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And irritated, finally, when her phone rang and she let it go to voicemail, then checked the message while the conversation faltered around her.
Cath looked at Nev and yawned. He checked his watch, and the party broke up.
Ten minutes later Winston closed the front door on his daughter, turned around, and Allie had gone.
—
Allie couldn’t remember exactly how she’d come to be on the roof once she got there.
It helped, though, and she needed help.
She needed great, gulping deep breaths of the cool night air, and the glow of the city all around her, and landscaping—did they call it “landscaping” when it was a roof?—that incorporated a mixed profusion of wildflowers.
She stuck her nose in a coneflower while her phone buzzed out its second notification of a text from Matt.
She was the worst. She’d ruined Winston’s reunion with his brother, and she knew it meant a lot to him, having Nev and Cath visit.
She’d ruined things with her sister. Like, ruined-ruined them, maybe-could-never-fix-them ruined them, only she couldn’t think like that, couldn’t think, period, and had spent most of the day on the top of a double-decker tourist bus, filling the spaces in her head with the blank patter of the tour guide.
The roof door opened and closed, and Winston joined her. Walked behind her, around the raised brick bed in the center of the roof that contained the wildflowers, and stopped opposite where she stood.
He removed his cuff links. Placed them in his shirt pocket.
Bzz-bzzzzt.
Bzz-bzzzzzzzt.
And then a chime to indicate a different sort of message, an email or Facebook or Instagram, she wasn’t even sure.
“Who—” Winston said, “—the fuck—” and he turned up one shirt cuff, “—is trying to reach you, and why the fuck—” he turned up the other cuff, “—don’t you pick up the blighted phone?”
“It’s Matt.”
He put his hands on his hips. “What does Matt want?”
Allie sighed, sinking onto the brick ledge of the flower bed. “So far today, he wants to know if I want him to renew the art museum membership as a couple or if I want to buy my own as a single, even though it costs more. He sent me pictures of the dogs, which used to be our dogs but now they’re just his. He called and left a message to let me know that he?
??s worried that I haven’t been responding to his texts, though he can see they’re delivered and read, and maybe we should talk, or even set up a regular weekly time to connect.”
She thumbed on her phone and scrolled down through the messages. “Oh, also, do I want to buy chocolate from his niece, who’s selling it for her school.”
“You gave me to understand that you and Matt were no longer together.”
“We’re not.”
He gestured to her phone, which had once again begun to buzz.
Four more texts from Matt.
Did you know the guy at the grill is putting in a new bathroom?
I stopped by there and the place is a disaster.
I’m not sure he’s doing it to code—the demo crew was his brother and some of his guys. If the electrician’s not licensed, you’re going to have a real problem when it gets inspected again.
Have you seen this?
And then a link to an online article, no doubt about the importance of using union labor or why it was a bad idea to upgrade restaurant bathrooms, and what the fuck, what the fuck, “What the fucking fuck, Matt, what the fuck?”
