Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Natalie
Two weeks after Halloween, Ruth calls while I am scraping banana out of the grooves in Benji’s high chair.
“Have you got ten minutes?”
“Probably four.”
“Good. I’ll talk fast.”
Ruth was the production editor at the publishing company where I worked before Lucy.
She now runs publications for the Bellweather Arts Center, which sounds grander than the redbrick building beside the river actually is.
We exchange Christmas cards and occasionally have lunch, provided lunch can happen at eleven and finish before school pickup.
“We’re doing a winter exhibition catalog. Thirty-two pages. The designer we booked has had to withdraw. I thought of you.”
I stop scraping.
“When?”
“Final files in mid-December. Three thousand two hundred, half on signing. I know it’s not a fortune.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
Benji slaps the tray. A piece of banana lands on my wrist.
“Things are complicated here.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
I look toward the kitchen window. Adam is in the backyard with Owen, untangling a soccer net somebody has managed to knot around the goalpost. He has been coming most afternoons during his leave.
At first his mother stayed too. Now I can go into my office with the door closed, although I still come out more often than I need to.
“We’re separated,” I say.
Ruth doesn’t fill the silence with surprise. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s recent.”
“Would work help, or would it make your life harder?”
It is such a sensible question that I have to sit down.
“I don’t know.”
“Have a look at the brief. You don’t have to answer now. We’d need you at the center for a presentation later this month and the press check before delivery. Most of it you can do from home.”
I promise to read it. After we hang up, I open the email on my phone while Benji works diligently at removing the bib from his neck.
The exhibition features paintings of the river through different seasons. Ruth has attached a photograph of one, an evening scene with flat blue water and windows lit along the opposite bank. I enlarge it and start imagining where the title could sit without interfering with the light.
I think about the job for a moment, then put the phone down because Benji has succeeded with the bib.
Later, while the baby sleeps and the older children build something questionable with sofa cushions, Adam notices the brief on the table.
“Is that a job?”
“Possibly.”
“For you?”
I look at him.
He winces. “Stupid question. What is it?”
I tell him. He picks up the paper but doesn’t turn it over, waiting until I nod.
I remember him reading my college projects at this same angle, head slightly bent, thumb braced beneath his chin.
He used to find typos because he actually read the words, while I would be too busy worrying about the spacing.
“You’d be good at this,” he says.
“I used to be.”
“You still are.”
“Adam, you haven’t seen anything I’ve done in months.”
He puts the brief down. “Then show me.”
I don’t immediately know what to do with that. The old reflex is to say there’s nothing worth showing. Instead I bring my laptop to the table and open the sample layout I found beneath the fundraiser form.
He leans closer. “I like that.”
“Which part?”
“The photograph going over the edge. It makes me want to turn it.”
That is what I intended. I look at him, then at the screen, and feel the faintest return of a pleasure I haven’t had much lately.
“The presentation is the twenty-second,” I say. “Two until four. Benji’s new place only has mornings available until January, so I’d need somebody here.”
“I can do it.”
“You go back to work tomorrow.”
“I can block the afternoon.”
I close the laptop halfway. “Don’t say yes because you’re sitting here right now and it seems easy.”
He takes out his phone, opens the calendar, and studies it. “There’s an internal review. I can move my part of that. No client travel booked that day.”
“And the other days? Because this isn’t one afternoon. I need time to do the actual work.”
We talk through it. Two mornings while Benji is at Juniper House.
Two evenings when Adam comes over after work and handles dinner and bedtime while I shut the office door.
If work changes, he tells me before the day collapses.
If he needs help, we agree who can provide it, instead of assuming it will be me.
The plan takes twenty minutes. I keep waiting for him to get impatient.
At the end he says, “I’d like to know about these things.”
“I used to tell you.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t add anything. I appreciate that more than I want to.
After he leaves, I call my sister. Beth answers with an oven timer beeping in the background.
“If this is about the class cupcakes, I have terrible news.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then my terrible news can wait. What’s up?”
I tell her about the catalog. She tells me to take it before I have finished describing the fee.
“You don’t even know if I’m any good anymore.”
“You sent me that thing for the fundraiser and I wanted to buy a ticket to my own children’s event. You’re good.”
“What if I can’t manage it?”
“Then we figure something out.”
“You live two hours away.”
“And I own a car. Listen, I’m not telling you to exhaust yourself to prove a point. Do you want the job?”
“Yes.”
“Then start with that.”
I sit at the table after we hang up and write Ruth back before I can find another reason to wait.
The next evening, Adam arrives carrying groceries and a library book.
Owen has asked for the book three times in the past week.
I know because he has asked me, and each time I’ve promised to reserve it after whatever I am doing.
