"In a wrap dress."
"It stretches."
"Astrid."
"Bet you won't."
He looked up at the tower, then back at me. He shook his head once, slowly.
"Not the ladder. There's a service stair inside the column. Door at the base. Hasn't been locked since the bypass went in."
"You're kidding."
"I am not."
He took my hand and led me around to the back of the tower. A steel door was set into the concrete base, painted over forty years of repaints, and now mostly rusted. He pulled it open.
Inside, a switchback stair climbed up the inside of the column in the dark. A single bulb at the bottom was somehow still working.
"Audrey and I climbed the ladder."
"You could've used the stairs?"
"Audrey is going to be insufferable about this."
He went up first. The stairs were tight and steep. He stayed a flight ahead of me, the heel of one boot ringing on the metal abeat before the next, the slow, even pace of a man who climbed stairs for a living. He waited for me at the top of every landing.
We came up through a hatch onto the platform.
The platform was wider than I remembered. The railing came to my hip. I could see the green bridge over the river, the small line of streetlights along Main, and the porch lights on Maple. The whole town was holding still under us, and for a long beat, the only sound was the wind moving against the curve of the tank behind our heads.
He sat down on the platform with his back against the tank.
I sat next to him.
He kept his knee a quarter inch from mine. It wasn't a touch. It was the absence of one. The absence was, somehow, worse.
Then he said, "Tell me about your marriage."
I wasn't expecting that. I'd been expecting the polite version men used.So what happened in Boston? So what did the guy do?Easton had given me the front door.
I looked out at the river.
"I married him at twenty-four. He was charming. He read what I left on the coffee table. He sent flowers on Wednesdays. He looked at me like I was the only sensible thing in his world."
I drew a breath. The cold went all the way down.
"It turned out that was who he could afford to be. His parents paid for the brownstone. His mother chose the lamps. His mother chose the dresses. His mother chose the dinners. I had a vet license I didn't use. By year two, I'd stopped saying the wordlicenseat his mother's table. By year three, I was apologizing for the placement of a butter knife."
I'd said those words many times in my head. Never out loud.
I let my fingers run along the seam of the platform. The metal was rough with old paint.
"His parents cut him off in March. He came home that night. He picked up a lamp off the side table and held it like he was going to throw it. He didn't throw it. He set it down. He cried."
I looked at my hands.
"I sat on the floor across from him and waited for the part of me that loved him to come back. It didn't. I'd ended it a year before. Two years before. I just hadn't told myself yet."
