Chapter 6
SIENNA
“Don’t get up,” Patricia says, and the screen door bangs off the shingles hard enough to rattle the window over the sink.
I am not getting up. I am standing at the counter with a wet plate in my hand, and she is already past me with a bottle of wine in one fist and a casserole dish held against her hip by a dish towel.
“It’s store-bought,” she says.
It is not store-bought. It has a lattice on it. Nobody at the store has ever done that to a potato.
“Barbara’s parking,” she says. “She takes eleven minutes to park. Nancy is walking up from the road because she says the gravel is good for her, which is a lie she tells to avoid being driven anywhere by Barbara.”
She sets the dish on my stove without asking where anything goes. She has been coming here since the first summer the cottage was mine, including the afternoon she helped me carry a mattress up the outside stairs and would not let me take the heavy end. She has never let anybody forget it.
I texted her on Sunday. Two lines. I’m at the cottage for a while. Is the club still Thursdays? She wrote back inside a minute, and then she waited for a reason to come, which for Patricia is a feat of restraint on the order of a moon landing.
Barbara comes in with a tin. Nancy comes in behind her with nothing at all, which is her position on hostess gifts and has been for as long as I have known her, and she takes the chair nearest the window, because it is hers.
Nancy’s eyes go to my left hand and remain there for one beat too long.
“Do we need the good wine or the very good wine?”
“Whichever one asks fewer questions.”
“That would be whiskey.”
Patricia sets the bottle on the counter. “I brought what was open.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is,” Nancy says.
Barbara lifts the tin. “I brought brownies.”
Nancy nods. “Barbara understands emergencies.”
That is all anyone says about the ring.
Barbara has brought enough brownies for a wake.
She unpacks the tin onto a plate, narrating as she goes, and every layer holds something I like.
The lemon brownies with too much zest. The dense chocolate ones with the cracked tops.
She sets the plate beside the stove, where I will have to walk past it.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re thin.”
“I’m the same.”
“You’re thin in the face,” Barbara says, which is a category of thin that cannot be argued with, and cuts me a corner of the casserole before I have sat down.
Patricia pours. Nancy holds her hand over her glass for a second, then takes it away, and Patricia fills it to the same line as everybody else’s.
The cottage has not held this much noise in years. The sound comes off the low ceiling. With one hand on the back of the chair, I check the wine, the plates, and the casserole.
“Sit down, Sienna,” Patricia says without turning around.
I take the chair.
They talk about the roof on the community hall. They talk about a dog that has been getting into somebody’s chickens. They talk about Patricia’s Ryan, who is currently called The Cardio.
“You said his name was Ryan,” Nancy says.
“He answers to both.”
“Does he know he answers to both?”
“He’s thirty-five, Nancy. His financial plan is apparently to remain hot.”
Barbara laughs into her wine and then apologizes to the wine.
Nancy sets her glass down. “Patricia put that app back on my telephone.”
“You needed it.”
“I have removed it twice. She has installed it three times. She considers this an ongoing discussion.”
“You like looking.”
“I like window-shopping. Then one of them messages me and I delete the app.”
Patricia points at her. “There is a man in the next town with a boat and all of his own hair.”
“I saw him.”
“And?”
“I don’t want to bring one home. I just like to know what’s in stock.”
Laughter rolls around the table like a wave. I laugh before I can stop myself, and the sound surprises me enough that I laugh again.
Barbara puts a second slice of casserole on my plate. Cade used to order for the whole table in the first months, and I had decided that was a kind of attention because I wanted it to be.
“Saved you another corner,” Barbara says. “You always liked the crispy bits.”
I pick up my fork and eat it while it’s hot.
They orbit me for an hour. Nobody comes at me directly and nobody quite leaves me alone, and the conversation keeps arranging itself in a circle with a hole in the middle where the question is.
Patricia tells a long story about her second husband and the boat trailer, which is a story I have heard, and which she tells because it is about a man behaving badly in a way that is safely twenty years old and funny now.
Barbara asks whether I have been down to the market yet, which is Barbara asking whether I have left the house.
Nancy asks if the screen door still sticks, and when I say it does, she says good, because a door that announces people is worth more than a door that just works.
I get up twice. The first time I get the good glasses down off the high shelf and Patricia says the everyday ones are fine and puts the good ones back herself, on tiptoe, at sixty-five.
