CHAPTER 3
Practical Choice
°°°
Sunday dinner at the Holloway house ran on a schedule as reliable as tide tables — six o'clock sharp, pot roast unless it was somebody's birthday, and a seating arrangement that had calcified sometime around Lexie's sixteenth birthday and never once been renegotiated.
Her mother at the head nearest the kitchen.
Her father across, doing the crossword he brought to every meal like a shield.
Bree, Lexie's younger sister by two years and taller by four inches, in the chair that had somehow, through nothing anyone could point to as an actual decision, become the good chair, the one that faced the window instead of the hallway closet.
Lexie sat in the hallway-closet chair. She always had.
"You look tired," her mother said, which was how her mother said hello, a diagnosis delivered before a greeting, the same clinical opener she'd used since Lexie was small enough to still find it comforting instead of exhausting. "Are you eating enough? You look thin in the face."
"I'm eating fine, Mom." She wasn't thin in the face.
She was, if anything, exactly the same face she'd had at every Sunday dinner for the past decade, but her mother had a talent for finding the one adjustment worth commenting on regardless of the actual evidence in front of her, and Lexie had long since stopped expending energy correcting it.
"Bree got the promotion," her father said, not looking up from seven-across, the announcement dropped into the room with the casual weight of a man who assumed everyone already knew and was simply confirming it. "Regional now. Whole southeast territory."
"That's amazing, Bree." Lexie meant it, mostly, the complicated way you can mean something and also feel a small cold stone settle somewhere behind your ribs at the same time.
Bree sold pharmaceutical equipment, had a laugh that filled rooms the way Lexie's never had, and possessed the effortless prettiness that made saleswork look less like a skill and more like a natural resource she'd simply been born standing on top of. "Seriously. That's huge."
"It is huge." Her mother beamed the way she beamed at Bree's accomplishments, a full-wattage thing Lexie had learned to recognize from a slight distance, like weather she watched happen to someone else. "And how's the clinic, honey? Still doing the — the walk-in thing?"
"Urgent care. Yeah. Same as always."
"That's good. That's steady." Her mother said steady the way other people said safe or fine , a word doing quiet work to describe something it was politely declining to call impressive. "Steady's good. Somebody's got to be the reliable one."
There it was. Lexie had heard some version of that sentence at approximately four hundred Sunday dinners, and it had never once, not a single time, been intended as an insult — her mother believed it, genuinely, as a compliment, the way you might compliment a load-bearing wall for not falling down.
Reliable. Steady. The practical choice in a family that had never quite figured out how to praise competence without implying it was competence's job to make up for everything Lexie wasn't.
"Speaking of steady." Bree, mercifully or not, changed the subject, though not in a direction that made things easier.
"Any men in the picture, Lex? You've been suspiciously quiet on that front since—" She didn't finish it.
Didn't need to. The unfinished sentence had a name, and the name was Danny — no, wrong Danny, Lexie caught herself, an unrelated Danny, her Danny, the one who'd spent eighteen months telling her she was wonderful and then left for someone whose body didn't require, in his words, quite so much managing.
"I'm fine on that front," Lexie said, which was true in the sense that she was not currently in crisis about it, and false in every other sense that mattered.
"You say that like it's a good thing." Bree said it lightly, no malice in it — Bree rarely meant malice, which was somehow harder to sit with than if she had, because it meant the carelessness was just the ordinary texture of how she moved through the world, unbruised by things that would have bruised Lexie for a week.
"You're twenty-nine, Lex. I'm not saying you need a ring by thirty, I'm just saying you used to want that stuff.
The whole house, the yard, the — you used to talk about it. "
"I still want it." She did, was the thing.
She wanted it enough that she'd stopped saying it out loud somewhere around the Curtis years, because wanting something out loud in this family tended to invite a review of why she didn't have it yet, delivered with love, which somehow made it worse.
"I'm just not going to manufacture a relationship to check a box on somebody else's timeline. "
"Nobody said manufacture." Her mother, mild, refilling water glasses that didn't need refilling, the busywork she reached for when a conversation edged somewhere she'd rather it hadn't.
"We just worry, honey. You give so much of yourself to that clinic.
We want you to have someone giving some of it back. "
It was, Lexie thought, the single most accurate thing anyone at this table had said about her in years, and it still landed like an accusation instead of the tenderness it was probably meant as, because it arrived stapled to the same old file — you give too much, you get too little, and somehow that's a character flaw and not a description of everyone else's behavior around you.
