Chapter 8
SIENNA
“This crank is going to kill me.” Patricia wrenches it sideways. “My second husband had the same ambition. Hold this.”
She puts the handle in my palm. It has come off in her hand, which is not her fault. The shaft spins freely and catches nothing. It did the last time I put the umbrella away.
“It’s stripped,” I say.
“Everything’s stripped. That’s not a reason.” She has both arms around the pole now, up under the canopy, and her voice comes out of the folded canvas. “Push the collar up while I turn.”
Her car is pulled up beside the porch with the trunk standing open. She arrived twenty minutes ago with a bottle of wine, a rubber mallet, and a doorstop shaped like a cat, and has treated the umbrella as the only emergency worth discussing.
I push the collar up. She turns. The mechanism inside the pole makes a sound like a coin going down a drain, and the canopy opens a grudging few inches and stops.
“There,” Patricia says.
“That’s four inches.”
“Four inches more than you had. You want everything at once. That’s a young woman’s disease.”
I go in for the penetrating oil and we spray the shaft and wait the amount of time the can says to wait, which Patricia announces she has never waited before.
She tells me about her second husband while we stand there.
He had a boat he could not afford and a laugh he used on other people. She got the boat.
“And Ryan?” I ask.
“The Cardio,” she says. “He told me dessert is a choice.”
“It is a choice.”
“Don’t take his side.” She takes the handle back off me and fits it onto the shaft and hits the end of it once with the rubber mallet, and something inside the pole gives up, and the whole umbrella opens over us in one motion like a held breath let go.
The shade drops across the deck and across both of us. Under it, Patricia is pink in the face and enormously pleased.
“That’s not stripped. That’s persuaded,” she says.
We try for a while to close it again. It will not close. We leave it open and go inside.
The screen door is the next thing. It has stuck in the frame since I got here, swollen from the damp, and I have been shouldering it, and after a while I stopped noticing that I shoulder it.
Patricia notices. She stands in the doorway and makes me open and shut it twice while she watches the bottom corner.
“It’s swollen,” she says. “It’ll shrink when the weather dries and swell again with the wet and you’ll be doing this forever. Where’s the toolbox?”
“Hall closet, bottom shelf.”
She comes back with it and a stub of white candle from the kitchen drawer.
“Wax the edges,” she says. “Every June. My first husband’s father taught me. Only good one in the family.”
She takes the top hinge screws out one at a time and pushes wooden matchsticks into the holes and drives the screws back into the matchsticks, and I run the candle along the door edge while she works.
The door swings and latches. It makes a small sound when it catches, a click and then nothing, and I open it and let it go a few times to hear it.
“Stop that,” Patricia says.
She talks the whole time she puts the toolbox back, which I have decided is a technique. Barbara has asked her twice this week whether I am eating and has been told twice that I am and does not believe it. Nancy has not answered a single message from her about the app Patricia put on her phone.
“She’s looking,” I say.
“She’s just committed to never letting the merchandise know.”
Patricia finds her keys beside the toolbox.
“Your gutter needs clearing before the next storm. I’ll bring my ladder.”
At the door, she works the new latch once, admiring it, then goes.
I make coffee and take it to the chair by the window. The novel is still on the arm where I left it. I pick it up and find my place.
The first page would not hold when I got here. Reading had been mine before the marriage, and I had not understood the marriage could reach it.
Today I turn several pages before reaching for my coffee. It has gone cold. I tuck my legs beneath me and keep reading.
In the book, she comes into the kitchen late at night. He puts down what he’s holding as soon as he sees her. They’ve been avoiding each other for days, but now he says her name, and she stays in the doorway, looking at him.
I read it again. He sounds glad she’s there.
In the first months Cade used to say my name coming in at night, with a small lift at the end of it, and I could not tell you the month it stopped.
I read the page again.
Nobody made me sign. My grandfather explained the covenant, the payroll, and the situation. He made sure I understood and gave me a week.
By then, I had been in love with Cade Belluomo for months.
It began at a lunch where he listened to my grandfather tell the hardware-store story again without looking at his watch.
He was the most handsome man I had ever sat across from.
Thick dark hair, a chiseled jaw, lashes I kept noticing whenever he looked down.
I could study him while he listened to my grandfather.
When those pale green eyes turned on me, I forgot what I had been about to say.
When he smiled, I smiled back before I could help it.
He was patient with my grandfather. When the waiter brought the wrong order, he was kind about it. And when my grandfather interrupted me, Cade waited until he finished, then turned back to me.
“You were saying?”
I had his attention. I wanted to keep it.
I went home thinking about him and never quite stopped.
So when my grandfather proposed the marriage, I said yes inside a minute and let him believe the speed was duty.
It was not duty.
I have never told a living person that. I have certainly never told him.
I knew about Ashley. What I did not know was what she still was to him.
I did not know she had broken something in him that I was never going to be allowed to reach.
I found that out slowly, after the wedding, after the first months.
I found it in the way he talked to her on the phone, the way his voice opened up for her in a way it never opened for me.
I found it the night I put on a dress I had bought because I thought he would like it and came downstairs and stood in the foyer while he looked at his phone, and I understood, all at once and far too late, that what I had taken for calm and steadiness was distance.
He could be kind to me without ever letting me close.
By then I was his wife, laying out his ties on Sunday nights and making his coffee before he came downstairs. He had never asked me to. I loved him, and I kept hoping he would notice how well I knew him and want to know me that way too.
He kept the agreement we made. For two years, I waited for him to want more than we’d agreed to.
I told myself I had known what I was agreeing to whenever I ate alone after planning dinner around him. I said it to Lauren once in a parking garage. She listened, and I kept explaining, as though she were the one who needed convincing.
I look down at the book in my lap.
He never yelled. He never lied. I never saw proof that he strayed.
I have been building a good man out of absences. Whenever someone asked about my marriage, I told them how lucky I was. I wanted to believe it. Sometimes I did.
I knew he didn’t love me when I married him. I thought that could change. I don’t know how much blame I deserve for spending two years hoping it would.
I’ve left him, and I still want him to love me. I wish leaving had put an end to that too.