“I look like a woman who has been running a diner alone for three hours, that’s all.”
“Don’t sugar me. Sugar means you’re stalling.”
I made a face at her. It was a good face. I’ve had practice.
She made a face back. Older and wiser and infinitely more tired.
Then she said, in the voice she had used since we were thirteen and trying to figure out which boy in our class had stolen my mother’s funeral lipstick out of my jacket pocket, “Talk.”
I looked at the table. It was walnut, or some kind of wood, and there were initials carved into it from 1997.E+K.Someone’s love story, now peeling varnish.
I looked at the napkin dispenser. It had a crack in the plastic.
I looked at her.
I did not, in any of the ten thousand mornings I had imagined this conversation in the last sixty days, imagine that I would tell her like this. I had imagined a glass of wine. A bottle of wine. A controlled environment. A finished cry.
I told her like this anyway.
“The bank merged in October,” I said. “The new bank pulled my line of credit. The mortgage went into default in November because they wouldn’t renegotiate. The note got transferred to a collections department in Chicago. They sent me a ninety-day default notice the day before Thanksgiving. I have eighty-five days. I owe fifty-eight thousand four hundred and twentydollars. I have, in my account at the moment, a hundred and seventy-three dollars.”
Mira did not move.
I watched her face do what faces do when they are processing. When they are taking in information that changes things. I watched her open her mouth.
I watched her close it.
I watched her open it again.
“Maple.”
“I know.”
“Maple.”
“I know, Mira.”
“Why didn’t you tell me. Why on God’s green earth did you not tell me. I have been bringing you bad coffee as ajokefor two months.”
“Because telling you would have made it real.”
She closed her eyes.
She put both palms flat on the table.
She breathed in through her nose for a count of four. The breathing exercise. The yoga app that has saved her in moments of crisis.
Mira Halpern is the only person in this town who learned breathing exercises from an app, and she has been deploying them at me at moments of high domestic crisis since 2018. This was a big moment. This was a Count-to-Four moment.
“OK,” she said. “OK. Eighty-five days. Fifty-eight grand. We can?—”
“I rented the apartment.”
“What.”
“The apartment over the garage. I rented it. Yesterday.”
“To who.”
