“I’m being supportive,” she says, wounded. “Thisissupport.”
I lean back in my chair and look at the ceiling. “She told me her older daughter is thirty. As a point of reference.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“Said good for her and moved on.”
A pause. Then: “Cruz. That was exactly right.”
“I know.”
“You really like her.”
It’s not a question but I answer it anyway. “She’s — yeah. I really do.” I pause. “She said I was beautiful.”
“She saidyouwere beautiful?”
“I saidshewas beautiful. She deflected with a joke about my salmon.”
Maya laughs, loud and genuine. “I love her.”
“You don’t know her.”
“I love her,” she repeats, firm. “Anyone who can make you sound like this after two days and still keeps you at arm’s length is exactly the right kind of person for you. You’ve always needed someone who doesn’t just—” she pauses, searching for it, “—hand it over. You need the work.”
I think about Hannah at the bottom of the stairs. The two inches between our hands. The way she went up first and didn’t look back and I waited anyway.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
We talk for a while longer. Her job, her kids, the family dinner next month that I’m going to have to navigate carefully given that I haven’t told anyone about the procedure yet. Maya asks if I’m doing okay and I say yes in the easy way I’ve been saying yes since the cardiologist appointment, the reflexive fine that I’ve gotten very good at.
I almost tell her.
It’s right there —actually there’s something I should probably mention— and I feel it in my throat, the shape of it, the relief it would be to put it down somewhere outside my own head.
I don’t.
Not yet. Not over the phone, not when she’s three states away and would immediately want to drive here and I’d spend the rest of my month managing her worry instead of… instead of this. Whatever this is becoming.
After we hang up I sit with the quiet for a while.
My chest does the thing it does sometimes. Not pain exactly, more like pressure, like a reminder, like a hand on my shoulder sayinghey, don’t forget about me.I breathe through it the way the cardiologist showed me. It passes in under a minute.
I’m fine.
The procedure is in seventeen days. The surgeon is excellent. The outcome will be good.
I’m fine.
I’ll be fine.
At seven-thirty I put on a clean shirt, which I’m aware is a decision that means something, and I walk next door and knock.
Hannah answers in what appears to be her reading clothes. Soft shorts, an oversized shirt that’s seen better decades, hair loose around her shoulders and she looks so completely unguarded for half a second before the lawyer comes back online that I feel the whole thing land directly in the center of my chest.
