Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
NAOMI
For a week after the Thai food, we were very polite to each other.
Graham came home by seven every night and loaded the dishwasher. He asked about my day in a careful voice, the one people use on someone recovering from surgery. We slept in the same bed with a strip of cold sheet down the middle that neither of us crossed.
On Thursday Lila texted me. Sorry sorry crazy week!! Call you soon, love you. Two red hearts and a crying-laughing face that made no sense in context. I didn't answer it.
The next Tuesday I had a noon meeting in Center City with a client who wanted a rooftop garden on a condo building at 17th and Walnut.
He was a retired orthodontist who kept saying the word "Zen," and what he wanted was a Japanese maple on a twelfth-floor roof in a wind corridor.
I spent forty minutes explaining, in more and more gentle language, how the tree would die.
When I came out of his lobby at 12:50, the sun was bright and cold. The wind was coming down Walnut like it had somewhere to be. I turned up my collar to wait for the light.
Across the street was a coffee shop with a long front window, Café Laurel, all white tile and hanging plants, the kind of place that charged fourteen dollars for toast.
Graham was sitting in the window.
I knew the back of his head before I knew anything else: the gray at his neck, the navy quarter-zip I'd given him for Christmas, his shoulders hunched over a small marble table. Across from him sat my sister.
The light changed. People moved around me into the crosswalk, and I stayed where I was.
Lila was crying, and not the way she cried at movies, dabbing prettily.
Her whole face had crumpled, her mouth pulled down, a napkin wadded against her nose.
Her hair was in the clip again. Between them on the table was a closed manila folder with Graham's hand flat on top of it.
As I watched, he reached across with his other hand and laid it over hers.
My fingers were stiff from the wind when I took out my phone.
Where are you?
I watched his phone light up on the marble. He read the message with his hand still on Lila's, then picked up the phone and typed with his thumb.
Mine buzzed in my palm.
Conshohocken. Site meeting till 2. You ok?
I read it twice. Across the street, he turned his phone face down on the table, slid a fresh napkin toward my sister, and touched her wrist with two fingers before taking his hand back.
I crossed against the light. A cab honked, and I didn't look at it.
There was a bell on the café door that jingled when I pushed it open. Inside, it smelled like steamed milk and burnt sugar. A barista with a septum ring looked up and said, "Hi, welcome in!" with enormous cheer.
Graham turned around.
He got up too fast, and his thigh caught the edge of the little table. It lurched. A small glass tipped over and rolled, spreading milky coffee in a pale sheet across the marble, over the folder, down onto the floor in a thin stream.
"Shit," Lila said, grabbing the folder. Coffee dripped off one corner as she shoved it into her tote bag without looking.
"Nay." Graham's voice came out strange. "Hey."
"Hi."
"This isn't—" He stopped, gripping the back of his chair. "Conshohocken got pushed."
I held up my phone with the screen facing him. He looked at the timestamp. Two minutes ago.
"I sent that before," he said. "Before it got pushed."
It was such a bad lie. My husband negotiated for a living. He'd once talked a city zoning board into a nine-story building on a lot zoned for six, and he could lie to a room full of lawyers without a flicker. Now here he was, lying to me like a teenager caught smoking behind the garage.
"You're standing in the coffee," I said.
He looked down, stepped back, and his shoe made a tacky sound peeling off the floor.
The barista hurried around the counter with a rag. "Oh no, no problem, I've got it."
Lila was wiping her face with the heels of her hands, her mascara running in two gray tracks. She looked the way she used to when our mother caught her sneaking back in through the laundry room window, the window I'd left unlocked for her.
"I asked him to meet me," she said. "It's my fault."
"What's your fault?"
She looked at Graham.
That look was what did it. Not his hand on hers, not even the lie. It was watching my sister look to my husband for permission to answer a question I'd asked her.
Graham shook his head, barely, a quarter inch.
"Nothing," Lila said. "It's nothing, Naomi."
"You're sobbing in a coffee shop. That's not nothing."
"I'm having a bad day."
"Then call me."
"I did call you. You were busy."
"When?"
She opened her mouth and then shut it again.
The barista was on her knees mopping around Graham's feet, keeping her eyes carefully on the floor. The whole café had gone quiet in that particular way where nobody looks and everybody listens. A man at the register had stopped with his card halfway to the reader.
On the marble, the tipped glass had come to rest against the napkin dispenser with a little pale, grainy foam still in the bottom. Oat milk. I knew what oat milk foam looked like, because Tess drank it by the gallon.
"Can we talk tonight?" Graham had lowered his voice. "At home. Please."
"I have a crew waiting in Fishtown."
I didn't. The crew wasn't scheduled until Thursday.
"Naomi—"
"Enjoy your meeting," I said. "In Conshohocken."
The bell jingled over my head on the way out, and its cheerful little sound followed me onto the sidewalk.
I walked without knowing which direction my car was in, the wind blowing my hair across my mouth.
I'd gone two full blocks down Walnut before I realized it was the wrong way.
I stopped in front of a bank and caught my reflection in the window, a tall woman in a camel coat with a laptop bag, her face completely blank.
My phone buzzed. Graham.
I'm so sorry. Please let me explain tonight.
A minute later: I can't explain all of it. But I can explain some.
I put the phone in my coat pocket and walked the two blocks back up Walnut on the other side of the street, where I wouldn't have to pass the window.
My car was in the garage on Sansom. The attendant had to bring it down from the fifth level, so I stood by the booth breathing exhaust while I waited.
Once I was in, I sat with both hands on the wheel.
The garage was dark and cold, loud with other people's engines.
Part of my brain went right on working the way it always did, collecting, sorting, putting things in order.
A deadbolt. A security bar. A kitchen box.
A new number saved under one letter. Twelve-forty in the morning.
A manila folder he'd kept his hand on like it belonged to him.
The look my sister gave my husband, and the shake of his head.
I started the car and drove to Fishtown anyway, to a site where nobody was waiting for me. For an hour I walked the chain-link perimeter of an empty lot with my hands in my pockets. There was nothing there to measure. I measured it anyway.