"There's nobody?"
There was a man, actually, whose handwriting she now knew backward because she'd checked her own card stock twice to see if she'd written her number legibly enough, whose text messages she'd reread more times than she wanted to admit to a Sunday dinner table that would extract maximum commentary from the fact of them, let alone the content.
This is Tank. Testing. Four words that had made her laugh out loud, alone, in her kitchen, in a way that had startled her own cat.
"Nobody worth reporting," she said, and reached for the pot roast, and let the subject die the way subjects always eventually died at this table — not resolved, just outlasted.
She checked her phone twice during dessert, which she told herself was normal, the kind of thing anyone did, and which she knew, in the more honest back rooms of her own head, was not normal for her, specifically, a woman who'd spent the better part of a decade keeping her phone face-down at family dinners because nothing on it had ever felt urgent enough to compete with the performance of being present.
Nothing new. She put it away. Ate her pie.
Endured forty more minutes of her mother's gentle, well-meaning, entirely oblivious commentary on the shape of Lexie's life compared to the shape of Bree's, and drove home a little after nine with the hollowed-out tiredness that always followed these dinners, a fatigue that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with three decades of practice at being the reliable one.
Her phone buzzed as she was unlocking her apartment door.
Not Tank. A number she didn't have saved, though something in the area code snagged at her before she'd even opened the message — a Cedar Falls prefix, but not one she recognized offhand, which in a town this size was itself a small strange thing.
hey. its curtis. i know its been a while. i been thinking about u, wanted to see how ur doing
She stood in her doorway for a long moment, key still in the lock, reading it twice.
Curtis Banning had not texted her in two years.
Not since the breakup, which hadn't been dramatic, exactly — no scene, no slammed doors, just a slow erosion of a relationship that had started with him telling her she was the most grounded woman he'd ever dated and ended, eighteen months later, with a conversation in which he'd used the phrase not quite what I pictured, long-term in reference to her body in a tone he clearly believed was gentle.
She hadn't cried about it, not really, not after the first week.
She'd filed it, the way she filed most disappointments, under things that confirmed what she already suspected rather than things that surprised her.
Two years of silence. And now this, a text with no punctuation and worse spelling than she remembered him having, arriving on a random Sunday night for no reason she could identify.
She didn't answer. She let herself inside, locked the door behind her — an instinct she registered a half-second after doing it, the deliberateness of it, when normally she just turned the lock without thinking — and set her phone on the counter, screen down, the same gesture she'd used on the clinic's counter three days ago when the same name had shown up uninvited on the same small glowing rectangle.
She told herself it meant nothing. People resurfaced. Exes got nostalgic, or lonely, or drunk, or bored, and fired off a text they'd regret in the morning, and it rarely meant anything beyond the fact that it was a Sunday night and Curtis Banning had apparently run out of better things to do.
But she found herself checking that the deadbolt was thrown a second time before she went to bed, which wasn't like her, and lying awake a few minutes longer than usual turning over a small, unplaceable unease that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the quality of a silence broken for no reason anyone had bothered to explain.
Her phone buzzed once more before she fell asleep. She almost didn't look.
This is Tank, it said, still four words, still exactly as much as he apparently allowed himself to send unprompted. Hope your Sunday wasn't as boring as mine.
She smiled before she'd decided to, the unease from twenty minutes earlier not gone, exactly, but crowded out for a moment by something that took up more immediate room in her chest.
Family dinner, she typed back. Boring wasn't really on the table.
That bad?
Just the usual. Older sister's the exciting one. I'm the reliable one. You know how it goes.
The reply took a minute, long enough that she wondered if she'd said too much, offered a piece of herself he hadn't asked for and wouldn't know what to do with. Then it came, four words again, which she was starting to suspect was simply the shape of the way he talked, economical, nothing wasted.
Reliable's not an insult.
She read it three times. It shouldn't have landed the way it landed — it wasn't much, four plain words from a man she'd met once, for twenty minutes, over a stranger's bandaged arm — and yet something in her chest did an unfamiliar thing, some small architecture shifting half an inch to the left, making room for a possibility she hadn't let herself consider in longer than she could easily name.
She didn't answer that one either, not right away.
She set the phone on her nightstand, screen up this time, and lay in the dark turning both messages over — Curtis's, careless and unwelcome, and Tank's, four words that had cost him something to send and had cost her, in turn, a small unguarded piece of the wall she kept up at family dinners — and fell asleep before she'd decided what, if anything, either of them meant.