Page 224

He laughs at whatever she said. She doesn’t laugh. He stops laughing.

I’d give anything to hear it. I’d give the car. I can’t hear a single word. I can only see their mouths, her face and his face, and his face is changing now, a little, the smugness going out of it, his arms coming uncrossed, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what she said to make that happen.

She says something. Two words, maybe three. He laughs, short, through his nose. She looks at him one more time. Then she turns around and walks toward my car.

I watch her come. And I watch him behind her over her shoulder the whole way. He doesn’t follow. He stands at the bottom of the steps with his hands pulled up inside his sleeves and watches her go. Then his eyes come up off her back and find the windshield. They find me.

I don’t move. I just look at him. I want him to see me, to see exactly who’s sitting here, waiting for her.

He looks away first.

She opens the passenger door. The cold comes in with her. She gets in, shuts it, and sits there with her hands in her lap and the scarf pushed up around her chin.

I look at her.

I want to ask. It’s right there. Are you okay. What did he say. What did you say. What the fuck was that.

I don’t.

I just look at her face. Her nose is red from the cold. Her eyes are a little wet at the rims but not crying. She’s not crying. Her mouth is set.

She turns her head and looks at me. And she smiles. Small. Not big. Not the fake one she used to do at the end of a lunch table, the one that meant leave me alone. Just the corner of her mouth for about a second. And I get it. I don’t know how, but I do.

I’m okay. I did what I came to do. You stayed.

I look past her at the house. He’s gone back inside. The screen door’s still swinging.

I look back at her.

I take my hand off the door handle, finally. My fingers ache. I put my hand on the console between us with my palm up.

She looks at it. Then she puts her hand in it. The watch slides down and rests against the side of my wrist, ticking.

“Ready?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I pull out around the gray sedan and drive.

The house smells like roast when we get back. It’s dark out already, almost five, and every window is lit up on the hill, and when I open the mudroom door the warm hits us both in the face, and the radio, and my mom saying something to my dad about the gravy.

Tessa stops in the mudroom to take off my mother’s boots. She takes a long time with them. She lines them up on the mat next to each other, exactly, toes even. Then she straightens up, takes a breath, and goes into the kitchen.

“There you are,” my mom says, without turning around from the stove. “Can you get the rolls out? Bottom oven.”

Tessa assumes my mom is talking to her, and she gets the rolls out. My mom takes the butter dish to the table. She tells my father he’s holding the carving knife wrong, and he looks at her over his glasses, and then at the knife, and then he holds it differently.

Tessa doesn’t look like somebody who just walked out of that house. I keep checking. I keep looking at her face across the kitchen for it, for whatever she did with her face on that walk. It isn’t there.

We eat in the dining room. The tree is lit through the doorway.

My parents talk and tell stories between bites, but I eat my roast and don’t say much. Under the table, my knee is resting against Tessa’s. It’s the only thing keeping me calm.

After dinner, she disappears upstairs. My mom sends me up twenty minutes later to get the extra blanket out of the hall closet.

The guest room door is open about a foot. The lamp’s on. And she’s laughing.

Not the way she laughs with me. Higher. Faster.