Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
NAOMI
Ididn't tell him about the lease.
I didn't tell him about the transfer, either, or the thirty-seven minutes on Pine Street, or the smell of my sister on his collar.
All week I carried the folded page around in my laptop bag like a stone in my shoe, waiting to figure out what I wanted to do with it.
Mostly, I think, I wanted it to stop being true.
On Tuesday at 12:15, Graham knocked on the glass wall of my office.
Our firm rented the second floor of an old textile building in Manayunk, all exposed brick and big factory windows with wavy glass.
Tess and I had built the partition walls ourselves one weekend with a borrowed nail gun, which was why none of them were quite straight.
My office was the smallest one, at the back, where the light was best.
He was holding a paper bag with grease spots on the bottom. When I just stared at him, he lifted it a little, like an offering.
"I was in the neighborhood," he said when I opened the door.
"You're never in the neighborhood."
"I'm in the neighborhood now." He held out the bag. "Number fourteen. No sprouts. Extra lime, extra basil. Broth on the side so the noodles don't go soft."
The pho place on Washington Avenue. We used to go every Sunday when we lived on Passyunk, and I'd ordered the same thing for twelve years without ever once having to tell him no sprouts.
"Graham."
"You don't have to talk to me," he said. "You can just eat."
He didn't wait to be invited in. He moved a stack of plant catalogs off my second chair, then seemed to think better of the chair and sat on the floor instead, his back against my flat file cabinet, his legs stretched across the old rug.
It was the way he used to sit on the floor of the Passyunk apartment, back when we only had one chair that didn't wobble.
He took out his own container. Number nine, brisket and tendon. He always said the tendon was the best part, and I always said it tasted like eating an eraser.
I sat on the floor too, because that was where he was.
When I poured the broth over my noodles, the steam hit my face, star anise, charred onion, a little fish sauce under it. My eyes watered. I told myself it was the chilies.
Taped to the wall above my desk was the grading plan for the Moat. He tipped his head back to look at it.
"Did they approve the underdrain?"
I looked at him.
"You said the district didn't want to pay for a perforated underdrain," he said. "Two weeks ago. You said without it the rain garden was just going to be a nicer puddle."
I had said that, at the kitchen island, on a night he'd been looking at his phone. I would have bet money he hadn't heard a word.
"They approved it," I said. "Yesterday."
"Good." He pointed his chopsticks at the plan. "That low spot by the gym door. Is that where the kids line up?"
"Every morning."
"So they'll be standing in it."
"Not after April."
He smiled and went back to his tendon.
For ten minutes nobody said anything important.
He asked about the orthodontist and his doomed maple.
When I told him the man now wanted a koi pond, on the roof, in the wind corridor, Graham laughed so hard he had to put his soup down.
Tess stuck her head around my door, saw the two of us on the floor, raised her eyebrows at me, then very tactfully disappeared.
His knee was touching mine. I let it.
He remembered the underdrain, I thought. A man in love with someone else doesn't remember his wife's underdrain.
Maybe there was a reason for all of it. Maybe there was a version where the lease, the keys, the fig all made sense.
Maybe he was helping her with something so humiliating she couldn't stand for me to know.
Money. Pills. Gambling. I'd read about women who ran up secret credit cards.
Maybe I'd built a whole building on a bad survey.
I wiped my mouth with a napkin and made myself say it lightly.
"You spilled her coffee. At that place on Walnut."
He winced. "Yeah."
"Did you buy her another one?"
"She didn't want it anyway." He tipped up his container to get the last of the broth. "They screwed it up. She orders an oat milk cortado and they put regular milk in it. She couldn't have drunk it. Dairy's been wrecking her stomach."
"Lila?"
"Since March." He said it offhandedly, fishing for a last piece of brisket. "She can't do any of it now. Milk, cheese, ice cream. She's lost eleven pounds since summer. The doctor thinks it's mostly stress, but the dairy thing's real."
My chopsticks stopped over the container.
When we were kids, Lila had lived on milkshakes, black-and-whites from the diner on Township Line.
She'd drink one in the car on the way home from every school play, every recital, every dentist appointment, the paper cup sweating in her lap.
When she was nineteen and a boy named Kyle dumped her, she ate a whole pint of mint chip on my apartment floor. I held her hair when it came back up.
I hadn't known she couldn't have dairy anymore. I hadn't known she'd been to a doctor about her stomach, or that she'd lost that much weight. I'd felt her shoulder blades at my mother's table and thought, she's thin. I hadn't thought about how thin, or since when, or why. I hadn't asked.
Graham knew the number.
"I didn't know that," I said.
"Hm?" He was already snapping the lid on his container, already moving on. "Oh. Yeah. She doesn't like to talk about it."
She talks about it to you, I didn't say.
His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He started to reach for it, then stopped halfway and put his hand back on his knee. It buzzed again, and he didn't look at it.
That should have made me feel better. But his jaw tightened a little with every buzz. He was not checking his phone for my sake, the way you don't scratch a bug bite for someone else's.
On the third buzz, he stood up.
"I should go," he said. "I've got a two o'clock."
"Where?"
He met my eyes. "The office. Actually the office. You can call Mark."
"I'm not going to call Mark."
"You can, though." He collected his trash, then mine, and balled up the paper bag in his fist. He bent down, hesitated, and kissed my forehead. His lips were warm from the soup. "I miss you, Nay."
"I'm right here."
"I know." He straightened up. "That's what's so bad about it."
I listened to his footsteps on the old wooden stairs, heavy, then lighter, then the steel door at the bottom banging shut.
I stayed on the floor. My pho had gone lukewarm. The noodles had soaked through and gone soft, the way they do if you wait too long. I ate every one of them. Then I leaned back against the flat file where his back had been. The metal was still a little warm.
Tess came in without knocking and sat down next to me on the floor in her good black pants. Without saying anything, she handed me half of her oatmeal cookie.
"Did you know Lila can't eat dairy?" I said.
Tess frowned. "Your Lila? Milkshake Lila?"
"Since March."
"Huh," Tess said. "No. How would I?"
I broke the cookie in half again without eating it.
"Graham knew," I said.