Glancing up from the uncooperative rug, she spots me. “Hey,” she calls out. I hear something Southern in the one-and-a-half syllables she gives the word. “Mind giving me a hand?”
I hold open my arms, showcasing the sweat dripping off them. “Mind the sweat?”
The woman eyes me. I know the look she’s giving me. It’s one I’ve learned to decipher, living my single life in Chicago. She likes what she sees. Her smile spreads flirtatiously.
“No,” she says. “Not at all.”
I jog over. When I hoist up one end of the rug, she lifts the other.
“I’m Meredith,” she says.
“Nathan,” I introduce myself. While we head toward her house, Meredith walking backward, we pass a very inviting swimming pool beneath a towering bougainvillea. Papery pink flowers float listlessly on the water. We continue up the short flight of front steps into her living room, where cardboard boxes cover the floor.
“I just moved to town.” Her eyes sweep over the boxes. “Obviously. You live nearby, right?” I catch her wince. “I’m not a creep, despite how that sounded. Just trying to learn the neighbors.”
I laugh, sympathetic to her self-consciousness. I remember well the rootless feeling of moving out of my home with Melissa and to my new city. I wonder what Meredith’s story is, which sounds cliché when the thought runs through my head, but it’s why I write fiction and where I find inspiration. “Don’t worry about it,” I reassure her. “Yeah, I’m staying down the street. The house with the blue shutters.”
“Vacationing?”
I shake my head. “Here for work. For the summer.”
Her eyebrows rise. I realize it’s the answer she was hoping for. When she doesn’t reply immediately, I indulge in the opportunity to look a little closer. She’s hot, probably in her early thirties, with a volleyball player’s frame. Her tan is too perfect to be unintentional, and her black halter top reveals a lean midriff.
She catches me looking, then grins. “Well, Nathan,” she says, “thanks for your help.” She sounds sure of herself—instead of a woman who needed my help and invited me into her unfinished living room, she’s a woman who now knows I was checking her out.
“Good luck with the boxes,” I say.
She walks me to the door. “I hope you run by again soon.”
On my way out, I flash her the dimple. By the time I reach the street, I’ve started strategizing how to get Meredith’s number. It’s a reflex at this point, after weeks on book tour in new cities each night. Opportunities like this one aren’t easy to come by. Meredith is attractive, by all indications single, and definitely flirtatious. It’s like the universe has delivered me a gift to sustain me through the next months with Katrina.
I wait for the prospect to excite me. It doesn’t.
With every passing second, the fire in me doesn’t heighten. Why wouldn’t I want to end stressful days of writing doing whatever Meredith wanted in her new bedroom, our wineglasses half empty on her living room floor? There’s no good reason.
Yet my desire only flickers, never quite catching. I’m not uninterested in the possibility, I’m just not enthusiastic. While I walk back to the house with the blue shutters, I wonder why not.
24
Katrina
“They still love each other,” Nathan says.
“But they’re not in love.” We’re coming up on twenty minutes of this discussion, the clock in the corner of my screen reminding me how much time has passed without progress. “And they never will be again,” I add.
We’re sitting at the dining table. It’s the point in the day’s writing where we would ordinarily either have found our groove or gotten irritable—we’ve been working for hours, yet with the late afternoon sun glaring marigold through the shutters, we have hours to go. Instead, our conversation on the walk home from the café has coated everything in cool professionalism.
We’re patient, even detached, while we discuss the looming question of how the book’s going to end. We need to plan out how the plot’s going to build, and we can’t agree.
“I’m not saying they don’t resent their feelings.” Nathan’s pretense of diplomacy is unwavering. “But you can’t deny they’re there.” His voice is a little hoarse from the day’s prolonged discussion.
I clench my jaw. I don’t like the direction this conversation has gone or the precise point hanging us up. I want to keep things detached. But the debate feels uncomfortably loaded, and I don’t enjoy walking the ugly tightrope that is discussing lingering feelings with Nathan Van Huysen. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t think Michael and Evelyn will ever move on or fall in love with anyone else?” I ask.
“Of course not,” he replies instantly. “You can love two people at once in different ways.”
I make the mistake of meeting his eyes. Wishing I hadn’t caught the fleeting shadow in them, I look away. Like a character in a ghost story, I pretend I imagined what I saw.
I stand up and start pacing, distancing myself from him. I know I could let the discussion go if Harriet hadn’t put the idea in my head that we would write repressed feelings into this book. It’s her fault, not ours, that I’m reading into everything Nathan and I say. But with Harriet’s warning ringing in my ears, I can’t agree with what Nathan’s proposing, not if there’s a chance this conversation isn’t just about our characters.
“They care about each other,” I get out. “But their passion has changed form. Love to hate.”
Nathan watches me from the dining table. “So you want to end this book with them signing their divorce papers and burning every memory they have of each other?”
I falter, pausing on one end of the room, under the tauntingly tranquil painting of a sailboat on open water. I want to say yes. Nathan is, however, unfortunately right. The ending I’ve wound up proposing isn’t interesting. It lacks nuance.
Which means if I were to push for it, I realize, it would only be out of personal feeling. Because it’s the ending I want for myself—sending in this book and forgetting every memory Nathan and I have of each other. If I let that hope become Evelyn and Michael’s, I would prove Harriet exactly right. Instead, I have to write with my feelings utterly to the side no matter the ending.
“No,” I say.
Nathan slants his head a little, like he’s not sure he heard right.
I elaborate, finally seeing with refreshing clarity what the ending should be. “You’re right. This book is about how love changes and how it stays the same. Even their parting is itself an act of love. Love to hate, then back to love, less passionate this time, but there. Forever.” The final word comes out weighty, making the hair on my neck stand up.