Chapter 11
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Conor came home from the boat on a Wednesday afternoon smelling like diesel and salt water and walked into the bakery without taking off his boots and announced, to the entire room, that he was hungry.
Eilis, without breaking her conversation with a customer about a christening cake, pointed at the back.
Conor went to the back. Ada, who had been on her stool by the window for the last twenty minutes, drank her tea and waited for him to come find her, because Conor always came to find her on Wednesdays after the boat.
Conor was thirty-one, taller than their father had been, broader through the shoulders than their father had been, and slower to speak than either of their parents.
He had a beard he had been growing since November because he had decided his face was cold and a knit hat the color of old moss that he wore on land in lieu of taking it off.
He came out of the back with a piece of brioche and sat down on the stool across from her. He did not say hello. They did not, generally, do hello. They had been small humans together. Hello was a word they used with strangers.
“Hi,” he said anyway, today.
“Hi.”
He ate his brioche.
He looked at her.
“So,” he said. “The campaign.”
“The campaign.”
“Wes Berglund.”
“Wes Berglund.”
“You all right.”
“I am all right, Conor.”
“I am asking the question seriously.”
“I am answering it seriously.”
He looked at her for a long beat. He was very good at looking at her for a long beat. He had learned it from their mother, who had learned it from their grandmother. It was a Halloran-women weapon that had skipped the gender expectations and landed in their brother.
“Ada.”
“What.”
“I have known you a long time.”
“I know.”
“I am going to ask you a thing. I am going to ask the thing once. I am not going to ask it twice. I am not going to follow up. I am not going to make you talk about it. I am going to ask the thing, you are going to answer or not answer, and we are going to eat brioche.”
“Okay.”
“Are you actually okay.”
He said it the way she had been dreading anyone saying it for two years.
He did not say are you actually okay with this Wes Berglund thing.
He did not say are you actually okay with the campaign.
He did not say are you actually okay with Theo Carmichael being in the building.
He did not specify. He just said the question, the way you said the question to a person you had been small with, and waited.
She did not answer immediately.
The bakery was the way the bakery was at three in the afternoon.
Marisol was in the back, prepping for the dinner rush of bread and pastry that would carry the Salt & Sugar to seven.
Eilis was at the front handling the christening-cake customer with infinite patience.
Outside, the light over the harbor was already gold and going.
A man Ada did not recognize walked his dog past the front window.
“Mostly,” Ada said.
“Mostly.”
“Mostly. There is — there is something about the way the campaign is going. The campaign is fine. The campaign is — actually, Conor, the campaign is going better than I thought it would. The campaign is — Wes is —”
She stopped.
“Wes is what,” Conor said, very flatly.
“Wes is good.”
“Wes is good.”
“Yes.”
“Wes is a good person.”
“Yes.”
“Ada.”
“What.”
“This is not what I expected the conversation to be.”
“I know.”
He looked at her.
His face did a small thing. The small thing was an interior recalibration she had not seen on Conor in years.
It was the same recalibration she had seen on him when he was sixteen and they had told him that their father was not coming home from the hospital, when Conor had spent five seconds being a child and then made the visible, terrible decision to be the man of the house, and had, ever since, been a man.
“I am not going to say I told you so,” Conor said.
“You never told me anything.”
“I have a number of opinions, Ada Halloran, that I have not, out of love, said out loud.”
“Conor.”
“Mostly about Theo.”
“Conor.”
“And I am not going to say anything about Wes Berglund except that I have known him since I was twelve and I have not had to say anything bad about him then or now and I would like for the record to reflect that.”
“Noted.”
“Reflected.”
“Noted and reflected.”
He ate his brioche.
She drank her tea.
After a long beat she said, “Conor, what I am not okay with is that I do not yet know what to do with — with the fact that he has been paying attention to me for a long time. Quietly. In the building. He has not done anything weird. He has fixed the thermostat in the lobby. He ordered me oat milk coffee. He added a better version of my warm-up music to the rink drive. He is — he is the kind of man who notices what room you are sitting in and adjusts the heating in the room around you, and he has been doing it for a year and a half, and on Tuesday I told him he could keep noticing if he asked me first, and now — now I am sitting in this bakery eight days later and I do not know what to do with the fact that a man who has been paying attention to me from across a building for a year and a half is currently holding my hand in photographs and the photographs are going up in newspapers and I have been finding it — I have been finding it —”
“Easier,” Conor said.
“Easier.”
“Than you thought.”
“Easier than I thought.”
“Ada.”
“What.”
“That is also okay.”
“Is it.”
“Yes. It is also okay. You are allowed to find a thing easier than you thought. You are allowed to like a thing that started as a job. You are allowed — for the love of God, sister mine — to like a man who has been quietly trying to keep your hip from hurting when you teach kids to fall like potatoes. You are allowed to like him and to not yet know what to do with him. It is January. You have weeks before the gala. There is no — there is no rule saying you have to have decided anything before the second of March.”
She looked at her brother.
She had not known, on her stool, that she had been waiting for him to say it.
“Hi,” she said. She did not know why.
“Hi,” he said back, gentle.
He ate his brioche.
She drank her tea.
The bell over the door rang. A new customer came in.
Eilis, who had finished with the christening-cake woman, came around the counter, looked at Conor’s boots, looked at the trail of grit Conor had brought across her floor, and pointed silently at the broom and dustpan behind the counter.
Conor went and got the broom. Conor swept up his own grit.
He was a man who had been small in this bakery and was respected here only as far as his work earned him respect, and he was, Ada noted, fine with that.
Eilis sat down across from Ada in his vacated stool.
“You told him,” Eilis said.
“He asked.”
“He never asks.”
“He asked today.”
