26. Lena
LENA
Andrew brings the finished drawings on a Thursday morning, and it’s the first genuinely good day I’ve had since October.
The light’s doing something extraordinary in the lobby.
It’s one of those cold clear mornings where the sun comes down Rowan Street at a low angle and gets all the way in through the front glass, and there’s a plasterer whistling somewhere upstairs, and the radiator has started working for reasons nobody can explain.
He comes in with a tube under his arm and a coffee in each hand and sets both coffees down on the counter before he’ll let me touch the tube.
“Wait,” he says. “Sit down. I’ve been driving around with these for days and I want to see your face.”
We roll them out on a sheet of plywood over two sawhorses and put a level and a coffee cup and my keys on the corners, and I look at my grandmother’s building.
It’s all there. The stair landing opened back up so the window puts light into the corridor again.
The blue tile in the ground-floor washroom repaired and not replaced, marked on the drawing with a note that says match, don’t match perfectly.
The desk staying where it is, and I know that cost him a fight with the accessibility consultant.
The fourth floor with the wall gone and the balcony doors put back the way they were before somebody boarded the transom, and no bedroom up there, and no apartment, ever again.
And down in the corner of the elevation, in that small square handwriting: Bennett House, 1911. Restoration—Phase One.
Bennett House. Not the property. Not Rowan Street. The name, printed on a drawing that’s going to go to a city office and sit in a drawer long after everyone who loved her is gone.
I put my hand over my mouth, and Andrew, God bless him, goes and looks out the window at the street for a while.
“It’s good,” I say, when I can.
“It’s very good,” he says to the window. “I’m not being modest about this one.”
We go through it properly for most of the morning.
He argues with me about the corridor lighting and I win, and I argue with him about the back stair and he wins, and he writes on the drawings in pencil the whole time, a thing he told me at the beginning he only does when he’s not precious about a job.
Then he rolls them and doesn’t hand them to me.
“Erin’s going to run it from here,” he says.
I go still.
“She’s running most of it already,” he says. “She’s on site four days a week and you like her better than me anyway, and she’s the one who caught the joist thing. It’s her project. She should have her name on it.”
“Andrew.”
“And it means—” He stops. He turns the tube over in his hands and tries again. “It means you and I aren’t in a parking lot behind a diner again. I’d rather say that badly now than have us both work around it for a year.”
I stand there with my hands flat on the plywood and my stomach dropping, because I’ve known this was coming since the parking lot and I’d been letting myself believe we’d both be adults and never mention it.
“I saw the interview,” he says.
“Everybody saw the interview.”
“Yes.” He puts the tube down. “I watched it in my kitchen with a plate of pasta and I said several unkind things out loud to a man on a screen who couldn’t hear me. Then I finished eating and I washed the plate and I sat there a long time.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I’d like to. I’ve been carrying it around for a week and it’s heavy.”
So I shut up.
“You’re not choosing between him and me,” Andrew says.
“I know that. I’m not—” He shakes his head and starts over.
“What I mean is, you’re choosing between him and the version of you that never risks it again.
And that version’s a perfectly good life, by the way.
She’d be safe. She’d have this building and a job she’s good at and a man like me who’d be careful with her, and she’d never once have to stand in a ballroom and find out something like that in front of everybody she knows. ”
My eyes have gone hot and I don’t stop it.
“I lose either way,” he says. “If you pick her, I’d be the safer of two doors, and I’d know it, and I’d start hating both of us in about a year.” A short breath. “I’d just rather lose to the right opponent.”
“That’s not fair to you.”
“It’s completely fair to me. I did all this to myself in a parking lot.” And he almost smiles. “I’m forty-one and I made a pass at a married woman during the worst month of her life. I’ve had a long conversation with myself about it. I came out of it about how you’d expect.”
I have to look at the ceiling.
“You are so much better than what happened to you,” I say, “and I’m not going to be able to say that without crying, so I’m saying it and then we’re moving on.”
“Noted.”
“You know I liked you.”
“I do—” It goes wrong in his throat. He clears it and starts the sentence again.
“I do know that. It’s why I said it in the parking lot.
I’m not sorry I asked. I’m sorry about the timing.
” He picks up his coffee, and it’s cold, and he drinks it anyway.
“And if you ever want to hear the version where the timing was different, don’t ring me. Because I’d answer.”
I laugh, badly, with my hand over my face.
“Right,” he says. “Erin will call you Monday. She’s going to fight you about the corridor lights and she’s going to win, because she’s better at it than I am and she doesn’t care about being liked.”
“Andrew.”
He stops at the door.
“Thank you for the window,” I say. “In the linen closet. Nobody else would have gone looking.”
He nods once and goes out onto Rowan Street with his hand up.
The door swings shut, and the cold that came in with it hangs around my ankles, and my throat closes.
I stand at the plywood with both hands on the rolled drawings and cry, quick and ugly, into my own sleeve.
For him, mostly, and a little for the safe door, because part of me did want it, and that part cries hardest. Then I wash my face in the blue-tiled washroom and go upstairs and get on with my day, and the ache sits under my breastbone all afternoon.
