Chapter 13 #2
"Iris." His voice was careful. Not guarded — careful, the way you handle something that might break. "Hi."
"Hi."
Silence. She could hear background noise on his end — a car door, the muffled sound of a street. He'd left the food bank.
"I saw my installation today," she said. "The soft opening at SAM."
"How was it?"
"It was good. The fourth panel is hanging slightly crooked."
A pause. "That sounds like it would bother you."
"It does."
Another pause. She pressed the phone harder against her ear. This was excruciating. Every sentence was a small negotiation, every silence a test of whether the next word would be the wrong one.
"I walked past the food bank," she said.
He was quiet for a long time. "Did you come in?"
"No."
"Okay."
"I saw you through the window. You were carrying a crate."
"Yeah. Canned goods. They got a big donation from a restaurant supply company. Mostly tomatoes and beans." He stopped. "Iris, I'm not — I don't want you to think this is a performance. I didn't know you'd be—"
"I know you didn't. That's why I'm calling."
She heard him exhale. Not a sigh — something more controlled, like a man managing himself carefully.
"I don't know what this is," she said. "I'm not calling to forgive you."
"I know."
"And I'm not calling because I saw you doing a good thing and now I think everything is fixed."
"I know that too."
"Then what am I doing?"
The question sat between them. She could hear the water lapping against the float beneath the houseboat, the faint creak of the dock lines.
"I don't know," he said. "But I'm glad you called."
She pulled her knees up onto the daybed. The glow-in-the-dark constellations were starting to appear overhead as the light faded — Constance's crooked Orion, her oversized Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper with one too many stars.
"Cleo told me you've been volunteering there for weeks."
"Since April."
"That's not weeks. That's months."
"Yeah."
"Why that place?"
"I drove past it one Saturday and they had a sign out front asking for help. I pulled over." He paused. "That's it. There's no strategy behind it. I just pulled over."
She believed him. She hated that she believed him — not because she thought he was lying, but because believing him meant something was shifting inside her, and she could feel it happening the way you feel a crack spreading through ice, slow and inevitable and impossible to stop once it starts.
"Do you like it?"
"I like that nobody cares who I am. Donna — the woman who runs the Saturday shift — she called me 'the tall guy who can't figure out the label maker' for three weeks before she asked my name.
" A small, self-conscious laugh. "It's the only place I go where people just tell me to do things and I do them. "
"That must be novel for you."
"It is."
Silence again. But this one was different — not tense, not strategic. Just two people sitting with the strangeness of talking to each other after a long time of not.
"How's therapy?" she asked.
"Hard. My therapist doesn't let me off the hook."
"Good."
"She asked me last week why I thought I was entitled to compartmentalize. The affair, the marriage, work — like they were separate accounts I could manage independently." He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't have an answer."
"That sounds right."
"It's not comfortable."
"It shouldn't be."
"No," he said. "It shouldn't."
She closed her eyes. The daybed smelled like cedar and the faintest ghost of turpentine, the permanent scent of the houseboat, the smell that had become the smell of her life after him.
Except it wasn't after him, was it? Not yet.
The papers were filed but not signed. The settlement sat unsigned on Elena's desk.
She'd been living in the space between the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and she'd convinced herself that the space was the destination.
"I miss things," she said. Not to him exactly.
To the dark, to the constellations, to whatever frequency they were both tuned to in this moment.
"Not the big things. Not the house or the parties or the — I miss reading in bed.
I miss the sound of you making coffee at five-thirty in the morning when you thought you were being quiet and you were absolutely not quiet. "
"The grinder."
"The grinder. Every morning. Like a small earthquake."
He laughed, and it was the laugh she'd heard through the food bank window — unguarded, slightly embarrassed. A human sound.
"I miss your pencil shavings," he said. "You'd leave them everywhere. In your hair, on the kitchen counter, in the bed. I'd find graphite dust on my shirts."
"You complained about that."
"I know. I was wrong to complain about it."
She pressed her lips together. Her throat was tight.
"Gavin."
"Yeah."
"I don't know if I can do this."
"Do what?"
"Any of it. Forgive you. Trust you. Try again. I don't know if I have it in me, and I need you to hear that before either of us makes this into something it's not."
"I hear you."
"I'm serious. This phone call isn't a door opening. It might be nothing."
"It's not nothing," he said quietly. "But I hear you."
She sat with that. The houseboat rocked gently. Somewhere on the lake, a boat engine cut out and the water went still.
"How crooked is the panel?" he asked.
"What?"
"The fourth panel. You said it was hanging crooked."
"A quarter inch. Maybe less."
"That would drive me crazy too."
She almost smiled. "Diana's having someone fix it Monday."
"Good."
The silence stretched again. She didn't fill it.
Neither did he. It wasn't comfortable exactly, but it wasn't unbearable either.
It was the first conversation they'd had since she'd left that felt like a conversation — not a negotiation, not a confrontation, not a chess move in a divorce proceeding.
Just two people who used to share a life, sitting with the wreckage of it, not pretending the wreckage wasn't there.
"I should go," she said.
"Okay."
"I don't know if I'll call again."
"That's okay too."
She hung up before she could say anything else. Set the phone face-down on the daybed beside her. Pulled Constance's old wool blanket over her legs, even though the evening was warm, because weight helped.
She was afraid.
Not of Gavin. Not of what he'd done or what he might do.
She was afraid of herself — of the woman who'd walked past a food bank window and recognized her husband, and felt something that wasn't anger.
Of the woman who'd picked up the phone and called him instead of calling Cleo, or Elena, or anyone else who would have told her not to.
Of the willingness she could feel taking root somewhere beneath her sternum, fragile and unwanted and absolutely, terrifyingly alive.
She'd spent months building walls. Good walls.
Necessary walls. She'd removed her ring.
She'd filed for divorce. She'd built a twenty-two-foot installation about erosion and survival and come out the other side with something she was proud of.
She had a life here — a real one, with work and friends and a kiln on the dock and bourbon in a canister labeled COURAGE.
And none of it had prepared her for the sight of him in a coat she didn't recognize, laughing at a joke she couldn't hear, smaller and more human than the man she'd married or the man she'd left.
The constellations glowed overhead. Constance had painted them wrong on purpose — the real ones are boring, she'd told Iris once, I like mine better — and lying here in the dark, looking up at a sky that existed nowhere but this ceiling, Iris understood her grandmother perfectly.
You could look at the actual stars, the real arrangement of the facts, and see only distance and cold mathematics.
Or you could paint your own version and find something warmer in the gaps.
She didn't know which sky she was looking at anymore.
She pulled the blanket tighter and lay there, listening to the water, afraid of what she was becoming willing to do.