Epilogue — Lena
The house smells like rosemary and woodsmoke. A year ago I wouldn’t have believed one word of that sentence about my own life.
The rosemary is because Connor has learned to cook a new thing and it involves an unreasonable amount of it.
The woodsmoke is because we have a fireplace that draws badly and he refuses to accept this and lights it anyway, every time, all autumn, and every time the kitchen gets a bit hazy and everybody pretends not to notice.
There are six of us around a table that seats four comfortably.
Marisol’s brought a chair up from the basement and is sitting on it like a queen.
Ruth has been in my kitchen all afternoon and has reorganized one of my drawers without asking.
Lidia is holding a glass and telling Ruth about a property in Charlevoix she wants somebody to go and look at, and Ruth is saying mm in a way that means she’s already decided to go.
And Sophie is at the end, sitting down, laughing at something with her hand over her mouth.
Sophie made me a coffee on the worst morning of my life. She was twenty-two and she called me Mrs. K in a voice with nothing in it but kindness while a man at the next table filmed me over his phone, and I left every note in my purse in her tip jar and walked out and didn’t go back for a month.
She works weekends on my front desk now.
She’s the best hire I’ve made. She looks up before people get to the desk, and you can’t teach that.
I’ve watched her hand a key to a woman who came in off a late train and lift the bag off her shoulder without being asked, and I had to go and stand in the office.
“Say the thing,” Marisol says to her. “Tell them the thing.”
“It’s not a thing.”
“Tell them.”
Sophie goes pink. “The first week, a man came in and asked if the owner was around. And I said she’s upstairs in the linen room, and he said no, the owner, and I said yes, she’s upstairs in the linen room.”
Lidia puts her glass down.
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all year,” she says.
Connor comes back from the kitchen with the second dish and stands there holding it while everyone’s still laughing, and I catch his face before he’s put it down.
He’s not in the story and he isn’t trying to be.
He’s just standing in a smoky kitchen holding a hot dish, looking at a table of women who like each other, and there’s an expression on him I never saw once in six years of the other life.
My throat goes warm and tight watching him.
Happy, then. Both of us. Still strange to say.
“Sit down,” Marisol tells him. “You’re hovering.”
“I live here.”
“Barely,” she says, and it’s a lie and a joke and also her way of saying she’s forgiven him, and he knows it, and he sits down.
He serves badly and nobody mentions it. Ruth passes plates like she’s running a service line, Lidia tells him the wine is better than he deserves and he agrees, and under the table his knee finds mine and stays there through the whole loud smoky length of the meal.
Diana calls on a Tuesday in November.
I’m in the car outside the hardware store with a box of cabinet handles on the passenger seat, and the phone lights up with a number I don’t have saved and never will, and I sit there and look at it ring twice before I answer it.
“Lena.”
“Diana.”
There’s a silence. I let it go on. I’ve learned that from her, actually, and I don’t think either of us finds that funny.
“I won’t keep you,” she says.
“All right.”
“The reopening.” A pause exactly long enough to be deliberate. “I should have come.”
It comes down the line flat, from a woman who has never in her life said a sentence like that to anybody, into a car park outside a hardware store. My pulse goes loud in my ears.
I could make it easy. I feel the pull of it, this whole trained reflex to say oh, don’t be silly, it was chaos anyway, and hand her back the ground she’s just given up.
“Yes,” I say. “You should have.”
Another silence. Longer.
“Yes,” she says.
That’s it. She doesn’t argue and she doesn’t explain and she doesn’t tell me about her calendar, and I sit in my car with my hand on the wheel and my heart going.
“How is he?” she says.
“He’s well. He’s the same. He’s got a mortgage and he talks about it constantly.”
“Does he.” Something moves in her voice and gets put away again. “And the building?”
“Full most weekends. The roof’s a nightmare.”
“They always are.” A beat. “The Halstead will be worse. That corner floods.”
“I know. We’ve had somebody out.”
“Good.”
And then neither of us has anything, and the whole thing sits there.
“I’m not going to make you a promise on this phone,” I say.
“I would not want one.”
“But you can call again.”
I hear her take a breath.
“Thank you,” Diana says, and hangs up before either of us can spoil it.
I sit in that car for a while with the cabinet handles on the seat beside me and my hands not quite steady on the wheel. She called, and she said should have, and today that’s enough.
I tell Connor that night, on a Thursday, before I tell anybody. He listens all the way through with his hands still on the table.
“How do you feel?” he says.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s allowed.”
“She asked how you were.”
He looks down at his plate for a moment.
“Okay,” he says, and his voice isn’t quite right, and I reach over and put my hand on the back of his neck and leave it there.