There’s nothing to be done about it, so I don’t do anything.
Saturday, Marisol takes me dress shopping. That’s the phrase we use. It doesn’t begin to cover what actually happens.
“Explain the brief again,” she says in the car.
“Something his daughter would hate.”
“A dying man told you to buy a dress his daughter would hate.”
“He said wear something my daughter would hate, and he said it while a nurse was trying to take his blood pressure.”
Marisol puts both hands on the wheel and looks straight ahead.
“I love him,” she says. “I’ve never met the man and I love him.”
The shop’s on the good side of the park, one of those places with three dresses on the floor and everything else in the back, and I have been in it before with a card that wasn’t mine. The girl who takes us through doesn’t recognize me, or she’s very good, and either way I’m grateful.
Marisol treats the whole thing like a heist.
“Nothing beige.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Nothing with a jacket.” She’s flicking through a rail with two fingers like she’s checking produce. “Nothing that says I have been through a difficult time and have come tonight to be gracious about it. We’re not doing gracious.”
“I have to actually stand in a room in it.”
“You have to walk into a room in it. Different job.” She holds something up, looks at it, and puts it back with real contempt. “That one’s for a woman apologizing.”
We end up with an armful in the fitting room and I hate nearly all of them.
Then there’s the red one.
A deep, serious, unembarrassed red, floor length, with a neckline that is frankly a decision, and when I come out of that cubicle Marisol makes a noise I’ve only ever heard from her at a boxing match.
“That’s it.”
“It’s a lot.”
“It’s the dress, Lena.”
“Diana Kingsley thinks red is for people who want attention.”
“Yes,” Marisol says. “Buy the dress.”
She goes off to argue with somebody about shoes, and I stand there in front of the mirror in a red dress in a shop on the good side of the park, and for a second I let myself see it.
Me, in this, walking into that ballroom on my own feet with nobody’s arm to hold, past every single person who watched me leave it.
Then I go back down the fitting corridor to change.
She’s standing at the end of it.
The corridor’s narrow and carpeted and lined with those heavy curtained cubicles, and Diana Kingsley is at the far end of it in a wool coat with her bag over her arm, perfectly composed, as though she’d arranged to meet me here and I’m the one running late.
My stomach drops to somewhere around the carpet. My hands go cold all at once, and heat starts climbing the back of my neck before either of us has said a word.
I’m in the red dress. Barefoot, on a carpet, with my own clothes hanging on a hook behind me and my phone in the pocket of my coat somewhere in that cubicle, and my heart goes so hard I feel it in my ears.
“Lena.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Not long.” Her eyes go over the dress once, top to bottom, and come back up, and she says nothing about it at all. The heat reaches my face anyway.
“Your friend is at the shoes. She’s very loud.”
“She is.”
“I will be brief and then I will go,” Diana says. “I would rather not do this in front of an audience. Neither would you.”
I could walk past her. The corridor’s narrow but it isn’t that narrow, and there’s a shop girl at the other end of it, and there is nothing on earth stopping me except the old habit of standing still when this woman starts talking.
I fold my arms so she can’t see my hands.
“Say it, then.”
“I want to buy Bennett House,” Diana says.
The floor tilts a little.
“It’s not for sale.”
“I am aware of what you have said publicly. I am not making an offer to a market. I am making one to you, in a corridor, where neither of us has to perform.” She adjusts the bag on her arm.
“I will pay whatever you ask. People assume I am speaking loosely. I never am. There is no number you could say to me in the next minute that I would decline. You may take a moment and pick one.”
I stare at her.
“You want the building.”
“I want it purchased,” she says. “The distinction matters. You will work it out in a moment.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“The company has no use for the building. Nobody in the family has thought about Rowan Street since before you were married. It is a poor property with an expensive roof.” Her voice doesn’t move at all. “I want the deed out of your name, and I am indifferent to what it costs me.”
It sits there on the carpet between us.
“Why?”
“Because it’s a leash on my son,” she says. “And I dislike watching him wear one.”
That’s when I laugh, and it comes out of me before I’ve decided anything, high and completely wrong for the room, and I watch it land on her.
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m never anything else.”
“You. You want to talk to me about leashes.” My hands are shaking and I let them.
“You had a woman pull a tape out of a locked room. You picked the night. You had somebody working out the tax on taking his house back while I was sleeping on a pull-out sofa in a stranger’s apartment with no toothbrush, and you’re standing in a fitting corridor telling me you don’t like watching him wear a leash. ”
Her chin lifts, barely, and it isn’t shame.
“You’ve been told a great deal recently,” she says.
“I’ve been told everything.”
“Then you’ll have noticed nobody has told you the last part.” She comes a step closer and stops, and lowers her voice to the register that has been ending conversations in this city for thirty years. “Name a number, Lena. I would genuinely rather you did.”
“No.”
“Then let me ask you a question instead, and you can think about it in the car.”
“Don’t.”
“Because you haven’t yet asked yourself,” Diana says, “what it costs my son to keep it in your name.”