, where I planned my year. And second from the bottom: say no to my mother.
I take a pencil and draw a line through it. One clean stroke, ruled, the way I’d strike a wall I’d decided against. And then I take out the other piece of paper, the one I folded up that night and kept without telling him. I open it. Four words in his handwriting, pressed hard into the page.
Have a good year.
I look at it for a long time.
I don’t text him.