I walked to the building where Janet lived and spoke to the doorman. She’d left my name downstairs with a key, and I went up to the ninth floor, carrying my heavy bag through her apartment door and finally setting it down in the quiet of her space.
Janet was another analyst at my firm, and she was doing very well. She’d bought her apartment last year, and I’d been here once for the housewarming party. Now, in contrast to my mother’s cottage, and the huge mansion on Maple, it looked tiny and meager. And the city outside the windows that had once felt vibrant and wild seemed dirty and exhausting.
Maybe I couldn’t do city life anymore.
Either way, it didn’t matter now. I laid down on the couch, which Janet had made up for me, and closed my eyes, falling asleep without even brushing my teeth or removing my jacket. Sometime in the middle of the night, Janet came in, giggling, with a male voice accompanying hers.
“Shhhh,” one of the whispered dramatically, and once they’d shuffled through and closed the bedroom door, I got up, got dressed for bed, used the bathroom and laid back down.
I awoke late, to a dreary gray Sunday morning. Janet shuffled down the hall a few minutes after I’d used the bathroom, rubbing her eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you, Addie?”
“Well, I’m sleeping on a couch,” I said. “So I guess I’ve been better. Thanks so much for letting me stay.”
“It’s really no problem,” she said. “Hey, could you grab the door when it buzzes? I ordered coffee and bagels. I’m gonna try to wash the alcohol from my skin with a quick shower, okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
An hour later, I sat at her small table with Janet and her boyfriend Allen, eating bagels and drinking coffee. Though my mom’s bakery was wonderful, this was one thing I really did love about New York City.
“That’s pretty,” Janet said, touching the slim silver bracelet on my arm.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, slipping it off. “It was in the house, the one I told you about.” I showed it to her, turning it over so she could see the engraving.
“To Lucille,” she read. “Our love defies boundaries. Robert.” She raised her eyes to me in question.
“It’s this beautiful love story between two people from families that hated each other. Kind of like Romeo and Juliet but without all the suicide.”
“Oh,” she said, handing it back.
“Lucille and Robert’s daughter gave us the house,” I explained.
“Some gift,” Janet said, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah.” I tried not to think about what she’d hoped to give us—the house and so much more.
“More lox?” Allen asked, pushing the little board toward me. We’d sliced onions and tomatoes and dressed our bagels with lox and capers.
“I’m good,” I said, leaning back in the chair.
“So what happens now?” Janet asked.
“Well,” I said. “I guess I get some version of my job back. At a lower salary and a lesser title.”
Janet cringed. “Yeah, sorry. I tried to tell them you were coming back.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine. I upended pens when I left.”
She nodded. She knew what our office was like. “I heard about that.”
Allen laughed. “That a pretty big deal?”
“Oh yeah,” Janet confirmed. “She might as well have come in with a blowtorch.”
“So anyway, I guess I’ll just go to work tomorrow. See if anyone knows someone who needs a roommate.” Even as I said it, my soul seemed to shrivel inside me. I was a thirty-five year old woman. I wanted a family, a house, a dog. I didn’t want to share a one-bedroom apartment with a stranger. But this was my life. I couldn’t live with my mother forever.
35
Lottie Gets Mad
Michael
I didn’t sleep much. Saying you were going to do something was very different from actually figuring out what the thing you needed to do might be. And when the sun rose the day after Halloween, I wasn’t much closer to figuring it out. I needed help.
So when Dan woke up, we walked down the hill to the Muffin Tin, and went inside, beckoned by the scent of cinnamon and pumpkin spice. Lottie was behind the counter as usual, though there was no sign of Addie, and I realized I’d hoped maybe I could just show up, say something off the cuff and fix everything. But it didn’t seem like that was going to happen.
Lottie’s eyes lit when they fell on Dan, but her brows lowered as she looked at me.
“Daniel,” she said, still frowning at me. “It’s so nice to see you again. What can I get for you?”
Daniel ordered a hot chocolate and a pumpkin spice muffin, and Lottie served it up, avoiding my gaze entirely. She smiled sweetly at Dan.
“I guess I’ll have a black coffee and one of those muffins too,” I said.
“I don’t think you will,” she told me.
I laughed. What else could you do when the proprietor of the bakery refused to serve you? “Seriously?”
“I’m mad at you.”
“Clearly.”
Dan wandered to the window with his breakfast, and I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling exhausted.
“She left,” Lottie said, her voice sounding more sad than angry now. “And it’s your fault.”
“She left? Already?” All the ideas I’d had about bumping into Addie in town before she left for New York fizzed away.
“She left last night, thanks to whatever you said to her.”
I was too tired to be defensive, and Lottie wasn’t wrong. “I didn’t get a chance to say anything. She told me not to bother. She said it was all too hard and walked away from me.”
Lottie sighed. “And you didn’t go after her.”
“She asked me to leave her alone!”
The older woman shook her head, her bob staying frozen around her soft face like a steel grey helmet. “Men.”
Just then the bell over the door rang and Uncle Victor came strolling in like he owned the place, quite a feat considering the last time he’d been here, he’d been busily attaching furniture to the ceiling.
“Dan!” He boomed, spotting my son in the corner. “Oh, hey Mike,” he said upon seeing me. “It’s a regular Tucker family reunion,” he joked. And then he walked right up to the counter, leaned across it, and gave Lottie Tanner a kiss that I would have classified as a little too long to be coffee-shop appropriate. Besides that, what the actual hell?
Lottie pulled away, fanning her face and blushing madly, and then she said, “Good morning, Victor,” in the sweetest voice I’d ever heard her use.
“Are you two . . .” I gestured between them.
“Yes we are,” Lottie said, confirming whatever she thought I was indicating in my speechlessness. “Not all Tucker men are terrible at expressing themselves.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. My uncle had never said a whole lot that I could recall that didn’t involve yelling at the football games he watched on television or at Virgil and Emmett.
“I am not, and you had better figure what you’re going to do to get Addie to come back here, young man,” Lottie said, finally letting loose. “She only thinks she wants to go back to that stinky big city, but I know better. She wants to be here. With you, for God only knows what reason.”