Chapter Fifty
Cait
She saw the table before she saw him.
He had opened the door and she had come in and was already past him and into the flat before the lamp light hit the walnut and she stopped.
It was oval. It was walnut. It was in the space between the kitchen and the west-facing windows where the folding table had been in March and where nothing had been since, and it seated four comfortably with room for two more, and it had the specific quality of a piece of furniture that had been chosen for what it was rather than what it cost.
She stood looking at it for a moment.
"You bought a table," she said.
"You said I needed one."
"In February."
"I know." He came to stand beside her, looking at the table the way they both sometimes looked at the west-facing windows: as a thing worth looking at. "I wasn't ready in February."
"And now."
"Now I know what kind of table it needed to be."
She looked at him. He was watching her with the directness she had catalogued since November, the attention that was not performance, and underneath it something that had been building since the parking lot and the bar and the key in the flat box and that was now, in this moment, simply present: full and clear and not managed.
She put the wine on the counter. She put her hands at his face, both of them, the way she had done in the kitchen in October when the sauce was catching and everything was easier than she had made it, and she kissed him with the walnut table behind her and the lamb in the oven and the west-facing windows going dark with the May evening.
He kissed her back with his arms around her and she felt the accumulated weight of it, six months and three hundred and forty jobs and eight meetings before the first dinner and a folder with handwritten tabs and cold coffee and a parking lot and a bar on Randolph Street and Sunday mornings in the city and the specific sound of his footsteps on the stairs at eight-forty every morning, all of it present in the room, all of it in his hands at her back.
She pulled back.
"I brought something," she said.
She had left it by the door. A canvas bag, not the work one, a different one, older.
She picked it up. Inside: three books she read often enough to want nearby, the green cup from the small office desk which was hers and which she had taken when she left the plant, a photograph of her father at a union meeting in 1994, young and certain, which she kept on every desk she worked at.
She set them on the counter. She looked at him.
"Not moving in," she said. "Still Pilsen. But some things belong in two places."
He looked at the three books and the green cup and her father's photograph. His face did the thing it did when something had reached him before he could manage it, the composure fractured slightly, the stillness broken open.
"Yes," he said. "They do."
She put the green cup beside his on the counter. Two cups. She looked at them for a moment and then looked at him.
"The lamb smells ready," she said.
"It is."
"Then we should eat first."
"Yes," he said. He was still looking at her with the thing she had stopped being able to name because it was too large for a single name. "We should eat first."