Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
She didn’t call first.
She drove to his house on Wednesday at three-fifteen because that was when she went to Bernie’s house on Wednesdays, and she had missed one, and the missing had become louder than the reasons she’d given herself for staying away.
She parked at the curb. The porch light was off, which meant he wasn’t expecting anyone. The hedge needed trimming. The wind chimes were still.
She sat in the car for a minute with her hands on the steering wheel and her purse in the passenger seat and no bag of groceries, no jar of soup, no foil-wrapped chicken. She had brought nothing. She was the thing she was bringing.
She got out of the car and walked to the door and knocked.
It took him a moment. She heard the floorboard by the kitchen—the one that creaked—and then his footsteps, even now, unhurried. The door opened.
Bernie looked at her.
He was in a collared shirt and his reading glasses were on top of his head and he had a dish towel over one shoulder and the kitchen behind him smelled like coffee. He looked like he’d been in the middle of something and had stopped.
“Margo,” he said.
“Bernard.”
They stood there, the doorway between them, the porch light off and the afternoon light coming in sideways from the west.
“Can I come in?” she said.
He stepped back and held the door.
She walked into the kitchen. The flamingo cards were on the corner of the table. The tally was still on the fridge—she could see it from the doorway but she didn’t look at the numbers. The mugs were in the cabinet where she’d put them. The coffee maker was on, the carafe half full.
They stood in the kitchen. Margo on one side of the table, Bernie on the other. The afternoon light was on the floor between them—the rectangle she’d watched move across this room for weeks. It was at the table leg. Four o’clock light.
“I didn’t come for cards,” she said. “And I didn’t come because you had surgery.”
She put her hands on the back of the kitchen chair—the one she always sat in, the one across from his. She held the wood and looked at him.
“I need you to tell me what you meant,” she said.
“When you said I didn’t need to come anymore.
I need to hear what you were actually saying, Bernard, because I went home and I stood in my kitchen and I was angry and then I was something else and I have been walking around for days not knowing which one I am. ”
She took in a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling.
“My friends told me I’ve been slow. And I have been. I’ve been coming here three times a week and telling myself it was about the surgery and the cards and I didn’t let myself know what it was really about.”
Her voice had gone soft, but she kept going.
“So I need you to say it. Whatever it is. I need to hear it from you. Not from the Circle. From you.”
Bernie was standing at his side of the table. His hands were at his sides. He hadn’t moved since she started talking.
“Sit down, Margo,” he said.
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Please sit down.”
They sat, the table between them. The flamingo cards on the corner. The light on the floor.
“I wasn’t telling you to stop coming,” he said.
“I was telling you that if you came back, I wanted it to be because you wanted to be here. Not because I needed a nurse. Not because Eleanor’s schedule said so.
Not because you’d assigned yourself a job.
” He looked at her across the table. “I wanted you to come back for me.”
Margo’s hands were on the table. She pressed her fingertips together.
She looked at this man across the kitchen table — the man who had set his coffee cup where she could reach it for decades, who had stacked sandbags in the rain at midnight and never mentioned it, who had made the tea and shared the Sanders hot fudge and said “it’s not the chicken” at the door and let her walk away because she wasn’t ready and then waited while she got ready.
The kitchen was quiet. The rectangle of light on the floor had moved past the table leg. The refrigerator hummed. The flamingo cards sat in their box.
Margo reached across the table and put her hand on his.
It was not a large gesture. It was a hand on a hand. But it was Margo’s hand and it was Bernie’s hand and it was the first time she had touched him since the night his knee buckled on the sidewalk and she’d caught him and held on.
His other hand came up and settled over hers. Warm. Steady. The hand that had held flamingo cards and coffee cups and sandbags in the rain.
They sat like that for a long time.
The light moved from the table leg to the wall behind the stove. The kitchen turned the color of warm bread. Neither of them moved. Neither of them needed to.
After a while Margo said, “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Neither do I.”
“You seem like you know how to do this.”
“Not really. I’ve just had more time to think about it.”
She almost laughed. It came out as something smaller—a sound in her throat, a loosening.
“Same time Wednesday?” she said.
He looked at their hands. Hers underneath, his on top.
“Yes, please,” he said.
She didn’t leave right away. She sat with her hand on his and his hand over hers and the kitchen going gold around them. When she finally stood, she picked up the flamingo cards from the corner of the table and held them up.
“I’m still ahead,” she said.
“At cards, at least,” he said.
She laughed in a way that surprised her, and she set the cards back down and picked up her purse and went to the door.
“Margo?”
She stopped at the door and turned.
“Thank you for coming back,” he said.
She stood in the doorway with the late afternoon behind her and this man in his kitchen looking at her. She set her purse on the table by the door and walked back to him and put her hand on his face.
His skin was warm. His jaw rough under her palm. He closed his eyes and turned his head and pressed his lips to her hand.
They stayed like that for a second. Two people in a kitchen with the light going gold and the flamingo cards on the table, finally finding the shortest distance.
Margo picked up her purse and went to the door.
“Goodnight, Bernard,” she said.
“Goodnight, Margo.”
The door closed behind her. The drive home was short and she knew every turn. Keys in the bowl. The house quiet around her, but a different quiet than before—the kind that still had the warmth of a kitchen in it.
The studio was dark. The canvas on the easel. She stood in front of it and picked up the brush and held it, and the holding was different.
She set it down and went to bed. And for the first time in weeks, she slept.