Thursday evening, November 5
Simon opened his front door with a dish towel over one shoulder.
“Come look,” he told Willa. “We're almost there.”
The kitchen had only half its cabinet doors. He opened a drawer to show her how gently it closed, and the drawer refused to do anything until he removed a protruding spoon.
“Spoons are temporary,” he said.
Beth washed her hands at the sink. She dried them carefully, then folded the dish towel and hung it through the handle of the oven.
“It looks good,” Willa told him.
Simon smiled. He had flour on his watch strap. Something was baking, something he had been waiting to show them, and when he pulled it out he looked at Beth first.
“Sit,” he said. “Both of you. It's better hot.”
Beth sat. Willa took the chair beside her.
It was a loaf with cheese rolled into it. Simon cut it too soon, apologizing as the middle gave beneath the knife. Willa caught a strip of hot cheese with her fork.
“Terrible,” she said. “You should give me all of it.”
He pushed the bigger piece onto her plate.
“He's been practicing,” Beth said.
“I've made two.”
“This is the third.”
“Third includes the first. The first didn't count.”
“Why not?” Willa asked.
“It became something else.”
“Smoke,” Beth said.
Simon smiled at her and reached behind her for the pepper. The gesture brought his arm around her shoulders, a brief warm circle that he didn't complete. He set the grinder beside Willa.
“Have you seen the room?”
“The theater? Yeah.”
“Big?”
“Quite.”
“Will it be on the actual television or is it a thing we have to find?”
“It's being filmed. They haven't sold it yet.”
Simon nodded. “Still. That's good.”
“It is.”
He looked genuinely pleased for her. She had a sudden desire to give him something equally pleasant to hear.
“Beth showed me the tour stuff.”
“I know. Those antlers.”
“Are you going out to see it?”
“I'll try. Last week of term is a mess.” He sat down at last. “I was saying we could do a weekend somewhere. Make a little thing of it.”
Beth pulled a small piece of crust away from her bread. The wine she and Willa had drunk was a thin warm line inside Willa's chest.
“It's work,” Beth said.
“Yeah, I know. I'm not asking to come to the office.”
“We'll have to see.”
“I know,” he said again, less easily.
Willa ate her bread. The kitchen windows had steamed up at the bottom. Beside the sink was a picture torn from a magazine showing a finished kitchen very unlike this one, with a bowl of lemons and no visible place where anyone had cooked.
Simon asked whether Beth had shown her the new drawer.
“I did,” he corrected himself. “Sorry. I've reached the stage where I'm introducing it to people.”
“What's its name?” Willa asked.
“Soft-close.”
“Strong family name.”
He laughed. Beth did too, and the kitchen became a place they could be in again. Simon told them about a boy in his music class who had learned one phrase on the saxophone and used it to answer every question. He didn't do an imitation of the boy. He imitated his own gradual loss of hope.
“Did you ask him to stop?” Beth said.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He played the phrase.”
Willa laughed with a mouthful of bread and had to cover her lips. Simon got up to get her water. She liked him. It was inconvenient, how much she liked him here. She could remember teaching him a card game one Christmas while Beth and Jo argued about whether a hired car counted as a present. He'd been very bad at it, quite happy to lose until he understood. Then he'd become furious about losing in a way that was fun to watch.
Beth checked a message on her phone. Simon saw her checking and looked down at the bread, then back at Willa.
“You were married, weren't you?”
Beth put the phone face down.
“Yes,” Willa said.
“I mean, I knew that. I was thinking—did you ever do any of this? A house together.”
“An apartment. We painted a wall.”
“What color?”
“Something nobody wanted once it dried.”
Simon smiled. “Right.”
“Don't listen to the names. They'll call it Early Morning and it's just gray.”
“Our gray's called Galley,” Beth said.
“That's a kitchen on a boat.”
“It's also where they keep the slaves.”
Simon looked at her. She was making a joke, but it had come out flat.
“Well,” he said. “Maybe we'll change it.”
Willa looked away. In the half-dark window she could see a blurry reflection of her sister and herself sitting almost in the same posture. She had been twenty-nine when Ben left. Beth was thirty-five now. Numbers she hadn't had to put beside each other before.
When they finished eating, Simon began clearing the plates. Beth got up too quickly and knocked the edge of the water glass. Willa caught it.
“Saved,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Simon's hand settled on Beth's shoulder as he passed behind her. “I'll do this. You two have a drink.”
“I've had enough,” Beth said.
He took it to mean wine. Willa watched him stack the dishes beside the sink.
The water ran over the plates, a steady rushing sound. Willa could see a strand of Beth's hair caught in the back of her sweater and reached to pull it free. Beth bent her head to let her.
Atlantic City, November 2016
Ben left his coat on the bed because he hadn't decided how to put it on while he was leaving her.
For several minutes Willa had thought he was describing something they could work on. Their marriage had reached the part of the conversation where people repeated each other's names. She said his, and he said hers, patiently, as if she had called a service desk about a problem no longer covered by the warranty.