Later he follows me up the stairs, which he does most Thursdays now, and I let him catch me on the landing.
“Door,” I say.
“Nobody’s here.”
“Connor.”
“There is nobody in this house,” he says, walking me backward into our bedroom with both hands on my hips, “and I’m not shutting a single door in it ever again,” and he means it about more than the door, and I stop arguing.
He gets my sweater off over my head and drops it somewhere and looks at me the way he does now, out loud.
“You’ve got paint on you.”
“I’ve got paint on everything.”
“I like it.” His mouth’s on my throat. “Get on the bed.”
“Say please.”
“No.”
I laugh and he laughs into my neck and then it stops being funny fairly quickly, because he puts his hand between my legs over my jeans and presses and my knees genuinely go.
We’re better at this than we were at twenty-nine and thirty-four and every year in between.
Nobody warns you about that either. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
He takes his time and narrates it the whole way, and when he finally gets inside me I’m so ready for it that I make a noise into his shoulder and he says my name like it’s been knocked out of him.
Afterward I’m lying half on top of him with the light still on and the door still open, listening to the house tick.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“I love you.”
“Mm.”
“I love you, I’m not going anywhere, and the fireplace is fine.”
“The fireplace is not fine.”
“The fireplace is fine,” my husband says to the ceiling, “and you are going to have to bury me with that opinion.”
The note’s on the wall in the kitchen.
It’s in a plain black frame, hung low, next to the light switch where you can’t get past it. It’s a torn corner off a grocery pad, and it’s my handwriting, in a hurry, and it’s soft at the folds from being carried around in a coat pocket for a long time.
THURSDAY. You and me. I’m serious this time.—L
I wrote it on a morning in October before any of this happened, and I stuck it on the fridge in a house I don’t live in anymore, and by that night I was in a ballroom in a borrowed dress.
He took it off the fridge when he went back for his things. He never told me. I found it in his wallet in the extended-stay place, gone furry at the creases, when I was looking for a receipt, and I had to sit down on the end of that awful bed and hold it.
Marisol thinks framing it is the most unbearable thing we’ve ever done. She says so every time she comes over.
She also looks at it every time she comes over.
The following spring, on a Friday evening in May, I stand on a sidewalk on a bad corner and look up at a sign.
The Halstead took the better part of a year and every dollar Ambrose left and most of a loan and one genuinely frightening argument about a staircase that had us not speaking for the better part of a weekend.
The corner floods, exactly as advertised.
The boiler is the same boiler, and it still sounds like a man being murdered, and we kept it, and there is a small brass plate next to it explaining why.
It’s still a small hotel. Nobody builds them that size anymore, and that’s exactly why we kept it that size.
The sign went up this afternoon and I haven’t let myself come and look at it properly until the light went gold.
THE HALSTEAD, in a plain serif, the same weight they’d have used in 1962.
And underneath, smaller:
L. BENNETT · C. KINGSLEY
My name first. Not because I fought for it. Because my husband went to the sign people on his own, months ago, and told them, and then didn’t mention it, and I found out standing on this sidewalk this evening.
I’ve been looking at it long enough that my neck hurts. Connor came out with me and then stepped back off the curb, hands in his pockets, letting me have it to myself.
“Well?” he says.
“It’s crooked.”
“It is not crooked.”
“It’s low on the left.”
“Lena.”
“I’m joking. It’s perfect. Don’t look at me.”
He’s laughing at me. I can hear it. I keep my face pointed at that sign with my eyes streaming and I let him laugh.
Then he says, “Can I put my hand on your back?”
And it’s that, more than the sign, more than my name on it, that undoes me on a public sidewalk in May. He still asks.
“Yes,” I say.
So he puts it there, warm, flat, at the small of my back, and I lean into it.
We stand there a while. Cars go past with somebody’s radio trailing after them, and a man walking a dog looks up at the sign because we are, and then looks at us like we’re a pair of idiots, which we are.
Behind the glass, Ruth is doing something to the desk that I will have opinions about tomorrow. Somebody’s got the fire going too high in there. There’s a girl on the front steps in a uniform shirt she hasn’t got used to yet, holding the door for nobody, practicing.
“Good building,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You want to go in? Ruth’s put the fire on.”
“In a minute,” he says.
So we stay out on the sidewalk a minute longer, under my name and his, in front of a small hotel on a bad corner. The gold’s going off the brick and the lamps are coming on inside, and my keys are in my pocket, an ordinary weight against my hip.
And I stand there with my husband’s hand at my back, and I am, at last, entirely and unmistakably home.