5. Ten Days
Ten Days
Iwant to put the good chapter here, where it goes, because that's where it went.
Ten days. That's what we had between the mixer and the Monday morning, and I didn't know it was ten days, and neither did he, and the thing I've held onto since is that we spent them well. Not on purpose. We spent them well by accident, the way you do, which is the only way anybody ever does.
Saturday we took the dogs to Hendry's.
It was the last Saturday in September, which is the best week of the year here — the tourists gone, the water still warm, the marine layer burned off by ten and that heavy gold light coming in over the water like the whole coast had been varnished.
We went early with coffee and Nate brought the good chuck-it and we let them off at the bottom of the ramp and they went off across the flats like two entirely different weather systems.
Bear does not fetch. Bear has never fetched.
Bear's relationship to a thrown ball is that of a large man to an argument he has decided not to have.
What Bear does is run with Floss while she fetches, at her shoulder, enormously, for the whole distance, both ways, and then lie down while she brings the ball back and receives all the credit — and he is visibly satisfied by this arrangement, and I have never seen anything like it in my life.
"He thinks he's helping," I said.
"He is helping."
"He's a logistics failure."
"He's support staff," said Nate. "Not everyone's a retriever, Lila."
We stood in the shallows with our shoes in our hands.
There was a moment — I keep it — when Floss dropped a tennis ball at my feet, and Bear immediately lay down on it, and Floss looked at me with an expression of absolute marital exasperation, and Nate laughed so hard he had to put his hands on his knees, and I stood in four inches of the Pacific at nine in the morning and thought, with total clarity: this is the happiest I have ever been.
That's the sentence. That's why the chapter's here.
Sunday, his house. The bad kitchen, which we have improved by exactly one item, a decent pan I bought and left there in August in what was, I realize now, an act of enormous cowardice — you can leave a pan in a man's house without saying anything about it.
He made the thing he makes, which is a chicken with too much lemon, and we ate it in the yard, and the dogs lay under the table in a single unit, and at some point I looked up and he was watching me with the unguarded face, the one from the beach, and he did not shut it down.
"What," I said.
"Nothing."
"That's not a nothing face."
Nate turned his glass on the table. It was nearly dark; the yard smelled of the sage that grows wild up there and the neighbor's jasmine.
"You know I was engaged," he said.
Everything in me went very still. He'd never said the word. He'd said "DC" and he'd said "it went wrong" and he had, once, on a cliff in the fog, said "a case," and that was the sum total of eleven months.
"I knew," I said carefully. "Marisol told me. Marisol knew within a week of meeting you, which I've never asked her to explain."
That got half a smile. "How."
"She says you flinch at weddings."
"I do not flinch at weddings."
"You've done four this summer and at every single one you check the exits during the vows."
He took that. He sat with it, and the dogs breathed under the table, and I made myself not say anything at all, which is the hardest thing I do.
"Her name was Anna," he said. "It ended in 'twenty-two, in the spring, and it wasn't — she didn't do anything wrong.
She was very patient for about eight months longer than anyone should have been.
" He turned the glass again. "There was a case.
It ended badly, and I ended badly, and she stayed through the first part of that and left in the middle of the second part, and she was right to.
" He looked up. "That's not the story. That's the frame around the story. I'm telling you the frame."
"Okay."
"I'm going to tell you the rest," Nate said.
"I want you to know that I know I have to.
I'm not — this isn't a man being mysterious at you, Lila, this is a man who has told it twice and both times it cost him something he didn't get back.
" He said it steadily and he was holding onto the glass hard enough that I could see the tendons.
"Give me a little more time and I'll put it down in front of you and you can decide what you think of me. "
"I've decided what I think of you," I said.
"You've decided what you think of the part you've seen."
"That's what deciding is."
And he laughed — surprised out of him, the way he does — and reached across the table and took my hand, and that was it. That was the whole of what we got to before everything came down, and I would not trade it for the answer.
Monday through Thursday: teeth. Two root canals, a bridge seat, eleven hygiene checks, a four-year-old who bit Marisol, a Tuesday where nobody came in at all between one and four and I sat in my office and looked at the trend line and said nothing to anyone.
Friday, Adele Whitcombe came in and demanded to know about the mixer, which by then had gone through the town twice and come back improved. In the version Adele had received, I had thrown a drink.
"I did not throw a drink."
"That's disappointing," said Adele. "Pearl, don't. Well.
Everybody's talking about it and half of them think you're jealous and the other half have gone and got second opinions, and Dorothy Fenn's daughter cancelled a graft.
So I'd say you won." She considered the ceiling.
"That man came to the Garden Club last spring, before he opened.
Preston Hale. Gave a talk about smiling. Very handsome, not a bit happy."
"Not a bit happy how?"
"I've buried two husbands, Lila, I know what a man looks like when the money isn't his." She snapped her handbag. "Now do my cleaning. I'm going to Palm Springs."
Saturday I did the free second opinions. I'd said it in a room with a live microphone, so I did it — I opened at nine on a Saturday with Marisol, who volunteered, and Anh Trinh, who volunteered and then brought her own patients' charts to work on between, and we saw nineteen people in six hours.
Nineteen. On a Saturday. From a town this size.
And eleven of them had been to Luminous, and I looked in eleven mouths with a treatment plan in my hand, and by two o'clock that afternoon — with Floss asleep on the floor of chair two in her Chief Investigator bandana and the fountain not working outside — I had stopped being angry about my practice and had started feeling something much colder, and much more useful, in the pit of my stomach.
Because two of those eleven had already had the work done. And it wasn't there.
I didn't know what to do with that. Not yet.
I told myself I'd counted wrong, that I'd misread the plan, that there was an explanation.
I went home and made dinner and did not call Nate, because he had said tell me before you tell anyone and I had a loan statement in a drawer and a thing in my stomach and a rule about not asking people for things.
That was Saturday.
On Monday morning at seven-fifty, the smile concierge from Luminous opened the door of the whitening suite at the back of the ground floor and started screaming, and a woman walking a corgi on Figueroa Street heard her through the glass.