Adam puts it on the counter, and I experience a brief, uncharitable flash of annoyance that he has managed something I haven’t.
Then Owen sees it and throws himself at him.
I take the groceries out of the bags.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Adam says when the children are occupied.
“Okay.”
“I found a counselor. A couple of names, actually. One has an opening.”
I keep unpacking. “You booked it?”
“No. I asked about availability.”
“Good.”
“I wondered if you’d go with me.”
There is a loaf of bread in the bag, the kind Owen won’t eat because it has seeds. I set it beside the toaster and turn around.
“Do you think somebody’s going to tell me I should get over this?”
“No.”
“Because I’m not paying to have that conversation.”
“Neither am I.”
He looks exhausted. He went back to work this morning and still got here by six, as we agreed. There are emails waiting when he returns to the hotel. I asked whether he had more work tonight, and he told me he did.
“What do you want from it?” I ask.
“I want to stop saying things that make this worse. I want to understand what I keep missing.” He pauses. “And I want you back. I’m not going to pretend I don’t.”
I lean against the counter. “I can’t promise that.”
“I know.”
“I might go and realize I don’t want to be married anymore.”
He looks down, then meets my eyes again. “Then I’d rather hear it there than keep guessing.”
We agree to try six sessions, then decide whether more would help. There is no deadline for moving home. No promise that participating will earn him anything.
When he gives me the counselor’s name, I write it on the back of the grocery receipt. Dr. Williams. I stare at my own handwriting until Lucy asks whether the seeds in the bread are supposed to be there.
Our first appointment takes place in a small office above a pharmacy. Adam’s mother has the children. I sit in an armchair with a cushion pressed against my stomach while Adam picks a loose thread off his sleeve.
Dr. Williams asks what brought us there. Adam tells her about Halloween. He does not call it a misunderstanding. When he finishes, she asks me what the days since have been like.
“Quieter,” I say, then feel disloyal and annoyed with myself for feeling it. “In some ways. I don’t wait for him to get home.”
Adam looks at me.
“I didn’t know you waited.”
“You text that you’re leaving work. I hold dinner. You text that something came up. I feed the kids. Then I wonder if I should eat or wait another half hour.”
“I never asked you to wait.”
The words hang there. He shuts his eyes.
Dr. Williams doesn’t explain him to me. She asks him, “What did you hear Natalie say?”
He takes a while. “That she wanted to eat with me.”
“Yes,” I say. My voice is suddenly unsteady. “I wanted to eat with you.”
We spend more of the hour on dinner than I would have believed possible. How long I wait. What he assumes I am doing while he works. How I tell him it’s fine because I don’t want to have the same argument again. At one point he starts to explain a client emergency, then stops when he sees my face.
“I’m doing it now, aren’t I?” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“Telling you why it had to happen.”
Dr. Williams lets us sit with that. She doesn’t rescue either of us.
Near the end she asks what I need in the coming week that is specific enough for Adam to act on. I tell her about the design presentation. Adam gives her the date and time without checking his phone.
I look at him despite myself.
Outside, a delivery truck blocks half the sidewalk. We stand beside the pharmacy window while its driver unloads cartons. Adam offers to get me a coffee, and I say I need to get home.
“All right.” He steps aside to let someone pass. “Would you have dinner with me sometime? An actual dinner. I can arrange the kids.”
I look at him in the cold light, his coat collar turned up, his hands empty. Seventeen years ago he asked me out while helping me carry a box of books into my apartment. He tried so hard to sound casual that he dropped his end of the box.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“Is that a no?”
“I haven’t decided.”
He nods. “Then think about it.”
For once he doesn’t fill the pause, and I don’t fill it for him. We walk to our separate cars. Before I get into mine, I turn back.
“Somewhere we can hear each other,” I say.
His hand stops on his door handle. “Yes. Absolutely.”
At home, I find an email from Ruth with the image files and a contract.
I read every page before signing. The words describing revisions and payment are reassuringly ordinary.
Nobody is asking whether my marriage can be saved.
They want a catalog, delivered on time, with the correct captions beneath the correct paintings.
The first file I open is too small to print. I start an email asking for a higher-resolution version, delete an apology from the beginning, and send it.
Then I clear the laundry off my desk.
It takes longer than it should. A pair of Owen’s socks has fallen behind the printer, and beneath the travel crib I find the missing lid from a storage box. I carry everything into the laundry room without folding it. When I come back, there is enough space to lay out the brief beside my keyboard.
I work until Benji wakes from his nap. In that time I try three arrangements for the cover and reject two. The third needs something I haven’t figured out yet, but when I stand up I find myself looking forward to returning to it.
On the way upstairs, I pass the photograph of Adam and me on our wedding day. We look younger than I remember being. I leave it where it is and go to my son.