Chapter 23 #3
Remy's phone lit up beside her plate for the third time that hour. "It’s Lauren." She was already standing. "Two minutes. If I don't call her back, she does the thing where she gets passive-aggressive for two weeks then pretends like it never happened."
She went out through the propped doors and walked a slow circle on the sidewalk with one arm across her middle.
Astoria moved her glass a quarter circle on the table. "Remy told me about you," she said. "Ten days ago, during a visit to my home. Twenty years I've known Cordelia, and I had to hear it from her daughter."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It isn't your doing." She said it without malice, and then she was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to tell you something. You can do what you like with it."
"All right."
"At Eleanor's funeral, she did all of it.
The church, the readings, the food, the cars.
She worked out where a hundred and forty people would sit so nobody who'd fought would have to look at each other.
" There was a tinge of sadness in her voice.
"She stood at that door for two hours and thanked every person who came, by name, and asked after their children.
She never sat down. Not through the service, not after. "
Wren didn't say anything.
"I found her in the car at nine that night, engine off, answering emails." Astoria stopped. She moved her water glass another quarter turn and looked at the table long enough that Wren thought she'd finished.
"I sat in the passenger seat for forty minutes.
She was perfectly pleasant to me the whole time, but she was not present in that car.
" She turned the phone over and back. "I asked if she was all right.
She said yes. I accepted it because it was taking the easy way out.
I have never told her what I saw in her eyes that night, and then I watched as the next eight years passed her by. "
The room had gone gray at the front and somebody behind the counter started stacking plates.
Astoria looked up. "You've seen her do it. Haven’t you? Gone somewhere else in her mind."
Wren looked at the table. "Yes."
"Recently?"
"Yes."
Astoria didn't ask what it had been, or when, or what it had cost her. She turned her glass again and let the noise of the room come back in. "She isn't going to stop, you know," she said. "It kept her alive for eight years. It isn't going to stop being true because she's happy."
She had been rehearsing it for three weeks, what she'd say when she finally said it. If she finally said it. The opportunity to talk about it hadn’t come up yet, but now that the moment was finally here, Wren found herself struggling over her words.
How she would say it that actually conveyed what she meant.
She wasn’t much for grand, sweeping speeches, but she wanted to get this one thing right.
She untangled the mess of thoughts. She wanted Cordelia anyway.
All of her, including the woman in the car with the engine off, escaping into work instead of feeling grief.
Forty minutes, Astoria had said. Wren had done ten hours.
She had spent three weeks believing that Sunday was Cordelia deciding what Wren was to her.
It hadn't been a decision at all. Cordelia had gone off somewhere and left behind a woman who was courteous and got a great deal done, and Wren had stayed in the room with her the whole day being useful, waiting for her to come back.
She could still say all of it. Cordelia would listen to every word and agree with her, because Cordelia was fair and would want to be fair about this too. And at the end, Wren still wouldn't have the thing she actually wanted, which was for that day not to have happened the way it did.
Remy came back and sat down and said Lauren wanted the deck reordered, all of it, tonight. Wren waited patiently for Remy to vent about the phone call and how long it’d take for her to finish the work. Then she took a deep breath.
"I love her," Wren said.
Remy went very still. "Okay." Then, too fast: "That's… okay. Good. Well, I knew. Obviously I knew, I'm not an idiot." She sat back. "God, she's going to be so weird about this."
"Remy," Astoria said.
"I'm being normal."
"You're not."
"I'm being as normal as I'm going to be." Remy pushed her plate an inch away and left it there. "Sorry. Go on."
"I've never said it out loud, not even by myself." Wren turned her wrist over and pressed her thumb into the leather under the watch. "I wanted to say it somewhere it counted."
"So, then what's the problem?" Astoria said.
"Me." She paused. "I do a thing. I've done it since I was twenty-three.
I find a woman who's— No. That sounds like I choose it and I don't." She started again.
"I become useful. To somebody good at something.
And useful is the wrong word; it's smaller than what I mean.
" She stopped. "When I left Vivian, my first boss, I spent my last two weeks training the woman who replaced me.
