Chapter Six
Six
On Mondays, Lev makes waffles. Everyone hates Mondays, he told me when he moved in. But everyone loves waffles.
It’s his way of turning Monday morning into something to look forward to, a ritual he started with his college roommates in Boston and kept up when he moved to Chicago for pharmacology school. Ava takes hers with extra butter and syrup, a detail Lev hasn’t forgotten even once.
It’s all very pure. Right now, it’s happening in my kitchen.
“Blueberry or chocolate chip, Mattie?” Lev looks at me over one shoulder.
“I don’t have time,” I mutter, sliding my laptop into the zip pocket of my suitcase. “I need to get to the office and then the airport.”
“But Waffle Monday,” Ava pouts. She’s in a brown sweaterdress with her hair tied in a bun, a #2 pencil stuck straight through it. “It sets the tone for the whole week.”
I glance at Lev, who raises his eyebrows to underscore what she’s said.
He has one hand poised on the handle of the waffle iron, the other tucked into the tied waistband of an apron embroidered with Waffle Whiz that he already owned when I met him.
He wears it for this express purpose and never else.
There were rituals in this apartment before Lev got here, of course.
The skeleton Ava’s school retired from an anatomy classroom and let her take home, who we named Kneecap and dress in a Santa suit every December, plastic menorah propped precariously in his ossified hands.
The way we walk to Montrose Beach on the first of every year to make our resolutions, watching the angry gray churn of the lake as we chatter against each other in the cold.
Or the smaller things, our informal habits—like having raccoon charcuterie for dinner (whatever scraps we can find in the pantry, artfully arranged on our two cutting boards) or watching The Mummy (1999) the day either of us start our periods (we’ve lived together so long, this is often the same day).
When Ava and Lev got engaged, I was the one who asked if she’d be moving out.
Not because I wanted her to; I wanted the opposite so badly I’d already spent every minute since the engagement missing her.
A preemptive sadness that was coloring our last months together, though there was nothing I could do to make myself stop.
I asked because I knew Ava would move out, and I also knew she didn’t want to bring it up with me herself.
The idea of it hurt, and Ava never wants to hurt me.
She and Lev had been talking for months already about buying a house.
Owning property was the sort of thing that had never occurred to me to want, because it felt entirely like something other people did—not people like Ava and me, in our Lincoln Park hidey-hole with its temperamental hot water and ancient brick walls.
But suddenly it was clear Ava had been dreaming of this, the kind of dreaming that’s less of a dream and more of a multistep plan.
Getting engaged was the first step. Moving in together to save money was the second.
I assumed Ava would go to Lev’s, or they would find a new place together.
The solution she brought to me was different: he’d come to us, and we’d all live together until the wedding.
We’d split rent three ways. It was a cost savings for everyone, and it kept the two of us together.
Another year, she’d told me. We’ll live together for a whole ’nother year.
Ava was giving me a practice run, I knew, for my future without her.
A long off-ramp from what would become, in her memory, “our childhood,” but just felt to me like my life.
It was the best option I had, even if it meant Lev’s razor drying out over the edge of our bathroom sink every morning.
His fish tank burbling in our living room.
The first time I suggested raccoon charcuterie with Lev around, he offered to buy us takeout instead—which wasn’t the point, but was also too generous to turn down. And since he moved in, I’ve obviously stopped announcing the first day of my period.
Those things are gone, along with so many other small pieces of my shared life with Ava. I like Lev, and I’d rather have the long off-ramp than be jettisoned completely from the highway, but they’re gone. Now, we have Waffle Mondays.
“I’ll take it to go,” I concede, finally. I’m already dreading the person I’ll be in ten minutes on the L, taking up too much space with my suitcase and trying to eat a waffle without touching anything germy. “Blueberry, please.”
Lev turns around on a nod, and Ava pats the barstool beside her. “My intrepid traveler,” she says, and Pancake slinks into the kitchen. “My worldly businesswoman.”
“I’m not leaving the States,” I tell her instead of sitting down. When I lift Pancake into my arms, she mashes the top of her head against my jaw and rattles out a long purr. “So I don’t know about worldly.”
“You’re worldly to me.” Ava licks syrup off her fork. “You anywhere but Chicago is too far away for my taste.”
Ava anywhere but the next room is too far for mine, but whatever house she and Lev wind up in will inevitably not share a wall with wherever I land as part of the fallout.
I’ve got to stop thinking of their wedding that way: a bomb gone off. But I know it’s going to leave this crater behind and me standing at the center of it, all alone. Meanwhile, Ava and Lev will be on their honeymoon in Hawaii.
“You’ll take care of Pancake?” I say, instead of any of that. Ava reaches out to give Pancake the ear scritches she loves best. Right side only.
“Of course I’ll take care of Pancake.”
Lev slides a plate in front of me, perfect blueberry waffle in its center. Then he tears a paper towel from the roll and folds it up under the lip of the plate. “Let it cool for a sec before you take it.”
Pancake and I both look up at him. Sometimes Lev feels like my dad: kind, reliable, always around. So nothing like my actual dad, rather like some archetype of one.
“Thank you,” I say, and he smiles.
“And you’ll take care of yourself?” Ava prods. “You’ll eat protein and drink something un-caffeinated at least once a day?”
I sigh, planting a kiss between Pancake’s whiskered eyebrows. “Fine.”
“You’ll sleep at least six hours a night?” Ava asks. “You’ll ignore Campbell Porter as much as humanly possible?”
I groan, and Ava cuts her eyes at Lev. Like they’ve discussed this without me, which I hate. He quickly turns toward the sink and starts doing dishes, as if that could make me forget that he’s here.
