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But that’s not why I came. And I think she knows it. And I think that’s exactly why she almost didn’t give me her address.
I grab the toolbox, and I go up.
The door opens before I knock a second time.
She’s in leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, hair up, no makeup, and she looks so unguarded and so much like herself that I have to remind myself I’m holding a toolbox for a reason.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“You actually came.”
“I said I would.” I lift the box. “Where’s the patient?”
She steps back to let me in, and I walk into her apartment, and I stop.
I don’t mean to. It’s just that I’ve spent ten years in a house that looks like a toy store exploded in it, and this is the opposite in every possible way.
Everything is where it belongs. Not clean, exactly. Clean is easy. This is beyond clean. This is decided. The throw pillows sit at matching angles, corners up, like somebody karate-chopped each one on purpose. A blanket is folded over one arm of the couch without a single wrinkle in it. The books on the coffee table are stacked biggest to smallest, squared to the edge, and there’s a coaster set out. One coaster. Ready. In case a person ever came over and set a drink down.
I get the feeling not many people come over and set a drink down.
The kitchen is small and immaculate. A row of spice jars, labels all turned the same way like soldiers. A candle in the exact center of the table, dead center, equal distance from every edge.
Three framed photos hang by the window. Her and two women I don’t know, younger, laughing. And one of just her, alone, that somebody else must have taken, because she’d never point a camera at herself.
The whole place is beautiful and careful and quiet, and it tells me more about her in thirty seconds than she’s told me in two weeks. She lives like a woman who decided a long time ago that the only person she could count on to take care of her was herself. So she does it exceptionally well. In a home where nothing is ever out of place, because there’s no one here to move it.
“You live alone,” I say. It comes out softer than I mean it to. Less a question than something I just understood.
“I do.” She’s watching me look at her home, and her arms come up across herself, just slightly, the way people guard a thing they’ve let you see. “Why?”
“No reason. It’s a nice place.” I turn a slow circle. “It’s really nice, Olivia.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m…” I look for the word and land on the honest one. “I’m learning you.”
She leans back against the counter, and after a second her voice drops. “It was nice. Saturday. Your house.”
“Yeah?”
“It was so loud.” She almost laughs. “Bo talking over Dottie talking over you, something always about to spill, and I kept waiting for it to bother me. I’m very easily bothered. And it just didn’t.” She looks around her own perfect, silent apartment like she’s seeing it from the outside. “I come home to this every night and I tell myself I love the quiet. And I do. But Saturday I sat at your table in all that noise and I thought, I’d like some of this. In here. Somehow.” A pause. “I don’t know how to make a quiet apartment louder.”
I look at her. Then at the candle in the dead center of her table.
And before I can talk myself out of it, I walk over and slide it, four inches off center.
She goes very still. “What are you doing.”
“Making it louder.”
“That is not louder. That’s not even a sound.”
“It’s chaos.” I nudge it another inch toward the edge. “A little chaos. You said you wanted some.”
She stares at the candle. I watch her fight it, this genuine, physical discomfort at a candle sitting off center, and then I watch her lose, because she crosses the kitchen and slides it right back to dead center with one finger.
