“I know that look,” she went on, warmer, crueler for the warmth. “That’s thehe got bored and moved onlook. I’ve worn it. Half this town’s worn it. I told you, didn’t I, way back. Said this exact thing would happen and you looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”
“Sabrina —”
“You really thought you were different.” She said it gently, which was how I knew it was meant to open a vein. “Why — because he danced with you? Made a couple grand gestures? Baby, that’s what men like him do. He feltsorryfor you. The widow with the little boy. You were a project. And projects getfinished. Then they go back to the kind of woman they were always going to end up with.”
It was a good hit. She’d found the exact sentence I’d been saying tomyself at two in the morning and said it back to me in her own voice, and for one second the floor wasn’t under me.
Then it came back, because she’d made a mistake. She’d shown me how badly she wanted it. I turned the water off, and I turned and looked at her directly, and let her see the thing she’d been digging for wasn’t going to come up.
“You’ve been keeping track of where I eat lunch.”
Something flickered. “Everybody —”
“No.You. Our table, our day, regular as church,your words. That’s a lot of attention for a woman who already won.”
I dried my hands slow, watching her the way she’d watched me. “You came in here with nothing and spent five minutes trying to get me to hand you something to carry out the door. There isn’t anything. And you should hear yourself, almost a year later,stillstudying me, telling yourself this story. Getting in my face is the closest you’ll ever get to being in a room with that man again, and somewhere in there, you know it.”
The smug slid off her face all at once. “I’m not —”
“Don’t speak to me again.” I dropped the towel in the bin. “You’ve had a year of practice studying me. Use that education. When you see me coming, go the other way.”
I walked out before she could find a comeback, got to my car, and shut the door before any of it touched my face.
She’d been right about one thing, and it was the one thing she hadn’t had to invent. He wasn’t there.
* * *
Micah had a game that Saturday.
I sat in the bleachers the way I always did, and when the buzzer went I stood and gathered my bag, expecting him to come pounding across the floor to me the way he does, all elbows and sweat and the play-by-play of every shot. He didn’t come to me.
He ran the other way.
I followed him with my eyes across the whole length of the court, to where Julian was standing at the far end — along the wall by the doors, where the bleachers stopped, in the spot a man stands when he wants to see and not be seen. Micah hit him at a dead run and Julian caught him and said something down into the top of his head, and Micah’s whole face lit, and Julian held up a hand and my son slapped it, and for asecond the two of them were laughing about something I couldn’t hear from where I stood.
Then Julian looked up, and across all that distance, he found me.
We looked at each other. The whole gym was loud and moving between us and neither of us moved. I don’t know what was on my face. I know what was on his, nothing I could read, the careful nothing he wears when he’s holding a door shut from the inside.
It lasted maybe three seconds. Then he bent and said something to Micah, and I watched my son’s head turn toward me, and I understood Julian had said go to your mother. He gave the top of Micah’s head one more touch, and he turned, and he went out the doors before Micah had crossed half the court back to me.
“Did you see Julian?” Micah was breathless, glowing. “He said my crossover’s getting nasty.”
“I saw,” I said, and turned us toward the parking lot so my kid wouldn’t see my face do what it was doing.
It was like that the whole three weeks. Nothing from him to me, and meanwhile my son’s phone lighting up two and three times a week. Help with the long division he hated. A call one night that was just talking, the two of them going back and forth about whether the new Spider-Man was better than the old one, serious as a contract negotiation. He came to the games and stood by the doors and left before the handshake line.
The Thursday Micah got his math test back he called Julian before he’d even gotten his shoes off, and he had it on speaker, bouncing on the couch. “I got an A, I got a ninety-four, you owe me a new Lego set.”
Julian’s voice came out of the little phone speaker into my living room, warm, easy, proud of him: “That’s what I’m talking about. I told you.”
I had to leave the room. I stood in my own kitchen with the water running over a clean glass so the sound would cover me, and I listened to the man I wasn’t allowed to talk to anymore be perfect to my son through a phone, and I had never in my life been so glad of a thing and so destroyed by it at the same time.
Because that was the cruelty of it, the part I couldn’t get under. He was so good. He was exactly the man I’d known he was, the one who keeps his word to a nine-year-old when his own heart is in pieces, and watching him be that good to my child was watching, in high relief, the precise size of what I’d lost. I didn’t get to grieve him quietly. I got to grieve him twice a week, out loud, in my son’s delighted voice.
Sunday I wentto dinner at Simone and Raschad’s. It was standing, the way Maple’s had been standing, nobody invited me anymore, I just came. I thought about not going. Then I went, because there was a chance he’d be there. And if he was there, I was going to pull him into a hallway and apologize. I had it ready. I’d been carrying it for three weeks.I’m sorry. I overstepped. I will never go around you like that again. Come back. I had practiced it the way I practice an opening, and I went to that house with it loaded and ready to fire the second I saw his face.
His chair was empty.
