Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
NAOMI
Tess's guest bed did have cat hair on it. It also came with the cat.
His name was Frijol. He was enormous and gray, missing half of one ear. Sometime Saturday night he climbed onto my chest and lay down like a sandbag. I let him stay there.
On the nightstand my phone kept lighting up. I'd turned the sound off, but the screen still glowed over and over, throwing blue light on the ceiling. Graham. Graham. Graham. Lila. Graham. Mom. Lila. Lila. Graham.
Sometime after midnight the calls stopped, and a single text came through.
Graham: I'm not going to keep calling. I don't want to make this harder. I'm here when you want to talk. Whenever. However.
I turned the phone face down. The cat purred against my sternum like an idling truck.
On Sunday morning Ben made eggs, standing at the stove in a Temple sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants with a spatula in his hand.
Their son Mateo wandered down, looked at me sitting there in yesterday's green dress, said, "Hey, Aunt Naomi," as if I were at their breakfast table every Sunday at nine, and left with a banana.
"How do you like your eggs?" Ben asked.
"However you're making them."
"No," Tess said from the table, holding her coffee in both hands. "He asked how you like them."
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. It was such an ordinary question.
"Soft," I finally said. "Over easy. Hot sauce. The green kind, if you have it."
"We have it," Ben said, cracking two eggs into the pan.
They were perfect. I cried a little into the hot sauce at the yellow table, and nobody said anything about it. Tess slid a napkin over without looking up from her crossword.
My mother called at eleven. I let it go to voicemail and then listened to it anyway, because I have never once in my life managed not to listen to my mother's voicemails.
Naomi, it's your mother. I don't know what that was last night. Your sister is devastated. Graham went to so much trouble. He was on his feet all day. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. I think you owe everyone an apology. Call me.
I deleted it, then went into the deleted folder and deleted it from there too.
Lila had texted nine times.
Nay please
Please call me
I didn't know. I swear I didn't know.
I thought you liked those things. I really thought that.
Please. I need to explain something. It's not what you think.
I didn't read the rest.
It's not what you think. The thing was, I believed her. Sometime in the night, with the cat on my chest and the ceiling going blue, I'd stopped thinking my husband was sleeping with my sister.
I kept seeing his face at the dining room table.
He'd carried those plates out like a man bringing gifts, and he'd watched me take each bite the way he'd watched me come down the aisle.
A man in love with my sister wouldn't cook her entire favorite dinner for my birthday and then stand there glowing, waiting for me to be happy.
He hadn't been hiding anything at that table. He'd thought he got it right.
I lay there with that until the cat got too heavy to breathe under.
On Monday I went to work, because I didn't know what else to do.
Tess drove. I was wearing her jeans rolled twice at the ankle with a sweater of Ben's.
I spent the morning at the Moat with Mr. Hollis and the excavator operator, a young guy named Dre who apologized every time the machine beeped.
They'd pulled up the asphalt. The courtyard was a raw brown pit now that smelled like wet clay and diesel.
At recess a row of sixth graders hung on the chain-link fence to watch the excavator. One boy asked Dre if he could drive it. Dre said no, so the boy asked again, louder, as if maybe the problem was Dre's hearing.
At noon I sat in Tess's car in the school parking lot, not eating the sandwich she'd packed me, when my phone lit up in my lap.
Graham: It wasn't the food. I know that much. I don't know the rest yet. I'm trying to.
I read it three times.
I thought about the salad plate, how he'd watched me push the beets aside. For twelve years his fork had come across the table and taken them without his even looking. He hadn't needed to look. His hand had just known. At some point, his hand had stopped knowing.
I thought about him standing in the dining room with my mother's scarf in its tissue paper on the sideboard behind him. I thought you two liked the same things. He'd said it like an explanation, like a reasonable mistake, like the two of us were a pair of shoes.
For six weeks I'd thought I was losing him to her, and I'd braced for that. That kind of leaving has a shape. You can pick it up and hold it.
This didn't have a shape. He hadn't gone anywhere. He'd stayed right there in the house, making the coffee, kissing my forehead on his way out the door.
Tess knocked on the car window, and I rolled it down.
"Dre wants to know about the gravel depth," she said. Then she saw my face. "Or Dre can wait."
"Dre can wait."
She came around and got in on the driver's side but didn't start the car. We sat there together watching the excavator bucket lift and drop in the pit where the kids used to line up.
"Lila called me," Tess said. "Twice. I didn't pick up."
"Thank you."
"Your mother called me too."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. It was very educational." She picked at a loose thread on the steering wheel cover. "Graham hasn't called me. Not once. I figured he would. I figured he'd be on my porch Saturday night pounding on the door."
"He said he wouldn't."
"I know. I just figured he'd do it anyway." She glanced over. "Men usually do."
She dug around in her bag and held out a business card between two fingers.
"Ben's cousin," she said. "Family law. She's not a shark. She's just good."
I looked at the card without taking it.
"I'm not saying call her today," Tess said. "I'm saying put it in your wallet."
"Tess."
"You'd make me do it if it was Ben. You'd have made me a folder with tabs."
She set the card on the dashboard, where it rode face up all the way back to Manayunk. When she parked, I got out without it. She picked it up and slid it into my coat pocket without a word. I let her, because I was too tired to fight over a piece of paper.
I looked down at his text again. I'm trying to.
On Tuesday night I lay in Tess's guest room with Frijol wedged against my hip and scrolled back through my messages with Graham. It took a long time to get to July, and I kept going.
In June his texts were long. Leaving now.
Want Thai or should I do the pasta thing?
Also I saw a guy on Walnut walking a pig on a leash, it was wearing a sweater, I'll tell you about it.
In early July: Home by 7. Need anything?
In August: Running late. Sorry. In September: Late.
Most days in October, nothing at all. Then Sorry about last night.
Then the painter's tape across the kitchen door, which wasn't a text, but I thought about it anyway.
I watched the messages get shorter as I scrolled, like a creek in August. Nobody notices the day it goes. There's just a morning when you look down and see rocks.
I put the phone face down on the blanket. Frijol stretched out one enormous gray paw, set it on my arm, and left it there.