Chapter 16 #2
They had chosen it together, in May. They had looked at more houses than she could count, and argued about every one.
He’d wanted the one with the big yard. She’d wanted the one with the porch.
They’d gone back and forth for two weeks, at the table, out loud, and in the end they’d found this one, which had a small yard and a porch, and neither of them had won.
They’d both just gotten what they actually wanted.
They’d paid for it together. Half and half. His half was a rounding error for him and her half was every dollar she’d saved in five years. That had mattered to her. He hadn’t argued. He had just said, Then it’s half yours. That’s right.
Over the kitchen table hung an old map of Atlanta in a cheap black frame, from a flea market on Moreland, printed the year before the Fletcher tower went up, with an empty lot where the building would be.
It had sat in a closet in Buckhead for nine months wrapped in brown paper.
She had given it to him the night they moved in, a year late, still in the paper, and he had opened it standing in the empty kitchen and then had to go out on the back porch for a while by himself.
The Buckhead house was sold. Denise had retired to a condo on the coast with a pension Lucas had set up in front of her face, in writing, and she sent postcards of pelicans. Walt drove Maureen now. Maureen said he was the only man in Atlanta who knew how to keep quiet in a car.
Roxanne came over three or four times a week.
She said she hated the house. She said it was too small and too old and the color made her want to lie down.
She said the stairs were a lawsuit waiting to happen.
She said all of this while sitting on their back porch with her feet up on the rail and a beer in her hand, every Tuesday and Thursday and most Saturdays, looking entirely at home.
“This is a terrible house,” she said that evening, after the welcome, from the porch swing.
“You’re here every other night,” Amelia said.
“I’m here to keep an eye on him.” Roxanne pointed her beer at Lucas, who was in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder. “Somebody has to.”
“I’m right here,” Lucas said.
“I know you’re right here. That’s why I’m keeping an eye on you.” Roxanne took a pull of her beer. “Marisol says you’re still saying good night up on twenty-eight.”
“Most nights.”
“She says Ashley got into nursing school.”
“I know. She told me. Last week, at two in the morning, on the service elevator. She cried.” He dried a glass. “I cried too, a little.”
Roxanne looked at him for a long moment over the top of her glasses.
“Well,” she said. “Don’t make a habit of it.”
But she was smiling. Roxanne turned her face toward the railroad tracks so Lucas wouldn’t see it, and smiled anyway.
* * *
It wasn’t perfect. Amelia didn’t want it to be perfect. Perfect was what she’d had before, and it had been built on a wall in somebody else’s study.
What they had now was better. It was plainer and louder and more work.
They fought sometimes. Not often, but for real, out loud, at the little round table with the wobbly chair.
In June he’d said yes to something for her without asking, a board seat at a college in Macon he thought she’d want, and she’d told him right there at dinner, not later, not in the car, not in a cold silence for a week, You did it again.
Don’t. Ask me first. And he’d put down his fork and said, You’re right.
I’m sorry. I’ll call them tomorrow and tell them it’s your call.
And he had. And she’d taken the seat anyway, because she did want it. But she took it herself.
That was the change. She said the hard thing at the table now, the second she felt it, instead of swallowing it and going quiet in the car on the way home from somewhere.
He told her things first now, before he fixed them, before he decided them, before anyone else could know.
Neither of them performed. There was nobody to perform for.
There was no circle, no table at Christmas, no chart.
There was just the two of them in a narrow gray-green house near the tracks, figuring it out, out loud.
She ran the Kirby Fund. He ran his company. Neither of them sat on the other’s board. He had never, since April, set foot in the office above the hardware store without being asked. She had asked him three times. Once to help carry a filing cabinet. Once to meet Deja. Once for no reason at all.
* * *
At eleven that night, he said, “Come with me.”
She was on the porch swing with her feet in his lap, half asleep. Roxanne had gone home. The crickets were loud, and a train had just gone by, and she didn’t want to move ever again.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.” He was already standing up. “Wear shoes you don’t love.”
She looked at him. “Do you know what day it is?”
“I know exactly what day it is,” he said.
A year ago tonight she had stood in a cold study in Buckhead with a glass of bourbon she hadn’t drunk and read a dollar bill three times. A year ago tonight she had lifted it off the wall.
She got up and put on her sneakers.
* * *
He drove them downtown in the plain blue car.
The city was empty and gold under the streetlights.
He parked in the loading dock of the Fletcher tower, next to a Vega Services van, and they went in the service entrance, and rode up in the service elevator.
The same elevator. The same scratched steel walls and the same dim light and the same slow grinding climb.
She hadn’t been in it in six years. She stood in the corner and watched the numbers go up and felt nineteen and twenty-six and thirty-three all at once.
The doors opened on twenty-eight.
It was dim. Half the lights were off, as they always were at night. A vacuum ran somewhere down the east hall. The air smelled of lemon cleaner.
“Well, look who it is.” Marisol came around the corner with her cart, grinning. “Miss Buckhead. And Mister Buckhead. Out past your bedtime.”
“Hi, Marisol.”
“Hi, Marisol, she says.” Marisol hugged her, hard. Then she hugged Lucas, which she had apparently been doing for months, because he hugged her back without any surprise at all. “Happy anniversary. The bad one. Rox told me.”
“Thank you,” Lucas said. “Is Mike on tonight?”
“Mike’s on the west side. Ashley’s off, she’s studying. Tran’s in the kitchen.” Marisol looked between them and her grin got bigger. “Go on. Do whatever you came to do. I got a floor to finish.”
Lucas walked down the hall. At the kitchen he stopped and put his head in and said, “Good night, Tran,” and a voice inside said, “Night, Mr. F.,” like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
At the west side he said, “Good night, Mike,” and a large man pushing a vacuum lifted one hand without looking up.
Amelia walked beside him and watched him do it. Every one of them. By name.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She just took his hand.
* * *
His old office was dark. She didn’t go in there. She went past it, all the way to the end of the hall, to the small conference room at the southwest corner that never got used.
She stopped in the doorway.
“This one,” she said.
He came and stood beside her.
It was a plain room. A table, eight chairs, a whiteboard with nothing on it.
And one whole wall of glass, floor to ceiling, looking west over the city.
Downtown spread out below them, every light on.
The dark shapes of the old neighborhoods, and the ribbon of the highway, and far off, past everything, the black line of the trees against a sky that was a little less black.
“I used to do this window last,” she said.
“Every night. I saved it. I’d do the whole floor, and then I’d come in here at the end with the squeegee and do this one, slow, so I could look.
” She touched the glass. “It was the only thing in the building that felt like mine. Two in the morning, and all of it out there, and nobody else awake to see it. I used to stand right here and think, someday.”
“Someday what?”
“I don’t know. Just someday.” She smiled at her reflection. “I didn’t have the rest of the sentence yet.”