I know when Oscar is listening and when he's waiting for his turn. I have twenty-three years of telling the difference. This was the first kind. He asked questions and then listened to the answers. He didn't check the phone in his pocket. When I stopped to look at something, he stopped too, and waited, and didn't fill the quiet.
At the overlook I stood with his arm around me and the water going under the house below us, and I let myself feel it, all of it, without checking first whether it was safe to.
Chapter 18
Oscar
The weeks after Fallingwater were the best I could remember in a long time. Maybe twenty years. It felt like twenty years ago, honestly, back before there was a company to feed, when it was just the two of us in a walk-up and everything ahead of us.
We had breakfast together in the mornings. She showed me the Ocean City drawings as they came, walked me through the changes, and I listened and kept my opinions to the ones she asked for. We laughed at dinner. She reached for my hand now sometimes without my starting it, which she hadn't done in years, and every time it caught me off guard and I tried not to let her see how much.
I was still in the guest room.
I thought a lot in those weeks about a thing I said to her once, a long time ago, before we were married. I told her she was my future. I told her I wanted to make a career out of making her happy. I was young and I meant it and then I went out and built a different career instead, and somewhere in the building I stopped doing the one I'd promised her.
But the promise never actually changed. That's what I understood now. Under all of it, under twenty years of getting itwrong, the thing I wanted was still the exact thing I wanted at twenty-two. Her, happy, and me the reason for some of it. I just forgot how to do it for a while. A long while.
I wasn't going to forget again.
* * *
I came home one evening to familiar food scents in the air. Ruby was at the counter with her back to me. The table was set for two.
"Dinner’s almost ready," she said.
I put my keys in the dish and as I entered the kitchen, Ruby was pulling the cookie sheet out of the oven. Fish sticks. A pot of the boxed rice on the stove. And Pillsbury biscuits in a basket on the table.
I stood there, surprised, remembering the meaning of this simple meal.
“Is there anything I can help with?” I asked.
“No, everything’s done. I’m just serving.”
She moved the fish sticks onto our plates, then scooped the rice. There was something settled in her face I hadn't seen in a long time. I took the plates from her and kissed her cheek before carrying the plates to the table.
We sat down. I emptied some ketchup onto my plate for the fish sticks, and Ruby put a biscuit on each of our plates. It wasn’t much, but it was the best thing I had eaten in months.
"I'm ready to move forward," she said. "I wanted you to know that I can see how much you’re trying. I really feel like I matter to you now. For a long time I didn’t.” She put her hand on mine. “I've been happy, Oscar. Really happy."
I set my fork down.
"I need to say something, and I want you to let me get through it," I said. “It means a lot to me that you see how much I’m trying, but I know I can’t always do it. I know I’m going tohave bad days, and when I do, I need you to not excuse it. Don’t give me an out. Don’t make excuses for me. Just let me know so I can correct it right then and there. I don’t want things to get bad again, and there’s no reason for them to. Just tell me and I promise I’ll listen. Every time. However many times it takes. I'm going to keep listening for the rest of my life."
She didn't say anything. She was blinking back tears and then she started nodding her head.
"Everything okay?" I asked.
"Yes." She smiled as she wiped away some tears. "Please eat."
We sat at our kitchen table eating the simple meal. After a while her foot found mine under the table and stayed there. Neither of us said anything else. Neither of us needed to.
Epilogue
Ruby
The black shapewear went on the same as it did last year, which is to say badly, with a fight, and the same rip somewhere I decided not to look for.
A year ago that struggle had felt like a bad omen for the whole night. Tonight it just made me laugh, alone in my dressing room, wrestling my forty-six-year-old body into shrink wrapping for the Harding Home Jubilee.
