Page 142
She turns all the way around, dries her hands slow, and levels me with the look. Not the teasing one. The other one. The one that pins you to the wall with a single eyebrow and waits.
“That’s not a nothing face.”
“Dottie.”
She lets it go, mostly. Kisses my cheek, says she’s got him, take my time. And then, before I’m out the door, she points the dish towel at me like a verdict. “Whatever it is, Luke. Ask before you decide. You’ve got a habit of deciding first.”
She goes to tell Bo he gets a Grandma night. He whoops from the living room, then hollers, “Tell Olivia the volcano’s due Friday! She said she’d help me paint it!” like it’s the most settled fact in the world, like she’s a fixed point, like of course she’ll be there.
I stand there with my keys in my hand feeling like I’m suiting up for battle.
I stop for takeout on the way. Chinese, the place she likes, the noodles she orders when she lets herself. I get it on purpose. I know her. Show up empty-handed and she’ll be at the stove inside five minutes, because cooking is what she does with her hands when she doesn’t want to be looked at, and tonight I need her looked-at. I need her across a table from me with nothing to do but this.
She opens the door in the oversized sweatshirt and the plaid pants, hair up, no makeup. Any other night that’s my favorite version of her, the unguarded one. Tonight it’s armor. She’s got the look of a woman who cried at some point today and fixed her face and is running on fumes.
Then she actually sees me. Standing on her step with two bags of takeout in one hand.
Whatever she was braced to say, it goes. She just looks at me, a little stunned, and for a second the armor isn’t anywhere.
“You’re wearing the hat,” she says, like that’s the part that matters.
“Sorry. I should’ve called first, I just—“
“No.” It comes out fast, before she can stop it, and I watch it surprise her as much as it does me. “No. I’m happy you’re here.”
For a beat neither of us knows what to do with that.
Then she reaches for the out, the way she does. “You brought food?”
“Figured I’d save you the trouble.”
“I was going to make that chicken thing.” She’s already turning toward the kitchen, toward the stove, toward the exit. “It’s marinating, it won’t take long, I can just—“
“Olivia.” I set the bags on the counter. Gentle. Firm. “Sit with me. Let’s just eat. You don’t have to cook for me tonight.”
Something crosses her face, quick, and she stops, and she doesn’t fight it, which scares me more than if she had. Olivia fights everything. A woman who won’t even fight me on the chicken is a woman holding something too heavy to spare a hand.
We sit at the little table by the window. The candle’s in the middle, back to dead center. She pushes her noodles around and doesn’t eat. The apartment is still and too neat, neater than usual, which I’ve learned is a tell, that when the inside of her is loud she makes the outside of her silent, and this place is silent as a held breath.
I don’t touch my food either. I had a speech. I worked it in the truck. And I look at her across the table not eating, not looking at me, somewhere far off behind her own eyes, and every careful line I planned falls apart, and what comes out is just the raw thing underneath it.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me.”
She looks up. “Okay.”
“Are you all in on Bo?”
She blinks. “What?”
“Bo. The whole thing. The whole package that comes attached to me.” I make myself keep going, because if I stop I won’t start again. “Because you’ve been somewhere else for two days, and I keep going back to Christmas, to your face when he asked you that question, and I need to know if what I saw was what I think it was.”
“Luke.”
“You went white, Olivia. He asked you to be his mom and you couldn’t say a word. Harper said you’re not a kid person. You kept him a secret from your best friends for months. And now you’re pulling back, and I have watched people pull back before, I know the shape of it, I built my whole life around never seeing that shape again.” My throat’s tight. “I let you in fast. Faster than I’ve let anybody near him in ten years. And if you got close enough to see the real size of it and you’re backing out, I need you to tell me tonight. Before he loves you any more than he already does.”
There it is. The worst thing I carry, out on the table next to the noodles neither of us is eating.
I brace for it. I actually brace, hands flat on my thighs under the table, the way you brace before a door comes off its hinges. I’m ready for her to say you’re right. I’m ready for slow and gentle and kind, the way the good ones let you down.
