Chapter 5 #2
It was still there. They sat at a sticky table by the window and Amelia told her. Not all of it. Enough. Keisha listened with her elbows on the table and her mouth open, and when it was done she sat back and said, “Well, I hope you took the house.”
“I didn’t take the house.”
“Why not? Girl. Take the house.”
Amelia laughed, and it felt good, and Keisha didn’t know a single person in the circle and didn’t care to, and they ate two of everything and stayed three hours. When they left, Keisha hugged her in the parking lot and said, “Don’t do that again. Disappear. I mean it. I don’t care who you marry.”
Amelia called Jenny Tran that same night.
Jenny had lived across the hall from her in the Kirkwood building, years ago.
Jenny had a baby now, which Amelia hadn’t known.
That hurt more than she expected. She sat on the air mattress and listened to the baby fuss in the background and apologized, and Jenny said, “Stop apologizing. Come see her. She has your chin, which is weird, because she’s not related to you. ”
* * *
Jonah Cordero was on the second floor of the Foundation on Friday afternoon, when she went up to get away from the phones.
She knew him a little. He was the architect on the building work, and he’d been around since the spring, a quiet man with his sleeves rolled up and ink on his hands.
He ran a small firm. He wore good shoes and didn’t seem to notice anything else about what he was wearing.
She had never talked to him for more than a minute at a time.
He was standing in the middle of the unfinished room with a set of drawings, looking at a wall.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was up here.”
“You’re fine. I’m just staring at a wall. It’s most of my job.” He turned around. He had an easy face, not handsome exactly, but open. “You’re Amelia. The scholarship program.”
Not Mrs. Fletcher. Not Lucas’s wife. The scholarship program.
“That’s me.”
“I heard you got the Harlan. Tasha told the whole building. I think she told the mailman.” He smiled. “Congratulations. That’s a real one.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I mean it. My sister applied for one of those for her after-school thing in Savannah. Two years in a row. Didn’t get it either time.” He tilted his head at the wall. “You want to see something interesting? You don’t have to. Most people don’t think it’s interesting.”
She didn’t have anywhere to be. “Show me.”
He showed her the wall.
It was an ugly wall. Old brick behind torn plaster, with a big wooden beam running across the top.
He explained that the whole second floor was sitting on it.
That when the building was a cotton warehouse, a hundred years ago, the men who built it had put this wall right here, in the middle, because they knew exactly how much weight a floor full of cotton bales would put on it.
He showed her the marks in the brick where the old iron had been.
He showed her on the drawings where he was going to open the room up, and why he couldn’t touch this one wall no matter what the Foundation wanted, and what he was going to do instead.
He talked for an hour.
She didn’t mean to stay an hour. She kept meaning to go back downstairs.
But he explained things slowly and clearly and without talking down to her, and when she asked a question he actually stopped and thought about it before he answered.
When she asked why he couldn’t just put in a steel beam and take the brick out, he said, “Good question. You could. It’d hold.
But you’d lose the history of the thing.
I’d rather work around what’s already carrying the weight.
” Then he looked at her. “That’s a real question, by the way.
Most people don’t ask real questions. They ask the ones that make them sound smart. ”
He never once mentioned Lucas.
She waited for it. She kept waiting. Everyone mentioned Lucas.
For two weeks every conversation she’d had with anyone in the circle had been about Lucas, around Lucas, near Lucas, carefully not Lucas.
Jonah didn’t do any of that. She wasn’t sure he even knew.
Or if he knew, he didn’t think it was the most interesting thing about her.
And he looked at her. That was the other thing. He looked at her the way a man looks at a woman he’s glad to be talking to. Not heavy. Not pushing. Just plainly.
She noticed it. She noticed every second of it.
She hadn’t been looked at like that in years. Not by anybody but Lucas. And Lucas—
She stopped that thought and put it away.
“I should get back,” she said.
“Sure.” Jonah rolled up his drawings. “Thanks for letting me talk about a wall for an hour. My wife used to say I’d bore a fence post.”
Used to.
“I’m sorry,” Amelia said.
“Divorced. Four years. She was right, though.” He smiled. “See you around, Amelia.”
She went downstairs. She sat at her desk and looked at her screen and did not read it. Her face was warm. She was thirty-two years old and married and furious and her face was warm because a man had explained a brick wall to her.
She didn’t do anything about it. She wasn’t going to do anything about it. She didn’t even want to, not really, not in the way that mattered.
But she noticed. She sat there and let herself notice.
* * *
The apartment was lonely at night.
She had known it would be. She didn’t mind it the way she thought she would, but it was real.
The four small rooms in a row. The air mattress, which she had finally replaced with a real bed, a plain one, bought with her own money from a store where she was a stranger.
The card table from Roxanne. The one kitchen chair and now a second one, from a thrift store on Memorial Drive, painted a green she liked.
There was nobody to tell things to. That was the hard part.
Five years of coming home and telling him.
The funny thing Tasha said. The kid in the file who wanted to be a pharmacist. At night the silence of the place pressed on her, and sometimes she caught herself turning to say something to an empty room.
But there was the other thing too. The joy of it.
Waking up and knowing that every single thing in the apartment was there because she had put it there.
The green chair. The bed. The Harlan letter, which came on Wednesday and which she had taped to the refrigerator like a kid’s drawing.
There was nothing in these rooms that anybody had won.
He hadn’t called. He hadn’t written. Nothing since the list. She had braced for flowers, for Walt at the door, for some new thing with a bow on it. None of it came. He had said I’m not asking for anything, and it seemed he had meant that too.
* * *
On Sunday night she stood at the sink washing her one skillet and looked out at the fig tree in the last light.
She went back over the day. She had slept late.
She’d gone to the farmers market and bought peaches and tomatoes and a loaf of bread.
Keisha had texted her a photo of a dog in a hat.
She had spent the afternoon on the Harlan budget, which was dull and satisfying, like sweeping.
She’d called Jenny and heard the baby laugh.
She’d walked down to the old mill and back in the heat with her hair up, not performing for anyone.
It had been a good day.
She set the skillet in the rack and dried her hands, and then she stood still with the towel in her hands.
She hadn’t thought about him.
Not once. Not since breakfast. Not at the market, not in the long hot walk, not over the budget, not on the phone. She had gone most of a day without thinking about Lucas Fletcher at all.
For five years she had thought about him every hour. Where he was. What he needed. Whether the meeting went well. Whether he’d eaten. Whether she’d said the right thing at the right dinner, so he’d never have to be embarrassed. He had been the weather she lived in.
And today the weather had stopped.
She had wanted this. She had told herself she wanted it every night on the air mattress. This was what getting free felt like. This was the thing she was supposed to want.
She stood in her small kitchen and held the towel and waited to feel glad.
It came. It did. A little lift, like a window opening.
But something else came in right behind it, cold and quiet, and it was grief. Not for the marriage she’d lost in Zane’s study. For this. For the fact that a day without him could feel this good. For what that said about how much of herself she had handed over without ever noticing.
For how easy it might be to go on.
She hung the towel on the oven door and straightened it. Then she turned on every light in the apartment, all four rooms, front to back, and sat down at the card table in the green chair and opened the Harlan budget again.
The grief could have her later. It would. Tonight she had work, and the work was hers.