"Tomorrow night?"
"Okay, tomorrow night," she said.
"I'll pick you up at seven."
She didn't argue.
I was at her curb at six fifty-five. Five minutes early.
Nova was at my parents' house. I'd dropped her off two hours ago. My mother reached for the baby before I'd finished getting out of the truck. My dad talked about something to do with the peewee hockey schedule while I stood in the kitchen, and I didn't fully listen because my brain was already at the dinner.
I'd been cleaning my house for two hours since. The living room floor was swept. The kitchen counter was cleared. The nonfiction stack was moved off the coffee table. The dishes were done. Something was simmering on the stove that I'd started at four from a recipe I pulled up on my phone, and it involved chicken and a sauce that had more ingredients than anything I'd ever cooked, and I'd watched the video twice.
Audrey came out of her building. Jeans and a sweater—softer than work clothes, not date clothes. Hair down. She crossed the sidewalk in the evening light, and I sat in the cab of my truck and clocked what I was doing. I was parked at this curb to pick up the mother of my child and drive her to my house for dinner. I'd cooked for her. I'd cleaned for her. I was sitting in a parking spot five minutes early because I didn't want her to come out and not see me there.
She got in the truck. "Hi."
"Hey."
I pulled away from the curb. The cab was quiet on the drive over. Audrey looked out the window. My hands were on the wheel. Neither of us filled the silence, because neither of us needed to. I stopped at the one light between her place and mine. Didn't look at her. She didn't look at me. The light changed. I drove.
I pulled into my driveway. Cut the engine.
"Ready?"
"Yes."
I walked her up the front steps and through the door.
The house was what it was—small, a firefighter's house. I'd done what I could with it. Two place settings on the small table in the kitchen. The stove running. The basement door closed because the pinball machine was down there, and the basement was not the room I was showing her tonight. The framed photo of the firehouse crew was on the wall by the living room window, the one from Easton's first year, all of us younger and squinting into the sun. The Krakauer on the coffee table because I'd moved the stack but left the one I was reading.
Audrey walked through it. She was quiet. She took it in the way she took everything in—quick and precise, filing what she saw. I watched her look at the photo on the wall. At the book on the table. At the kitchen, which was small, smaller than hers, the stove and the counter and the two-person table that was the only table the room could hold.
I wanted her to like it. The want was plain and simple, and it surprised me, because I'd lived in this house for years without once thinking about whether anyone else would want to be in it. It was my house. It held my things. It did its job. Standing in the doorway watching Audrey take it in, I wanted her to seesomething in it worth being in, and the wanting was a door I hadn't stood in front of before.
She looked at me. "It smells good."
"Don't sound so surprised."
The corner of her mouth went up. The half-smile. I'd take it.
We ate. The chicken turned out better than I expected. She said so, then told me she could tell I'd watched a video because the garlic was cut too small. I told her the garlic was cut to the size the video said to cut it. She told me the video was wrong. I laughed. She laughed. The dinner was easy in a way I hadn't been sure it would be. The wine was a bottle I'd bought yesterday after standing in the aisle for ten minutes reading labels like they were going to tell me something useful.
Then she put her fork down.
The shift was immediate. I could feel it before she spoke—the temperature in the room changing, her posture settling into something deliberate, her eyes finding mine and holding.
"I need to tell you something," she said.
I set my glass down. I waited.
She looked at the table. Her thumb moved along the stem of the wineglass without her seeming to know it was moving.
"My father left when I was young. He just stopped coming back one day. No fight, no explanation. He was there, and then he wasn't." She paused. "My mother spent three years setting the table for him after he was gone. Three places. Every night. I ate across from an empty chair until I was nine years old, and she finally took it away."
Something moved through my chest. I kept my hands flat on the table.
"Every question she asked you—the house, the hours, the salary—that wasn't snobbery. That was her running the same equation she ran on my father. Trying to figure out where you'd break."