“I can’t just ignore him, Ava. We’re going to be together pretty much constantly for a month.”
“So?” She gestures across the living room at Lev’s fish tank. “You live with Nori and Maki and you ignore them every day.”
Lev laughs under his breath, and I shake my head at him. “I still can’t believe you named your fish after sushi.”
“Diabolical,” Ava agrees. “But my point stands.”
I stare at the tank, the two fat goldfish drifting past each other inside of it. Lev’s lucky Pancake is a pacifist.
“Campbell’s not a house pet,” I tell Ava. “He’s the Antichrist. He’s harder to ignore.”
“But you’ll try,” Ava says, standing. When she pulls me into a hug, Pancake squirms between the walls of our bodies. “Because that’s better than the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?”
Ava leans back to look up at me. “You scratch his whole face off or something, I don’t know. Prison, certainly.”
I roll my eyes and tip Pancake into her arms. Start wrapping my waffle in the paper towel. “Glad to know you think so highly of me.”
“I think the highest of you,” Ava says. “It’s him I don’t trust.”
“I’ll be on my best behavior,” I insist, reaching for my suitcase. I don’t trust Campbell, either: not his quick mind, not his clever mouth, not the way he held my gaze in that Four Seasons conference room like there was something certain and sinister between us. “But now I really do need to go.”
“Nooooo,” Ava whines, squeezing my wrist hard enough to hurt before letting me cross toward our front door. She holds up Pancake so their faces are level. “When will our husband return from war?”
Behind her, Lev raises a hand in farewell. “Safe travels, Mattie.”
“Thanks, Lev.” I let out a rush of breath, one hand on the doorknob, and look back at them.
Lev in his apron over his work clothes, soft eyes behind thick-framed glasses, so tall his head nearly scrapes the pendant light above the sink.
Ava with that pencil in her hair, the familiar way she’s always dressing up for her kids.
And their bodies tipped toward each other across the island.
A family, I think, and it tightens in my throat like choking.
“You’ll tell me when you land safe?” Ava asks, and I nod.
I can see it so clearly, their life without me.
Next school year, when I won’t be with Ava for the start of her first day, or for Waffle Monday, or for any other day.
Ava moving toward her dream and me moving toward mine and the widening space it’ll leave between us.
Maybe nothing left to stand on there at all.
“I love you,” Ava says.
“I love you,” I echo.
Ava loving Lev will take her from me. My parents loving each other led to ruin. All my life, love’s established itself as something unnecessary, at best, or hugely problematic, at worst. Loving Ava’s the only time it’s been anything good.
I wave at her with my waffle and step into the hall.
My stupid heart says, Not for much longer.
“This should be fun,” Greg insists. Though he’s quiet as a church mouse beside me, I can hear Dexter groaning internally.
We’re across from Greg at his desk, Iris leaned against the wall and our three suitcases lined up at the door.
“It’s work—and, if I know Lucia, it’s going to be hard work—but I want you to enjoy it. ”
The edge of Dexter’s jaw goes tight. His pride about moving on to the next round of the Wicksteed pitch lasted about an eighth of a second before he slid right back into misery about our month on the road.
Two weeks in Aspen, two in a remote town on the Northern California coast. A working vacation split between Wicksteed resorts is his nightmare; the more Greg tells him to enjoy it, the more furious he’ll get.
“When I worked on Wicksteed at OverComm, they always kept us on our toes.” Greg steeples his fingers, elbows propped on his desk.
Through the window behind him, Chicago is cast golden with honeyed September sunlight.
“They’re going to push you. Lucia’s whip-smart.
She’s going to want to see how you work together but also how you work with Slater—with people you might not like.
Wicksteed’s got PR partners, in-house producers, preferred vendors: all sorts of folks you’ll need to work with when we win this.
She’s going to pressure-test you.” His eyes slide from me to Dexter and back again.
“And she wants to know you can play nice.”
Campbell’s smirk wavers behind my eyes. Nice is the last thing I want to be, but I nod. “We’re going to kick ass.”
Greg smiles. “I don’t doubt it. And I don’t need to tell you this, but I’m going to anyways: an account like this would be huge for the agency.
” From the corner of the room, Iris nods deeply.
“We’ve been talking a lot at the leadership level about going after more agency-of-record work.
Wicksteed would be a big win for the three of you, but also for all of us at the Art Room. ”
My eyes flick over Dexter’s shoulder across the floor, where my teammates are tucked into their pods.
Headphones in, knickknacks strewn across desks.
Familiar faces in this place that feels so much like home.
I want it for me, and I want it for them, and I want it for Dexter—even if he can’t see the value in it himself.
“I don’t usually put too fine a point on this,” Greg says, “but there are things on the line if this all goes well.” He glances at Iris, then back at the two of us. “Promotions, leadership opportunities. Okay?”
It rattles in me like a held breath. I need a promotion so badly: money to afford my new life without Ava. A one-bedroom apartment for Pancake and me. Grocery funds for whatever I start eating on Monday mornings when Waffle Mondays aren’t something I get to be part of anymore.
“We aren’t trying to scare you,” Iris says from the corner, and I crane around Dexter to look at her. “You’re on this because you’re the best team for it. We trust you.”
“That’s right,” Greg says. “We believe in you two. And there’s no one better to support you than Iris.” He claps his hands, just once. “Let’s go get this win.”
It’s Campbell’s voice I hear, as we gather our suitcases and make for the elevators. As we load into a black SUV with its GPS set for O’Hare.
The low, lasting drawl of it. Like a fingernail down my spine.
May the best man win.