The second time I start clearing plates that still have food on them, and Barbara takes the stack out of my hands with the patience of a woman removing scissors from a toddler.
“Sit,” she says.
I sit down, already reaching for another plate. “I’m sitting.”
“Your ass is sitting. The rest of you is still hosting.”
Nobody asks why I stayed away so long. There were texts, but it was never the same as this. The drive was ninety minutes I never had. There was always something of Cade’s that came first.
Barbara catches me up on the books they’ve read, spending most of her time on the terrible ones. She remembers every cover and none of the titles. Nancy supplies those, though she disagrees about which books were terrible, and soon they’re arguing.
I listen to them disagree, relieved enough that my eyes sting. I thought I would have to explain two years of being absent before I could sit here like this again. Barbara just wants to know what I’m reading.
Barbara cracks first. She doesn’t look up from wrestling with the corkscrew, her tone deliberately casual. “Are you staying through the winter, sweetheart?”
The table does not go quiet, exactly. It thins.
“That depends,” I say, “on whether the boiler and I can come to terms.”
They laugh. Patricia laughs loudest and longest, on purpose, picking up the bottle to splash another inch into Barbara’s glass before the quiet can settle back in.
The boiler is fine. I arranged its servicing by phone every spring, paying invoices from a kitchen ninety minutes south while I pretended I was never coming back. Two years of paying to keep an empty house warm, just so the pipes wouldn’t burst while I played house with Cade.
Nancy is watching me. She opens her mouth, the shape of the real question forming, before Patricia cuts in, loud and sudden: “So. The book.”
Nancy closes her mouth and picks up her glass.
“I’m forty pages in,” I say. “I don’t have standing.”
“Nobody at this table has standing,” Patricia says. “Barbara has been happily married for forty years. She is useless to us.”
“I contribute,” Barbara says.
“You contribute optimism. It’s a disability.”
The man in the book has insulted her family over dinner, and she has decided to believe every ugly thing she hears about him. So far, neither of them has asked a useful question. Patricia has almost finished. Nancy has finished, but won’t tell us whether they improve.
“He’s no Darcy,” Patricia says.
“You liked Darcy better after you saw him wet,” Nancy says.
“It helped.”
“And the hand,” Barbara says.
“Oh, God, yes,” Patricia says.
“Fine,” Nancy says. “The hand.”
I’m nodding with all of them, grinning into my wine.
“I still think the man in our book is shy,” Barbara says.
“He told her she had an annoying sister.”
“She does.”
“So do I. I wouldn’t thank a man for pointing it out.”
Barbara picks the burned edge off a brownie. “John likes my sisters.”
“John turns on your side of the heated mattress pad.”
“Every night,” Barbara says. “I never have to ask.”
I look down at the bird on Patricia’s wine label. I used to lie awake beside Cade, cold, wanting to move closer. I never knew whether he would welcome it, and I couldn’t bear to find out he wouldn’t.
“Does she at least tell him off?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” Nancy says.
“Good.”
“Don’t encourage her,” Barbara tells me. “She’s marked the page.”
“I want to read it aloud,” Nancy says.
Patricia reaches for the bottle. “Let me refill everybody first.”
They go at ten, which is late for this street. Barbara hugs me the way she hugs, both arms, no announcement, and says she is leaving the tin. Nancy stops on the top step and looks out at the water, and says the air is better up here and always was, and goes down the steps without holding the rail.
Patricia is last. She stands in the doorway with her keys already in her hand, and the screen door propped on her hip, and she is not smiling.
“We’re not going to ask until you’re ready,” she says. “But when you are, I’ve got two divorces’ worth of notes.”
Then she is heading down the gravel, telling Nancy to get in the car. Nancy is still protesting when the door shuts. I listen to them pull away before closing the screen door. It catches, and I have to tug it shut.
The kitchen is loud with everything that just left it. The dish is still on the stove. I pick it up and stand there with it.
My phone goes off on the counter.
I set the dish down and reach for it before I can pretend I wasn’t waiting for him to say something that means I matter.
Dish comes back full or don’t bother.
Under Patricia’s name is his. That’s fine. I’ll be out of the house.
I put the phone face down, then slide it into the drawer with the menus. I get a fork and eat the casserole cold, standing at the stove.
I do not know what to do with a man who can say that’s fine about losing me and are you safe in the same breath.