9. June
June
Some nights sleep just doesn’t show up. You can lie there waiting for it, or you can get up and do something useful with your hands.
The house is dark and settled. Gus got back from the Calgary trip after dinner, dead on his feet, and went up early. I go down without the hall light — after two months I could walk this house blind — and I’m halfway into the kitchen when the ice maker starts grinding.
“Brenda,” I say quietly, opening the fridge for the milk, “it’s three in the morning. Nobody needs ice. Nobody has ever needed ice at three in the morning. Look at your life.”
“Who’s Brenda?”
I do not scream, and I deserve a medal for it: a man speaks out of a pitch-dark kitchen at three a.m., and I keep it to a full-body flinch, because two kids are asleep upstairs and waking them is worse than dying. I put down the milk with extreme care and hold on to the counter.
The lamp by the reading chair clicks on. There he is in the corner in a T-shirt and flannel pants, a mug on the armrest. He looks like he’s been there a while and is now having the best night of his month.
“Brenda,” he says again. “Who is she?”
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“Long enough to hear you tell somebody named Brenda to look at her life.” He is trying not to smile, and the trying shows. “We don’t know anybody named Brenda.”
There’s no way out of this but through. “The ice maker,” I say, with all the dignity available to me.
“The ice maker is named Brenda. She grinds every half hour and produces nothing, and sometimes I address her about it. Every house has an appliance like her. I name them. It’s a system.
I’ve never once told another living person about the system, so I’ll be upstairs packing. ”
Gus puts his hand over his mouth, which does nothing. The laugh comes out through his shoulders instead — silent, wheezing, a laugh that won’t wake his children. It goes on so long I have to lean against the counter and wait it out.
“Brenda,” he finally manages, wiping his eyes. “It’s — no. It’s exactly right. That’s exactly what she is. That machine has been broken for two years, and I’ve had a guy out twice, and both times she behaved perfectly while he was standing there.”
“Because she’s Brenda.”
“Because she’s Brenda,” he agrees, like I’ve handed him a missing puzzle piece. And that’s the moment the night goes off its rails, because instead of taking my mortified self upstairs, I make tea. He stays in the chair. We start talking.
We talk about nothing. That has to be understood about the next two hours: nothing happens in them.
No confessions, no accidents, nobody’s hand brushing anybody’s hand.
Two adults in a dark kitchen with a lamp on, talking about nothing at all, and it is somehow the most dangerous night of my whole careful life.
He asks why I’m up. I tell him the truth — some nights sleep doesn’t show up, always been that way.
He says he’s the same, that he’s been the same for years, that hotels make it worse.
“Three a.m. in Calgary is the loneliest place in professional sports,” he says, like it’s a documented fact.
I laugh, and he looks pleased with himself in the lamplight.
I ask what he actually does at three a.m. in Calgary. He turns his mug around on the armrest before he answers. His thumb crosses the scar, and my whole body goes quiet.
“Used to have somebody to talk to,” he says. “Time zones don’t matter at three a.m. Now mostly I read game film I’ve already seen.”
He used to have somebody to talk to. I am the somebody. I sat in a studio in Greenwood at three in the morning, typing back and forth with this man. Hotel pillows. Road food. Whether anyone ever really sleeps in Calgary. He doesn’t know he just told me about myself.
“That’s the trouble with three a.m. friends,” I say, which is as close to the edge as I have ever walked. “They’re only real at three a.m.”
“She was real,” he says. Not sharp. Just certain, the way he’s certain about the kids’ bedtimes. Then he seems to hear himself, and he course-corrects with a mug lift: “Anyway. Now I’ve got Brenda.”
“You can’t have Brenda. Brenda’s mine.”
“Split custody,” he says. “Weekends and road trips,” and we’re safe again, back on the surface, and we deliberately stay there for two more hours.
Here’s what nothing looks like. He tells me about the worst hotel in the league, in twenty-one years of hotels, and about a rookie-year roommate who ironed his jeans. I tell him about the vacuum repair shop under my old studio.
“Ten years,” I say. “Allegedly a vacuum repair shop. Never once open. My theory is it’s a front.”
“For what?”
“Unclear. Vacuum crimes.”
He nods seriously, like we’re reviewing evidence. “And your backup theory?”
“A shrine. To one specific, beloved vacuum.”
“That’s the stronger theory,” he says. He tells me Margot’s counselor uses the phrase “big feelings,” and that he once watched Margot visibly decide not to say something cutting about it.
He counts that as growth, hers and his. I tell him about the fourth family I worked for, whose garage-door opener was named Susan.
He says, “So it’s true. There were others before Brenda.
” I laugh into my tea so hard that some of it goes wrong.
He gets up, pats my back twice, and sits back down.
I can still feel those two pats an hour later.
Somewhere in the second hour, the talking slows down without ending, the way it does when it’s good.
He sits there in the lamplight with his gray hair wrecked from the pillow he gave up on, mug empty, eyes half-shut.
“This is the best insomnia I’ve had in years,” he says, in the exact voice he used to type in.
I know it’s the exact voice. That’s the problem. I have two months of evidence from this kitchen and fourteen months of evidence from before. All night they’ve been piling up together without my permission.
Oh no.
Not oh no, he’s kind. I’ve known he’s kind since the interview.
Not oh no, he’s handsome, which has been a manageable fact since the first time I watched him roll up his sleeves to cook.
This is worse. This is: it’s almost morning, and I don’t want to go to bed, because going to bed ends this.
I can’t think of one thing in my life right now I’d trade for another hour in this kitchen.
I like him. Present tense. No mask on either of us, no subscription between us, no screen.
The man I’m lying to every day is the same man I once talked to every night.
Somewhere between the burnt pancakes and Brenda, the two of them turned into one person.
I like the whole person, and I am in so much trouble.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says, half asleep in the chair.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you leave the room without moving. Your eyes go somewhere else and you start planning tomorrow.” He waves his mug at me gently. “Off duty. It’s almost five.”
“It’s almost five,” I agree, and take his mug, because they’re my dishes to do, and our fingers brush at the handoff. It’s nothing. A quarter of a second. I’ll be thinking about it at seven when I make his coffee.
At the bottom of the stairs he says, “Hey. June.” I turn around.
He’s winding the lamp cord back behind the chair, not looking at me, doing a chore so the sentence doesn’t have to be a moment.
“I sleep fine when I’m home now. Took me a while to notice.
I figured out the difference is knowing everybody in the house is okay before I close my eyes. So. Thanks for being one of them.”
One of them. Everybody in the house. He counts me in the headcount now, whatever that means to him. I stand on the second stair — a woman who once got paid to be this man’s three a.m. — and I say, “Goodnight, Gus,” instead of any of the true things.
In my room I lie on top of the covers and watch the ceiling go gray.
I run tomorrow’s list — swim bag, groceries, drop-off — because a list has always been able to put me to sleep.
Not tonight. He still turns his mug when he’s deciding whether to say something.
Calgary is still how he tells time. He misses her — misses me — with his whole quiet face, six months after I logged off forever.
Tonight he sat four feet away from her for two hours and called it the best insomnia he’s had in years.
I could have been asleep hours ago. Given the same choice again, I’d pick the kitchen every time.
The birds start up. Somewhere below me, right on schedule, Brenda grinds, drops nothing, and grinds again. I put the pillow over my face, because there is officially nobody in this house sleeping less than me, and only one of us knows why.