Chapter Six

The apartment was quiet in a way it had never been before.

I was up before the sun. I lay in bed for a while first, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something to arrive that didn’t—just the hollow numbness — wide and flat and somehow worse than crying. I got up because lying there felt like something I couldn’t afford.

The kitchen was cold. I turned the kettle on and made breakfast. My hands moved automatically — eggs, toast, the cracked wooden spoon Sadie refused to replace. Enough for four people before I caught myself. I stood very still for a moment with the spoon in my hand. Then I put one plate back in the cupboard and kept going.

Sadie came out of Mamma’s room at half past seven.

She appeared in the doorway still in yesterday’s clothes, her hair undone, her eyes carrying the specific swollen weight of someone who had cried through the night and run out of tears somewhere around four in the morning. She looked at me. I looked back. We both said nothing to each other. She sat down at the table and I put a plate in front of her and poured two cups of tea and sat across from her.

The toast went cold. Neither of us touched it.

Sam came out a few minutes later. 

Also in yesterday’s clothes, hair everywhere, one sock on and one off. He looked at the two of us sitting at the table and something crossed his face — quickly filed away. He pulled out his chair, sat down, reached for the toast, and said without looking up —

“Is Mum any better today?”

Sadie stopped moving. Her shoulders came up slowly like she was bracing for something and then collapsed inward all at once. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. Her eyes filled and spilled over, and she shook her head once—not answering, just shaking her head — and the sound that finally came out was small and broken, with no shape to it at all.

Sam looked up.

He looked at Sadie. Then at me.

“She passed last night Sam. After you left.”

He looked at me for a long moment without moving. Then he looked down at the table. His jaw worked like he was trying to find somewhere to put something too large for his mouth. His hand was flat on the table in front of him and a single tear dropped onto it — just one, landing quietly — and he stared at it like he didn’t know how it got there.

Then his chin went down to his chest and his shoulders pulled up around his ears and the sound that came out of him was the kind you only made when you had been holding something for so long that your body simply stopped asking permission. He was crying the way people cried when they forgot anyone was watching. His whole chest heaved with it. His hands came up to cover his face. He made himself as small as a fifteen-year-old boy could make himself and he stayed there and let it take him completely.

Sadie was beside him before I could move — her arms around his shoulders, her face pressed against the side of his head. Both of them crying. I sat across from them and held it together. I held it together so completely that I didn’t notice my own hand was shaking until I picked up my tea and had to put it back down.

I picked up my bag and told myself I was leaving for work because the bills didn’t stop for grief. After all, the work didn’t wait, because being useful somewhere was better than just wanting to cry all day. I told myself all of that and it was even partly true.

Sadie looked at me when I picked up my bag. Not with judgment. Just — she knew. I kissed Sam on the top of his head where he sat on the couch wrapped in Mamma’s blanket, eyes on a television he wasn’t watching. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t either. I just went.

The subway was loud and ordinary and completely indifferent to what kind of morning I’d had. I held the pole and stared at the advertisement across from me and let the noise of it wash over me — the doors, the announcements, the particular hum of a city that kept moving regardless. It was almost a relief. Nobody on this train knew anything about me. Nobody needed anything from me. I was just a woman holding a pole, going somewhere, same as everyone else.

Verizon was already busy when I arrived. I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop and stared at the quarterly projections file. None of the numbers was going to make sense today. I already knew that.

Andrea looked at me once when I sat down. Not the usual glance — a proper look, the kind that took inventory. She didn’t say anything. She reached across and put a coffee on my desk without being asked and went back to her screen.

I opened my laptop and stared at it.

After about ten minutes she said without looking up — “Bad weekend?”

“Something like that,” I said.

She nodded once and left it alone. That was the thing about Andrea — she knew the difference between someone who needed to talk and someone who needed to be left alone inside the same room as another person. She gave me the second one without being asked and I was grateful enough for it that I nearly told her everything right there.

Nearly.

The morning moved quickly. I answered emails. I opened the variance analysis I was supposed to complete for Cassius by the end of the week and read the first line four times. I closed it. Opened it again. Closed it.

At eleven there was a team meeting in the conference room.

I didn’t go.

I sat at my desk and watched people file past and told myself I would go in a minute and didn’t move. Andrea paused beside me on her way past.

“I’ll tell them something came up,” she said quietly.

I nodded.

She went in. I put my hands flat on the surface in front of me and looked at them and breathed carefully.

Through the glass walls, I could see Cassius at the head of the table. At one point he looked up from his laptop and glanced toward the door — toward my empty seat — then toward Andrea. Andrea said something brief. His expression didn’t change. He looked back at his laptop.

After the meeting, he walked past my desk on his way back to his office. I kept my eyes on my screen. He kept walking. Nothing was said. But his gaze stayed on me a half-second longer than the walk required.

Andrea appeared beside me at one o’clock. “Come on.”

“I’m working.”

“You haven’t done anything since nine thirty.” She picked up my coat from the back of my chair.

We went to the coffee place two blocks east. I sat with both hands wrapped around a cup I wasn’t drinking and looked at the window and said nothing for a long time.

Andrea wrapped both hands around her cup and waited. She had a way of waiting that didn’t feel like pressure — just space, held open, yours to fill or not.

I looked at the window for a long time. At the people passing outside who had somewhere to be and reasons to be there and mornings that had gone the ordinary way mornings went.

“My mum died last night,” I said.

The words came out the same way they had with Sam — plain, without decoration. I had nothing left to dress them up with.

Andrea went very still across the table. Not the polite stillness of someone composing a response. Just — still. Like she understood that the wrong word in the next three seconds would cost something.

“I’m so sorry,” she said finally. Quietly. Just that.

