Page 54 of Close Reading

Marcus and I both turn. Rowan is in the armchair with Hammertime in the fanny pack on their lap. They are wearing an oversized mustard velvet blazer with the sleeves shoved to the elbows over a teal t-shirt, which should not work with their black jeans and scuffed boots and should absolutely not work at 11:00 on a Sunday morning, and yet the whole arrangement communicates a person who got dressed with conviction and without a mirror and was right both times.

“How do you know about the blazers?” I ask.

“I notice blazers. She wears them like body armor. I find that very compelling as a choice.” They scratch Hammertime behind the ear. Hammertime tolerates this with the dignified forbearance of a creature who has decided that physical affection is beneath him but that resistance requires more energy than compliance. “Also Kim mentioned something in November and I have a good memory for romantic subplots. Occupational hazard.”

“You’re in Creative Writing.”

“I am in Creative Writing and I am telling you, as someone who has workshopped a lot of first kiss scenes and most of them are bad, that the look on your face right now is not the look of someone whose first kiss was bad.” They sit up straighter. “Oh my God. Wait. Did it just happen? Last night?”

“There was a kiss. Before last night. Last night was⁠—”

“Last night was not a kiss.”

“It was not.”

Rowan pulls Hammertime closer—a reflexive hug, like how some people clutch a pillow during a good part of a movie. Hammertime’s face, emerging from the fanny pack, achieves new heights of affronted dignity.

“That’s so good,” they say. The sentence is simple and sincere and the sincerity is the thing about Rowan that catches me: how the chaos parts sometimes, without warning, and what’s underneath is this direct, undefended warmth. “That’s really, really good. She deserves that. She looks like she hasn’t been— I don’t know.” They pause. Consider. “She looks like someone turned the lights off in her a long time ago and someone needs to turn them back on.”

The sentence lands. It lands because it is precisely true and because Rowan delivered it without filtering, the thought arriving fully formed and departing before the social calculation can intervene. She looks like someone turned the lights off in her a long time ago. Rowan has spoken to Margot exactly once that I know of—a brief exchange at the colloquium about hedgehog hibernation patterns that Margot received with polite bewilderment—and from that single exchange Rowan saw the thing I have spent six months learning to see.

They settle back with Hammertime. “Anyway. Congratulations. The lights are back on. I can see it from here.”

Bea sets a Calloway on the counter. She does not look at me when she sets it down. She wipes the counter. The slow wipe.

I take the coffee. I drink. Perfect, as always. I come back to the counter for a warm-up, though the cup is still half-full, just to be near Bea, just to stand at the counter the way I have stood here for years, in the proximity that means: I need you to know something and I don’t know how to start.

Bea pours without comment. She folds the cloth into a neat square. When she looks at me her expression is layered.

The top layer is gladness. Genuine, simple. Bea is glad.

The layer beneath is more complex. A protectiveness.

“She’s okay?” Bea asks. Two words. The simplest possible question.

“She’s okay,” I say. “She stayed.”

Bea’s hands still on the cloth. One second. She knows what stayed means. Bea knows the architecture, knows the pattern of retreat, knows what it costs Margot to remain in a room when leaving is the safer option.

“Good,” Bea says. Softly. “That’s good.”

She goes back to wiping. Then she stops again.

“There are things she hasn’t told you yet,” Bea says. “About before. When she’s ready, she’ll tell you. And when she tells you, you’ll understand things about her you don’t understand yet. Things about why the staying cost what it cost.”

She picks up the cloth. “But that’s hers to give. Not mine.”

I nod. The nodding is an agreement, a contract between me and Bea, written in the language of the counter and the cloth. The contract says: I will wait. I will let her tell me in her own time.

Bea reaches beneath the register. The wooden box with the affirmation cards. She selects one. Sets it on the counter.

Joy is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to dance with it.

I put the card in my pocket beside the first one.

Friday. Margot’s house, for a practical reason that has nothing to do with the impractical feelings coursing through my nervous system every time I am within six feet of this woman.

The reason: I left my reading glasses here. She is at work. She told me where the spare key is—under the third flowerpot from the left on the back porch. The key is exactly where she said it would be. I let myself in.