Then he put on the coat.
“You're going now?”
“I think that's best.”
“We have a dinner reservation.”
He looked at the small hotel desk where she had written the time on the back of an envelope.
“Willa.”
“I know what you said.”
She knew. He was leaving her. He had come away with her for their anniversary because he hadn't known how to say it at home and had then found out that a hotel was no easier. He had said that too, and it was perhaps the part she hated most, that he had arrived with hope of completing a difficult task.
She stayed in her dress after he went. The zipper had caught the lining halfway up, and the dress was tight across her chest when she tried to move her arms. She sat at the foot of the bed and watched the door. There was no peephole on this side that would show him getting smaller.
She called her mother at nine seventeen. Jo answered over a clatter of voices, said, “What?” and then, at Willa's first attempt to talk, said it differently.
“All right. Where are you?”
“Here.”
“I need the hotel, honey.”
Willa gave it to her. She had to look at the stationery to remember the name. Jo asked her to stay in the room. Willa said she wasn't going anywhere in this dress, and Jo said, “Then we've found its good point.”
She arrived after eleven with Beth and a white paper bag. Beth held a coat Willa hadn't asked for. Jo put the bag on the dresser and took Willa's face in both hands.
“Oh, baby.”
Willa bent into her. Jo's blouse was cool against her forehead and then damp. Behind them Beth shut the door quietly.
“Let's get this thing off,” Jo said after a while.
They stood in front of the mirror. Jo tried the zipper. Beth found the sewing kit in a drawer and held a miniature pair of scissors up to the light.
“That's not scissors,” Jo said. “That's a rumor about scissors.”
Willa gave a wet snort. Jo looked at her reflection, pleased, and made no other joke. She kept one hand against Willa's back while Beth cut two threads of lining and freed the metal teeth. The dress dropped open. Willa saw the pink marks across her own ribs and suddenly wanted to sit down again.
Jo helped her into a T-shirt. Beth had put the spare coat over a chair and was opening the takeout containers. The smell made Willa's stomach close.
“I can't.”
“It's chicken,” Jo said. “It'll wait. They do very little in the box.”
Beth put a container in the little refrigerator. She had remembered Willa liked the potatoes. Everybody remembering things made Willa furious.
“You didn't have to come,” she told Beth.
“I wanted to.”
“She just needed somebody to drive.”
Beth's hands stopped on the refrigerator handle.
“I can go if you want.”
Jo said, “Nobody's going anywhere tonight.”
Willa looked at her feet. One strap of her shoe had made a red line across the top. She hadn't intended to say that to Beth. She had intended to make the room empty and couldn't find a way to do it.
In the bathroom Jo tested the water with the inside of her wrist. She had Willa lean over the tub. It was awkward; Willa was twenty-nine years old and her mother had to kneel on a folded towel to keep from hurting her knees. Water ran behind Willa's ear.
“Too hot?”
“No.”
“Tell me if it is.”
Jo worked shampoo through her hair. Willa could hear Beth on the phone in the other room, asking the front desk for another blanket. She said please twice in her brisk, quite cheerful voice.
“I don't want you to tell anybody,” Willa said.
Jo squeezed the water from a section of hair.
“Put your head down.”
“Mom.”
“I'm here.”
“Don't tell it.”
Jo turned off the tap. For a moment there was only water dripping from Willa's hair into the tub.
“All right.”
Beth brought the blanket in while Jo was drying Willa's hair. She had taken the chicken out of the refrigerator and put it within reach of the bed. Willa ate two potatoes and then a piece of chicken. Jo sat beside her with her shoes off. On television, a woman opened a refrigerator and screamed. None of them could find the remote until Beth stood up and it fell out of her coat.
“She's stolen the television,” Jo said. “We're staying.”
Beth looked at Willa. Willa pulled back the blanket to make room.
All three of them slept badly. At four, Jo got up to turn off the bathroom light; she came back and put her hand against Willa's forehead, as though leaving were a fever that might break in the night.
Back in Simon's kitchen, Beth turned her head and said, “What?”
“Nothing. Hair.”
Willa held up the dark strand, then let it fall into the trash. Simon was looking for the dish towel. Beth had put it through the handle of the oven. She told him without turning around.
At the door, he gave Willa the remainder of the bread wrapped in foil.
“Breakfast.”
“I'll try to wait.”
Beth walked her to the corner. They stood under a streetlight while a bus passed in the wrong direction.
“You're not going to say anything?”
“No.”
“I know it's shitty.”
Willa watched the bus go.
“It's not for me to tell him.”
Beth nodded. She put both hands in her coat pockets, her shoulders lifting around her ears.
“You'll tell me if I can help?”
“I did. The shelf.”
“Besides the shelf.”
“Just that for now.”
Willa opened her mouth and shut it. There was no way to ask for more trust without explaining how much she already had.
Beth kissed her cheek. The kiss was quick and cold.
“Text me when you get home.”
Willa held the bread against her coat all the way back. On the bus she pulled open one corner of the foil and ate a little of the soft middle.