“I know . . . I’m not—” he says. He takes a deep breath. Starts again. “I just think that maybe if you felt a little more settled, you wouldn’t miss Philadelphia as much. We could move forward.”
“What do I have to move forward to?” It shoots out of my mouth like a bullet from a gun I didn’t even know was loaded. But then again, I’ve been storing up the ammunition ever since the night we stared at each other on the cement floor in my studio, our baby’s hand and Harrison’s words hanging between us: Maybe it’s for the best.
He looks at me, his eyes sad, tired, but he doesn’t respond.
And even though I know I should leave it alone, not push it—that he needs time—I can’t stop myself. I give voice to the sentence that’s been on loop in my head for weeks—the truth that I haven’t wanted to admit. “It’s not time you need, is it?” I say it calmly, quietly. Resigned. “You’re never going to be ready.”
He doesn’t answer for so long, I begin to wonder if I even said the words out loud. But then, he takes a deep breath, exhales and levels me with the look in his eyes. A look that tells me the answer, before he even says: “No. I don’t think I will.”
I wait for the water to fill my eyes, spill down my cheeks. Crying is as familiar a function to me as breathing at this point. But the tears don’t come. Instead, something else wells up inside me. Something hot and caustic and out of control, like a vat of acid threatening to burn me alive if I don’t let it out. So I open my mouth.
“Then what are we fucking doing?” I throw my napkin on the table and walk out of the restaurant alone.
* * *
Breakfast the next morning is markedly different from the one twenty-four hours previous. And not just because they’re out of powdered eggs and we have to settle for make-your-own waffles. Harrison and I aren’t speaking. When we got back to the hotel the night before, I got right into bed, turning my back to Harrison’s side. “Mia,” he said later, when he slipped in beside me, and I ignored him, pretending to be asleep. I know it’s childish, that I should talk to him, to beg him to tell me what’s really going on with him, but I also understand we’d just go in circles again. And I’m too hurt, too exhausted to try.
By the time we’re driving back to Hope Springs that afternoon, I can’t wait to be out of the car. Away from him. But then, I realize, we’ll just be in our house together. And as big as it is, it suddenly feels too small. I need to leave, to get out, and I know exactly where I’m going to go. I punch out a text to Raya, even though I know she’ll say yes.
“I’m gonna go to Philadelphia tomorrow,” I say, as Harrison pulls the car into the driveway.
He doesn’t respond. Just turns the key, shutting off the ignition, and then gets out of the car, popping the trunk and hefting our suitcase from it. I follow him to the front door.
He sticks the key in the door, pauses and then turns to me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time that day. They’re blazing, his jaw a tight line, and he says, “To see Raya or Oliver?”
“What?” I’m caught off guard by his anger and then put off by the audacity—he’s mad at me? Doesn’t he realize I’m also mad at him? “Raya, of course.”
He pushes the door in and steps over the threshold. He throws his keys on the cardboard box with a touch more force than necessary, and it collapses under the weight, his keys scattering to the floor.
He stalks over, bends down to pick them up and then, realizing there’s nowhere else to put them, sends them hurtling back to the ground. “We need a goddamn entry table,” he growls.
And as if it’s contagious, his irritation rips through me, and my fury from last night comes bursting back, as if it never left. “So buy a goddamn entry table,” I say. We stare at each other for a beat, eyes blazing, the thick air between us crackling.
“Maybe I will,” he says, finally, but there’s no fight in it. He slips past me into the den, into the kitchen. And I hear the door of the fridge open, the clink of glass on glass as he fishes out a beer.
I pad silently to the bedroom, where I hang my sundress in our closet, scrub my face and my teeth and then stride out to the studio, where I crank on the window air-conditioning unit and crawl under the blankets of the half-deflated air mattress and pretend to sleep.
And that’s when I remember that old console TV—and the day that no amount of banging could rattle those wires back together. And Dad finally put it out on the curb to be picked up with the trash.
Chapter 17
Raya’s apartment is across the street from an Express Oil Change shop and a kebab restaurant. She specifically chose it for its proximity to the garage, where she sweet-talked the owner into letting her store her welding equipment and do her metal sculpture work on off-hours in exchange for janitorial services twice a week.
From the front, her building is redbrick and stately, four aged and dingy cement columns holding up a useless ornate balcony. From the side, a mosaic of artistic graffiti covers every square inch of the exterior eastern wall—a mishmash of turquoise vines, pink florals, orange paisleys. Today, the sky above it hangs gray and heavy, fit to burst with clouds.
After Raya buzzes me in, I take the stairs two at a time up to the fifth floor and am breathing hard by the time I reach her, standing in the open door to her apartment. She’s decked in khakis and a blue polo shirt, her vibrant red hair smoothed to the side, ending in a braid over her left shoulder.
“Why are you in your work clothes? I thought you had the day off.”
“Sorry,” she says, pulling me into a hug. I inhale her peppermint scent. “Antwon didn’t show up this morning and they called me in.”
“No! I hate Antwon,” I say, though I’ve never met him in my life.
“I know. He’s a bitch.” Then she takes in my red-rimmed eyes and her face softens. I started crying as soon as I called her last night—the weight of everything that happened with Harrison the past twenty-four hours finally hitting me—and it doesn’t feel like I’ve stopped since. “How are you?”
I shrug, biting my lip. “I’ve been better.”
“I know,” she says, squeezing my hand. “I hate to leave you. Maybe you could go check out Prisha’s exhibit? It started last week.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“’K. Well, I left you a spare key on the table. And there’s a loaf of raisin bread in the freezer.” I walk past her, dropping my bag in the middle of her living room.
“Is Peter here?” I ask, glancing toward her roommate’s shut bedroom door, a vintage Velvet Underground concert poster affixed to the center of it.