"Twenty. Five."
"Audrey. Please."
She rolled her window back up an inch and stared at me through the glass like I was the ninth wonder of the world. Then she turned the wheel slowly, with the deliberate patience of a woman who wanted me to understand she was doing me a favor, and rolled the Subaru into my driveway.
She was out of the car before I had my front door open. She followed me up the walk, into my front hall, into my kitchen. She set the bakery bag down on the counter and put both palms flat on it.
"Go," she said. "Underwear. Now. I'll be waiting right here. Don't even think about lying to me about a single detail when you come back down."
I went.
I peeled the shirt off in my own hallway, dropped it in the wash with the towels, and put on underwear, jeans, and a tank.
By the time I came back down, she'd pulled the cinnamon bread out of the bakery bag, made herself coffee in my kitchen, and was waiting at the counter with her hands folded and a look on her face I had been the recipient of since the third grade.
"Sit. Start at the beginning. Don't leave anything out. Start with the dog."
I told her.
She made me start over twice. Once after the bra came up. Once after Moose hit the back gate.
She slid down the counter, laughing somewhere around the moment my hair towel hit the grass. By the time I got tocome inside, I'll find you a shirt, she had her forehead against the counter and was wheezing.
"This is the best thing that has ever happened in this town," she said into the counter. "I want you to mark this day. This is the funniest thing that has happened in Hartsdale since the Doyles' truck rolled into the river back when we were in high school."
"Audrey."
"You have to marry him."
"Audrey."
"You owe it to me as a friend. I have been waiting my entire life to know someone who started a relationship in a bath towel."
"This is not a relationship."
"Mhm."
"Don't mhm me."
"I'm just sitting here."
Audrey came off a twelve-hour shift at seven that morning. She stopped at the bakery on Main on her way over instead of going home. Scrubs. Lipstick. Cinnamon bread. This was not a woman who needed to be on a stool at somebody's kitchen counter at nine-fifteen in the morning. She was here anyway.
"How was your shift?"
She made a smallmmphsound. Which was Audrey forlong.
"Twins. A first-timer. Eight hours. Husband fainted twice."
"And the twins?"
"They're great. Cooking. Six pounds even, the both of them. Mom is a goddamn warrior. Husband is concussed."
Audrey didn't know how to go home and rest. She grew up in a house where silence meant somebody was about to leave. Her father left. Her mother spent ten years chasing him. Audreydecided very young that she was going to fill every silence she met, so it could never get quiet enough to mean anything.
"How's the clinic search going?"
"I called about a storefront on Main. Waiting to hear back."
