“You could’ve kept playing.”
“I could have.I didn’t.I let someone with authority tell me what I couldn’t do, and I listened.”She picked her fork back up.“I don’t do that anymore.”
“Your mother still in Tallahassee?”
“Still.Forty-one years in the same house.Same mailman, same neighbors, same azaleas in the front yard that bloom the second week of March, whether anybody waters them or not.”
“You call her?”
“Sundays.Seven o’clock in the morning.She watches the news at six-thirty, so I get the half-hour after that.”She turned her wineglass between her fingers.“Tomorrow’s Sunday.I haven’t decided what I’m telling her about my week.”
“What are your options?”
“Nothing.Or everything.Or the version that lives between those two and lets her sleep tonight.”
“What does she think you do for a living?”
“Charge nurse.ICU.She knows the floor.She just doesn’t know what’s on it.”
He nodded.He didn’t push.The version a person told their mother on a Sunday call thirty-six hours before something dangerous wasn’t the kind of thing he was going to weigh in on across her own dinner table.
* * *
She wouldn’t let him do the dishes alone.
He washed.She dried.The kitchen was narrow enough that their elbows nearly touched when she reached past him for the cabinet, and every time she did, he was aware of the exact space she occupied — the physical, specific fact of her standing eighteen inches to his right with a dish towel in her hands.
He’d held briefings in smaller rooms.He’d cleared buildings shoulder to shoulder with operators he trusted with his life.Tight quarters had never been a problem.
This was a problem.
“I should go,” he said, rinsing the last glass.“Early start.”
“It’s seven-thirty.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Then why are you telling me you should go instead of going?”
Because leaving required walking past her, and walking past her required not stopping, and not stopping required a level of discipline he wasn’t sure he had left.He’d been rationing it for three weeks.The bakery.The hospital corridors.The midnight parking lot.Last night in front of her car.This morning at his own table with her hand laced through his.
He turned off the water.She held out the towel.He took it, and his fingers closed over hers in the process, and neither of them pulled away.
They stood like that.A dish towel stretched between them.The fluorescent light humming overhead, too bright, the kind of light that left nothing hidden.
“I’m trying to figure out the right way to do this,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Leave your kitchen when I don’t want to leave your kitchen.”
She let go of the towel.He caught it before it hit the floor and set it on the counter without taking his eyes off her.
“You told me something this morning,” she said.“At the cabin.You told me Ronan asked if you could make the hard call.You told me you handed it off to him.”
“I remember what I said.”
“I told you to choose the operation.And I meant it.I still mean it.”She took a half-step closer.“But I’m standing in my kitchen right now.Not in that hospital.And what I said this morning about the operation and what I’m saying right now are two separate things.”
