Chapter 2
Maple
For a week, I’d been reading Cade’s texts and not answering them.
I hadn’t blocked him. Blocking him would have meant he couldn’t reach me, and I wanted him to be able to reach me. I wanted him to see those two little ticks turn blue and know that I had read every single word and chosen, deliberately and with full information, to say nothing back.
His texts were all singing the same song. Where are you. Are you okay. Can we talk. Maple, please.
The please ones were my personal favorite.
Very committed to the please. Hundred and twenty pleases in seven days, which worked out to nearly eighteen pleases each day, which suggested a man who had done some calculations about the appropriate frequency of pleading and had landed on a number that projected the right level of sincerity without tipping into desperation.
I read all of them.
I answered none of them.
It was a Tuesday. Tuesdays were my back-to-back tourist salsa class nights — four o’clock couple, five-thirty couple, seven o’clock group — and I had come home with a tiredness that had crept up through my knees and had spread across my face.
The face tired was from smiling. I had been smiling at strangers for eleven hours because they were paying me to teach them to salsa and smiling was part of the service.
Come to think of it, I had been smiling through things since I was old enough to understand that smiling was easier than explaining. I was very practiced at this.
But after coming to Chestnut Ridge, the fake smile was gradually replaced by a true sense of joy and belonging. And after meeting Cade, that joy had only multiplied. I had completely forgotten the fake smile. But now it was back.
The pasta water was on. I was cutting vegetables at the counter — the mindless kind of cutting zucchini into rounds, the same motion over and over — when I made the mistake of letting my brain go quiet. And when my brain went quiet, it went straight to Cade.
About a month after Cade started showing up at my dance classes, we had gone on our first real date. He had made a reservation and told me three days in advance and I’d spent two days trying to talk myself out of going.
I told him about River on that first date.
All of it — the four-year-old on my hip, the bus, Vegas, the years of pole dancing, the move to Chestnut Ridge.
I told him about River’s love for soccer and how he was slowly losing interest in it because of the company he was keeping.
I put it all on the table in the first hour because I had learned the hard way that there was no point in waiting, no point in letting someone get comfortable before you showed them the parts that made them leave, because they always left eventually and it was better to know sooner.
He listened to the whole thing without flinching. Then he asked me what River’s favorite soccer team was.
Not that must have been so hard or you’re so strong or any of the things people said when they wanted credit for sitting through a difficult story.
He asked about River’s soccer team, and then about River’s position, and then about whether River had a good coach, and by the end of dinner I had talked about my brother for forty-five minutes and Cade had looked, the entire time, like he had nowhere else he’d rather be.
I drove home that night and sat in my car in the driveway. Be careful, I had thought.
But I had not been careful.
He asked one afternoon when I called him from the studio between classes, about River’s new cleats. I had mentioned casually that I needed to pick some up before his game on Saturday.
The next day, the cleats were at River’s school. Dropped off by Cade. The right size. The right brand.
He had remembered. He had gone out and bought them and dropped them off without saying anything to me first, without asking if it was okay, without making it into a thing that required gratitude or acknowledgment. Just — cleats. At school. Done.
I called him immediately.
He picked up on the second ring.
“You bought River cleats,” I said.
“I thought it would save you a trip.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
I stood in the middle of my studio between classes, holding my phone, trying to locate the part of me that had a reasonable response to this. It was taking a while to find.
“Were they the right size?” he asked.
“They were the right size.”
“Good.” A pause. Then, quieter, in a slightly different register — the one I had only heard a few times, usually when he thought I wasn’t paying close attention: “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“His game is Saturday.” Another pause. Longer this time. “Would it be — I mean, if you think it’s too soon, or if River would be uncomfortable, just say so and I completely understand, but I was thinking —“ He stopped. Started again. “Could I come? To the game?”
I had not been prepared for that.
Not the question. The way he asked it. Cade Sonnenberg, who walked into rooms like he owned them, who never once appeared to second-guess himself in public, was stumbling over a sentence about a fourteen-year-old’s soccer game like the answer genuinely mattered to him and he wasn’t sure what it would be.
“You want to come to River’s game,” I said.
“If that’s okay.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
I heard him exhale.
Something in my chest fluttered.
“I’ll see you Saturday,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I hung up and stood in the middle of my studio and smiled.
He came to River’s soccer game the following Saturday.
River gave him absolutely nothing. River, when presented with a wealthy man who was clearly interested in being in his sister’s life, had deployed every defensive weapon in his arsenal — the monosyllabic responses, the phone-staring, the brand of teenage body language that communicated I see you and I have decided not to.
Cade took it all without blinking.
After the game, we stood in the sidelines and Cade asked River about soccer. Methodically, like he had prepared for exactly this, which knowing what I now knew about him, he absolutely had. He asked River about the defensive formation of one team. The transfer window decisions of another.
River’s determination to avoid Cade lasted about twenty minutes before his phone went down.
At the pizza place after the game, River talked straight about soccer tactics while Cade listened and asked exactly the right questions.
I sat across the table and watched my closed-off, suspicious, nobody-gets-in fourteen-year-old brother lean forward in his seat to explain something about a corner kick.
Oh no, I had thought.
Oh no, because it was good.
Oh no, because I was falling for this man.
Now, as I was dwelling in the aftermath of an overheard conversation that had shown me exactly how the last three months had been a facade, the front door opened and River came in. He dropped his backpack on the floor by the door, which I had asked him not to do eleven hundred times.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said.
He went to the cabinet. He got a bowl. He poured cereal. He took it to the couch and picked up his phone.
“How was school?”
“Mm.”
“Anything happen?”
“Mm.”
I looked at the pasta water, which was almost boiling. I looked at the zucchini, which was cut. I looked at River, who was staring at his phone with zero acknowledgement of another person present in the room with him.
Two weeks ago, he had slammed his bedroom door and told me he hated me. Yesterday, he had eaten dinner in his room. Today was a cereal-and-mm day. That was fine. I was cataloguing the data, building a map of who he was becoming, which was the only reliable tool I had.
I went back to the pasta.
And then the doorbell rang.
***