I nodded. Kept looking at the window.

“She’d been ill for a long time,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. Like the length of it was supposed to soften the landing somehow. Like I was trying to make it easier for both of us.

Andrea put her cup down. “That doesn’t make it easier.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

She didn’t say anything after that. Didn’t reach for the words people usually reached for — the “she’s at peace now” and the “at least she isn’t suffering” and the “time heals everything.” She just sat there with me in the middle of it and let it be what it was.

I felt the tears before I knew they were coming. I pressed my lips together and looked at the ceiling for a second and pulled them back. When I looked at Andrea again she was looking at her coffee cup with great concentration.

She never mentioned them.

I have never been more grateful for anything in my life.

I went back to the office at two. I managed another three hours. At five I packed my bag, said goodbye to Andrea, and took the elevator down. I stood outside Verizon on the pavement for a moment. Then I went home. 

The Penthouse — Cassius

Gloria didn’t knock.

She never knocked. She always showed up with no particular interest in whether you were ready for her. I heard the key in the door and Max looked up from the couch where he had been sitting for the past hour eating my food. 

“Did you give her a key?” I said.

“She asked very nicely,” Max said, not looking away from the screen.

Gloria came through the door with a tote bag on each shoulder, earphones around her neck, and the specific energy of someone who was about to cause trouble. She dropped both bags on the floor, looked at Max on the couch, looked at me standing in the kitchen, and said —

“Good. You’re both here. I need advice and I need food and I need someone to tell me I’m not being insane.”

“Two out of three,” Max said. “I’m not committing to the last one.”

She threw her scarf at him and came into the kitchen and opened my fridge. She emerged holding leftover pasta and a look of moderate satisfaction.

“Can I—”

“Yes,” I said.

She put it in the microwave and leaned against the counter and looked at me.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

“And yet you always ask.”

She smiled. “It’s called checking up on Cassius. Normal families do it.”

“Tell me about normal families,” Max said from the couch.

“Nobody asked you,” Gloria said.

“You literally said you needed advice from both of us.”

“I said I needed advice. I didn’t specify the quality. I’m probably not going to follow it anyway, it’s just for building character.”

Max put his hand over his heart as she had wounded him. Gloria took her pasta from the microwave and came to sit at the kitchen island and for a few minutes, we were just three people eating and arguing about nothing important.  

Then she put her fork down and said — “There’s a boy.”

Max looked at the ceiling.

I said nothing.

“From my course,” she continued. “He’s — fine. He’s good actually. He’s very good. He wants to come to New York next month and meet—” she paused “—everyone.”

The word everyone landed and we both knew what it meant.

I looked at her.

She looked back at me with her chin slightly raised — the expression she had been perfecting since she was nine and wanted something she already knew was complicated.

“Don’t make that face,” she said.

“I’m not making a face.”

“Do you want him to?” I said.

She was quiet for a moment. “I want to want him to,” she said finally. “Does that make sense?”

“Tragically yes,” Max said.

She threw a napkin at him.

“The thing is—” she started, then stopped. Turned her fork over in her hands. “The thing is I really like him. Like actually like him. And every time I think about bringing him here I think about what he would see and what he would think and whether—” she stopped again.

I waited.

“Whether he would still look at me the same way,” she said quietly. “After.”

The kitchen went a different kind of quiet.

Gloria stared at her pasta. She was twenty years old and she had spent her entire life in a house full of men. 

“He would,” I said.

She looked up at me.

“If he’s worth bringing here,” I said, “he would.”

She held my gaze for a moment. Something moved through her expression that she didn’t let become anything visible. Then she picked up her fork and said — “Okay but what if he’s not worth bringing here and I just really like him anyway?”

“Then you don’t bring him here,” Max said. “You keep the two things separate.”

“Can you do that?”

Max and I looked at each other.

“No,” we said at the same time.

Gloria threw her head back and the laugh came out loud and completely unconscious. She pointed at both of us. “Useless. Genuinely useless. I came here for advice.”

“You came here for pasta,” I said. “The advice is a bonus.”

“The advice is terrible,” she said. “The pasta is also terrible, this is leftover.”

“You ate it.”

“I was hungry.” She pushed the empty container aside and rested her chin in her hand and looked at me with the particular attention she reserved for moments she had decided were important. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Amelia.”

“That’s different,” I said.

“I know it’s different,” she said. “I’m asking how you are about it.”

I looked at her for a moment. Gloria was the only person in my life who asked that question and meant the second word and not the fourth one. Not “how are you about it” as a pleasantry. “How are you?” — actually, specifically, right now, tell me the real thing.

“I’m managing,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time with those eyes that were too perceptive for a twenty-year-old and too kind to be anything but completely genuine.

“You always say that too,” she said softly.

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Then Gloria stood up and picked up both her tote bags and said — “I’m staying in the guest room.”

“I didn’t agree to that,” I said.

“Max said it was fine.”

“I absolutely did not,” Max said.

“Goodnight,” Gloria said, and disappeared down the hallway.

Max and I sat in the silence she left behind. 

“She’s good for you,” Max said eventually.

I looked at the hallway she had gone down.

“She’s good for everyone,” I said.

Max nodded slowly. He looked at the window, at the city outside, and then back at me with the expression he wore when he had something to say and was deciding whether to say it.

“Cassius.”

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Let it remain that way, Max.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he picked up the television remote and unmuted whatever he had been watching before Gloria arrived.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

My phone rang a few minutes later.

No name. Just a number. I stepped onto the balcony and closed the glass door behind me. 

I answered.

“There are a few complications” The voice was low and unhurried. “But we can get it done.”

 “Understood. Stay ready.”

The line went dead.