“Not your fault,” Veronica said with a shrug.
I couldn’t get away from stories of infidelity, it seemed. But I saw it differently now, my mistake. I remembered how it had felt to sit in the main house at the artist colony in upstate New York, surrounded by painters and writers and visual artists who were far more accomplished than I, wondering how on earth I had managed to get admitted into this place. I felt like an impostor; I was certain I would be discovered and thrown out. Then one night, the famous Max Bloemhof arrived and, seeing me curled up in an armchair with a copy of Memory of Fire, came right up to me and introduced himself. I remembered how it all began. How he asked about my music. How I’d sat at the grand piano and played a piece I’d just finished. How he’d looked at me. “Do you know,” he said, “I once watched Brad Mehldau play this piano. He was sitting right where you are.” He asked me to stop by his cottage sometime so he could give me a copy of his new book. The colony was on forty-two acres of land where horses and deer grazed, and for days I had stayed on the paved pathways, avoiding the fields for fear of ticks that carried Lyme disease. Yet that night, I took the shortcut to Max’s studio, walking, almost running, through the green fields. I remembered how he opened the door, how I stepped across the threshold, knowing what would happen next. For months, I didn’t allow myself to talk about the affair or think about his wife. Instead I waited, believing that our story would truly begin only after he left her and the messy details could be forgotten.
They weren’t. In March, he came to my apartment with a bottle of champagne and a duffel bag. It was past ten o’clock and I was already in my pajamas, a pencil and a page of musical notations in my hand. “What happened?” I asked, alarmed to see him on my doorstep so late, and yet also excited—perhaps he’d finally made the leap he’d been promising me he would make. “I just got a Lannan,” he said. It was his first big fellowship after years of scant attention from grant foundations. He’d once bitterly denounced the critics who served on judging committees as “a bunch of sheep” and “tasteless hacks,” but now his eyes shone with happiness and the deep lines around his mouth faded. “Let’s celebrate,” he said as he walked into my apartment. Margo, who’d been reading a magazine on the sofa, shuffled past us to her bedroom. I took out the champagne flutes and watched Max wrestle with the bottle. The hair on his arms was very dark, and on his right wrist he wore an old wind-up watch that had a cracked glass front but kept the time unfailingly. “Evelyn is taking Isabella for a field trip overnight,” he said, “and Ian is at a sleepover.”
“So you can spend the night?”
“I can spend the night.”
The champagne bottle popped, and Margo slammed her door shut. I put my work aside, drank the champagne, and listened to Max tell me about his fellowship plans. He would travel across the U.S. to conduct interviews with surviving Freedom Riders, in the hope that he could use selected quotes to weave together an oral history of their fight. “Kind of like Svetlana Alexievich, but more rigorous,” he said, which irritated me no end. He did this a lot, I thought, sneered at other writers, particularly women. He didn’t ask what piece I’d been working on when he arrived. In fact, except for the night we met, he’d rarely shown any genuine interest in my music. The next morning, while I was still in bed, my head pulsing with an incipient hangover, he got up and packed his bag. He was getting ready to return to his wife and kids and responsibilities, and I would be left behind. What was my place in all this? And the answer was as clear to me as if he’d spoken it himself: I was the bottle of champagne, the personal celebration. I raised myself on one elbow and told him he had to choose.
For weeks, I waited to hear from him, and would have waited even longer. So I hadn’t expected what happened with Jeremy that night in Joshua Tree or the few nights since. I was unprepared for the eagerness with which he took me in his arms, the tenderness that was in his voice when he spoke to me. It stunned me that my body had moved on like this, that it had grasped on to life, insisted on whatever comfort it could find, even as my heart pined for the old world, the world as it was when my father was still in it. The time I spent with Jeremy was a private solace, a few hours when there was no fighting with my sister, no criticism from my mother, no disappointment in myself. I could just be, even if it was for only a short while. He was the grown-up version of the boy I had always known, kind and funny and warm, and yet I feared that beneath this easy familiarity lay disturbing secrets.
Whenever he came to see me, he tried to fix up little things around the cabin. One time he changed the air filter on the swamp cooler, another time he found a replacement bulb for the missing light above the stove. That morning, I caught him eyeing the unsteady chairs around the dining table. “You don’t need to bother with that,” I said. “It’s not like I’m staying for good.” But he insisted. “It’ll only take a minute,” he said. I was beginning to think he was trying to make up for something, though I had no idea what it was he’d done. And I didn’t want to find out. I couldn’t allow myself to be drawn into a relationship at such a fragile moment. All my attention was on the hit-and-run case.
“Want some toast on the side?” Veronica asked. She placed the cheese omelette in front of me on the counter and once again topped off my iced tea.
“No, thanks.”
“Or maybe fresh biscuits?”
“This is just fine, thanks,” I said. Then, remembering something else, I asked her, “So that big new sign outside, it went up the morning my dad died, right?”
“Right.”
“I imagine there must’ve been a lot of noise? Or some kind of disruption?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Was Baker upset about that?”
Veronica tilted her head, but didn’t answer one way or another, and I thought it best not to push too much. She walked away to the other end of the counter, where the sugar dispensers sat, waiting to be refilled. I picked at my food as I watched the other diners through the mirror above the counter window. There was a time when I would have known some of the Pantry’s customers or at least recognized them, but all I could see now was a roomful of strangers. Two construction workers in orange vests had finished their meals and sat with their arms hanging over the headrests, their faces turned toward the windows. A young couple pulled miniature containers of jam from the dispenser and made a pyramid out of them to amuse their toddler. A middle-aged man in a baseball cap, a toothpick hanging from his lip, was reading the newspaper. His glass was empty, but Marty hadn’t noticed. I picked up the water pitcher and went to refill it.
Afterward, the pitcher still in my hand, I cast an appraising eye on the restaurant. The counter, which had been shiny new a few years ago, bore the unmistakable dullness of too many wipe-downs. There was a crater in the vinyl flooring at the entrance. Cracks ran through the grouting on the baseboard. The paint on the far wall, once an appealing pistachio color, had yellowed over the years and was peeling in places. The descriptions on the menu—calling the eggs “farm-fresh,” the bacon “applewood smoked,” the tomatoes “vine-ripe,” the bread “Grandma’s own”—were no longer au courant. A gash cut through the backrest of the last booth by the window. The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.
But the place was busy.