Matt #2
I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
My table on Alder seats one. I eat over the sink most nights, or off the arm of a chair with the scanner on low, and the loudest sound in my house is the coffee maker in the morning, and I’d built it that way on purpose, room by room, until every part of my life was something I could latch and drain and account for.
Nobody hands you a roll over your shoulder in a house like that.
Nobody has to. This kitchen ran on the exact opposite principle—too many people, no accounting, everybody’s business everybody’s—and I sat there braced for it to overwhelm me and slowly understood that it wasn’t going to.
It was just going to fold me in and keep going, whether I performed correctly or not, and something in my chest that had been standing at attention for as long as I could remember quietly, without asking me, sat down.
Gwen came without her kids—they were with their dad for the weekend, which somebody mentioned once and nobody mentioned twice—and she moved through the evening with a phone she kept face-down beside her plate and glanced at, I noticed, more than a woman glances at a phone she isn’t waiting on.
Iris was up at the Big House under doctor’s orders.
Heather had run a covered plate up the lane before the rest of us sat down.
Her absence was its own presence in the room.
Every few minutes somebody glanced toward the window in the direction of the Big House the way you’d check a stove you’d left on, and the brightness everyone was working a little too hard at had that under it, unspoken—a whole table loving somebody out loud because the quiet was unbearable.
And Elizabeth was right in the middle of it, laughing.
That’s what I remember most about that first dinner.
Not the food, though the food was extraordinary.
Her, at that crowded table, elbow on the arm of Beau’s chair, a few strands come loose from that knot she keeps her hair in, her whole face lit up, telling some story about the hay wagon that had Donna wiping her eyes with her napkin.
Warm, easy, and completely at home. I sat there with a kid’s place card propped against my water glass and thought I had never in my life been at a table this loud, or this happy.
And somewhere under all that noise, I noticed she hardly ate.
I clocked it without meaning to. The gray smudges were still under her eyes.
She’d covered them with the brightness the way you’d throw a quilt over a sagging couch, and it worked on everybody in that warm crowded room because they wanted it to work, because she’s been giving them this version of herself her whole life and they’ve learned to take it as the truth.
I wanted, with an intensity that startled me, to make her slow down. To put a hand on her shoulder, make her relax, and stand between her and her worries. The need for it came up so fast and so whole that I had to look down at my plate for a second.
I’ve spent my whole life being that for one person. And I recognized, sitting at that loud bright table, that the feeling pointing itself at Elizabeth Starling was not the welfare-check feeling, was not the citizen-of-the-town feeling, was not anything I had a clean and bloodless file for.
I put it somewhere. I’d look at it later. I realized I was getting a backlog of feelings I was supposed to examine later.
“So, Matt.” Tiffany had her reading glasses pushed up on her head, and her attention swung onto me. “Becca says you’ve lived alone out on Alder a long time. No wife, no—” she gestured with a roll “—nothing?”
“Tiffany,” Heather warned. “Don’t be nosy.”
“I’m making conversation, Heather.”
“You’re taking a statement,” Elizabeth said, dropping back into her seat with the coffee pot, and the table laughed, and the heat came off me.
That was the other thing she did. She watched the room for who was getting cornered, and she got them out. Every time.
Her eyes caught mine for half a second as she filled my cup, and there was something in them, quick and dry—I know they’re a lot, I’ve got you—and then it was gone, and she was asking Beau to explain the place cards.
Gwen’s phone lit up face-down beside her plate.
She turned it further over without looking at it, but a little color came up her neck, and Delilah said, “Aunt Gwen, your phone keeps—” and Gwen said, “Eat your dinner,” a half-beat too fast, and across the table I watched Elizabeth’s eyes flick to Gwen and then deliberately away.
The practiced look of a woman granting somebody privacy she’d want back herself.
I filed that too. The cop in me had a folder going on this whole family by now, and the folder marked Gwen had exactly one page, and the page said somebody’s waiting on her, and she hasn’t told them.
None of my business. I closed it.
After, I tried to leave three times. The first time Donna put a foil-wrapped plate in my hands for later. The second time Beau needed a ruling on whether police officers were allowed to have favorite place cards. The third time, I actually made it to the truck.
Elizabeth came out onto the little porch with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, warm light behind her and dark fields in front, and came down the steps and across the gravel to where I stood with my door open.
“You patched my grandmother’s barn.”
“Jonas patched it. I held things.”
“I watched you. From the ground. For three hours.” She stopped a few feet off, and out here in the dark, away from the table, the brightness wasn’t all the way on, and underneath it I could see how tired she was.
How scared. How much she was holding that she’d let nobody at that table see. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t on your schedule. There’s no roof repair round.”
“I know that too.”
She looked at me a long moment in the cold, and I watched her walk to the door where she keeps the jokes, and then, just for a second, not open it.
“Thank you,” she said. Plainly. Nothing wrapped around it, and I understood it had cost her something to say it that way, with no punchline holding it up.
“Get some sleep, Elizabeth,” I said. “You were up before the sun, and you ate about four bites at that table.”
It caught her. I watched it catch her—watched her whole face go startled and unguarded, the look of a person caught at the exact maneuver they perform so they’ll never be caught—and for one second, I thought she might actually let me in.
Then the grin came up like a shop light.
“Four bites is a normal amount of bites,” she said. “Go home, Hartford. I’ll see you at the next round.”
And she went back up the steps into the warmth of her house, and I drove home through the dark with a foil plate on the seat beside me and that patched roof in my mirror, holding still and weather tight.
I felt good about exactly one thing I’d fixed, and uneasy about the much larger thing I was beginning to understand I wanted to.