Eilis considered Conor across the room. She watched her son sweep the floor of her bakery. She watched him with the look of a woman who had built two human beings and was, today, mostly satisfied with them.
“I have a question,” Eilis said.
“Mom.”
“I have a question that I am going to ask once. I am not going to follow up. I am not going to circle. I am going to ask it, you are going to answer or not answer, and we are going to eat brioche.”
“I have already eaten brioche today.”
“Eat more brioche.”
“Mom.”
“Are you going to bring him here.”
“What.”
“Are you going to bring Wes Berglund into the Salt & Sugar. Are you going to bring him in here for a piece of bread, alone, when there is no camera, and let me meet him as a person and not as a campaign.”
Ada thought.
She thought for longer than she had thought about any other question she had been asked all month.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“That is the right answer.”
“That is the right answer.”
“That is — that is the only answer I would have trusted. I don’t know is the answer of a person who is not yet performing this. Yes would have been performing. No would have been performing harder. I don’t know means you are still inside the question, which means you are still being a person.”
“Mom.”
“What.”
“That was a very deep sentence to be saying at three in the afternoon.”
“I am the kind of woman who says deep sentences at three in the afternoon, Ada Halloran. I have been telling you for thirty years.”
“I know.”
“Eat the brioche.”
She ate the brioche.
She had a six o’clock private lesson back at the rink with Iris, the sixty-one-year-old beginner who had told her, last week, that Wes Berglund looked like a man who would shovel your driveway.
She had to leave the bakery by five-thirty.
She had time, she decided, to walk down to the water for fifteen minutes first.
The harbor at three-forty-five on a Wednesday in late January was a long stretch of windy gray water and the strung lights of the wharf restaurants beginning to come on.
A man was hosing down the deck of a fishing boat.
Two gulls were arguing over something fishy on the floor of the pier. The cold went through her jacket.
She walked to the end of the pier.
She had not, since coming home, walked to the end of the pier in winter.
She had been keeping the pier as a summer thing, because in winter the pier had always belonged to her father, who had liked to walk it before sunrise with a paper cup of coffee from a different bakery than the one his wife ran, because he had said, very tactfully, that the second bakery’s coffee was better and his wife’s bread was better and a man should be allowed to combine his loyalties strategically.
She stood at the end of the pier in the failing light.
The thing was — and she was, now, going to admit it to herself, in private, in the cold, on the kind of pier where her father used to drink the wrong coffee, because the alternative was to keep refusing to admit it and start performing brightness about it in front of her brother in his work boots — the thing was that she had stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, being able to think about Wes Berglund as a man she was performing a campaign with.
She was thinking about him as a man.
The thing was that she had, on Friday night, in the empty rink after Family Skate Night, skated alone with the cello version of the waltz playing low on the lobby speakers, and her right hip had not clicked at minute four, and she had skated until her legs were warm and her chest was loose and she had thought, in a clean unchaperoned thought that she had not had in two years, I miss this in a different way than I used to.
She had been missing skating for two years.
She had been missing it the way a person missed a phantom limb.
She had been missing it as a was, as a thing she had lost. On Friday night she had thought I miss this in a different way, and the different way had been a thought about a future.
A thought about a thing she might still get to make, in the body she still had, with the building she was now standing in.
She had been carrying the thought for five days.
It was sitting under her sternum like a small kept stone.
And the thought had arrived inside a room that had, ten minutes earlier, contained Wes Berglund saying we are not doing the kiss tonight.
She did not yet know how much of the one was caused by the other.
She was not sure, in the end, that she would be able to tell which thought had come first.
She wrapped her arms around herself in her jacket.
The wind off the harbor was unkind.
A piece of paper blew past her boots and out over the water. She watched it land on the gray and disappear under it.
She thought, briefly, of the navy Tidemark folder on Joanna’s desk three weeks ago, which had started this. She thought of Pete on the lobby floor, his hands knitting an explanation. She thought of Wes Berglund saying pitch them me.
She thought, last, of Joanna, who had told her, very plainly, in the staff kitchenette, that the campaign performing well was you.
She turned and walked back up the pier.
She was forty minutes late to her lesson with Iris.
Iris, who had been raising children for forty years and had developed the patience of a woman who had spent twenty thousand hours waiting for someone to put on a coat, did not mind.
Iris skated for forty-five minutes with Ada in the half-light rink.
Iris fell three times. Iris, on the third fall, said, “Honey, I am sixty-one years old and I am not as soft a potato as I once was,” and Ada laughed for so long that her chest unlocked.
After Iris left, Ada did not, that night, skate alone.
She went to the staff hall. She walked past the equipment closet, the door of which was closed. She stopped. She looked at the door.
The door of the equipment closet had a small piece of masking tape on it, halfway down, on which someone — Wes — had written, in his all-caps lefty print, thermostat — leave alone, j knows.
Joanna had been adjusting the lobby thermostat sometimes.
She had been doing it badly. Wes had finally taken a piece of tape and labeled the door.
It was such a Wes thing.
She felt, briefly, a small clean flare of fondness in her chest, and she did not, in this moment, try to talk herself out of it.
She walked past the door.
She went home.
She did not, that night, take out her notebook. She did, however, sit at her kitchen table in the dark and look at the back of the notebook for a long minute, and put her hand on it, and close her eyes, and breathe.
On Friday the campaign had a Q&A panel at the rec center.
Then the dress rehearsal. Then the gala.
She had a folder in her bag. She had a notebook in her bag. She had a small kept stone under her sternum. She had a contract handshake she had given a man at the back booth of the Penalty Box twenty-three days ago.
She had not, in any of that time, made any decision that required her to take her hands out of her jacket pockets and reach for him.
She kept her hands in her jacket pockets.
She went to bed.