On my own time. Nobody asked me to." She turned the glass on the table.
"I made her a binder. Tabs and everything.
" She stopped. "And then I went home, and I didn't know what to do with myself for a month. I never leave anything for myself."
Nobody said anything. At the counter, the coffee grinder started and shut off a few seconds later.
"So if I go up there," Wren said, "I have to be able to ask her for things."
Astoria waited.
"That Sunday, while we were at the coastal house working together, she went off wherever it is she goes.
I was with her all day, and the only thing I wanted the whole time was for her to look up once and see me standing there.
" She stopped. "I could have said so. I had ten hours to speak up, but I didn’t.
I spent the whole day working and fetching her food. "
"Why not say it?"
"Because she could have said no." Wren looked at her.
"You can't turn down somebody useful. There's nothing there to reject because there’s nothing personal in it.
You just get told you did well." She turned the glass again.
"I've never asked a woman for anything I hadn't earned first. Not Vivian. Not any of them."
"And can you now?" Astoria asked.
"I don't know. I've never tried it," Wren said honestly.
"You know, I sat in my car outside your building for ten minutes on Thursday," Remy said. "Working up to do it. I said the whole thing out loud first so I couldn't chicken out."
"You didn't sound like it."
"No," Remy said. "I’d been up since four that morning, and I’ve had a lot of practice masking to sound fine." She reached for her water and caught the edge of the glass with her wrist. It tipped over and spread across the table toward the wall.
Wren snatched the napkin off her lap, attempting to dry the spill, and Remy joined her, blotting the table with her own napkin. Astoria flagged Lavender for a cloth, and they quickly had the table dry.
They all sat back down, and Astoria watched her over the rim of her glass. "Well," she said. "Welcome to the club. We meet on Thursdays."
Remy laughed and Wren joined in, laughing harder than the joke deserved, but she finally felt relaxed in her body for the first time in longer than she could remember. Astoria smiled and asked Remy what exactly Lauren wanted changed in the presentation.
Remy made a small despairing noise. "Eighteen slides. She wants them in her inbox by seven."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight." She reached for her bag.
Wren had built that deck in March. She knew what Lauren wanted moved and it would take her forty minutes, and she had nothing at all to do tomorrow.
She felt the familiar urge to jump in and rescue people rise, through her stomach and into her throat.
She swallowed it down and was surprised it hurt more than she thought it would. "You'll be done by one," she said.
"Optimistic." Remy stood up and kissed Astoria's cheek. "Wish me a fast night."
Lavender cleared the plates. "Stay as long as you want," she said. "I'm here till eleven."
Wren and Astoria stayed till ten, talking.
By eleven the next morning, she had rearranged the shelf beside the green chair twice, which was not a job that needed doing even once. She sat down in the chair and only lasted nine minutes before she stood up and busied herself with other household chores. At three the phone rang.
"How long have you been awake?” Lillian asked, evidently hearing the exhausted restlessness in her voice.
"Half past four."
"Well, that would be your grandmother’s influence,” Lillian tutted. “Up before the birds her whole life and never once a thing to do at that hour." Something rustled on the other end. "I've started the Nadine Gordimer book again. I'm not enjoying it, but I'm going to finish it out of spite."
"How far in are you?"
"Ninety pages. Don't ask me again next week. I’ll probably be in the same spot."
Wren carried the phone into the kitchen and put away the dishes she had washed earlier.
Lillian's tomatoes had blight and she was pretending they didn't. Her middle daughter had called twice in a fortnight, which was a record and probably meant something.
The Aldridge girl from two streets over had had twins, both girls, both enormous.
Twelve months of Sundays since the funeral, or thirteen, and Wren had never once had to wonder whether Lillian would call her. She had thought that Lillian was keeping a promise to Millie. It had never occurred to her that it was Lillian keeping her. She shut the cupboard.
"Can I tell you something?"
"Go ahead."
"I've been doing something my whole life, and I only worked it out three weeks ago. I make myself necessary to people so they can't get rid of me. And then I never ask them for anything, because if I never ask, nobody ever gets to say no and reject me."
Lillian didn't answer.