No comment.
“Anything else happen? Anything good?”
She shakes her head.
And that, in a nutshell, is Zoe’s sucky day.
Zoe is excused from the table without eating her chili. Heidi convinces her to take a few bites of a corn bread muffin and finish a glass of milk, and then sends her to her room to finish her homework, leaving Heidi and me alone. Again, my cell phone rings. Heidi jumps up to start the dishes and I linger, wondering whether or not I’ve been excused. But instead I grab some dishes from the table and bring them to Heidi who’s dumping Zoe’s chili down the garbage disposal.
“The chili was good,” I lie. The chili was not good. I stack the dishes on the countertop for Heidi to rinse and hover behind her, my hand pressed to plaid red flannel.
“Who’s going to San Francisco?” Heidi asks. She turns off the water and turns to face me, and I lean into her, remembering what it feels like when I’m with her, a familiarity so ingrained in us both; it’s natural, habit, second nature. I’ve been with Heidi for almost half my life. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. I know her body language, what it means. I know the inviting look in her eye when Zoe is at a sleepover or long after she’s in bed. I know that now, as she slips her arms around me and pulls me into her, locking her hands around the small of my back, it isn’t an act of affection; it’s one of ownership.
You are mine.
“Just a couple people from the office,” I tell her.
Again with the big inquisitive eyes. She wants me to elaborate. “Tom,” I say, “and Henry Tomlin.” And then I hesitate, and it’s probably the hesitation that does me in. “Cassidy Knudsen,” I admit, meekly, throwing in the last name as if she doesn’t know who Cassidy is. Cassidy Knudsen, with the silent K.
And with that she removes her hands and turns back to the sink.
“It’s a business trip,” I remind her. “Strictly business,” I say as I press my face into her hair. It smells like strawberries, sweet and juicy, combined with a hodgepodge of city smells: the dirtiness of the street, strangers on the train, the musty scent of rain.
“Does she know that?” Heidi asks.
“I’ll be sure to tell her,” I respond. And when the conversation goes quiet, the room silenced except for the indelicate propulsion of dishes into the dishwasher, I seize my opportunity to slip away, wandering into the bedroom to pack.
It isn’t my fault I have a coworker who’s nice on the eyes.
When I wake in the morning, Chris is gone. Beside me, on the distressed wooden nightstand, is a mug of coffee, tepid and likely filled to the gills with hazelnut creamer, but still: coffee. I sit up in bed and reach for the mug and the remote control and, flipping on the lifeless TV, stumble upon the day’s forecast. Rain.
When I finally wobble down the hall to the kitchen, bypassing Zoe’s school portraits from kindergarten through seventh grade, I find her standing in the kitchen, pouring milk and cereal into a bowl.
“Good morning,” I say, and she jumps. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask, and kiss her gingerly on the forehead. She congeals, uncomfortable with the mushy stuff these days. And yet, as her mother, I feel the need to show my affection; a high-five—or secret handshake as Chris and Zoe share—simply won’t do, so I kiss her and feel her pull away, knowing I’ve planted my love for the day.
Zoe’s dressed already in her school uniform: the pleated plaid jumper and navy cardigan, the suede Mary Janes that she hates.
“Yeah,” she says and takes her bowl to the kitchen table to eat.
“How ’bout some juice?”
“I’m not thirsty.” Though I see her eye the coffeemaker nonetheless, a door that she previously opened and I firmly closed. No twelve-year-old needs a stimulant to get going in the morning. Yet I fill my mug to the brim and douse it with creamer, sit beside Zoe with a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and attempt to make small talk about the anticipated day. I’m inundated with yeses, noes, and I don’t knows, and then she scampers away to brush her teeth, and I’m left with the silence of the kitchen, the steady percussion of raindrops on the bay window.
We head out into the soggy day, bypassing a neighbor in the hall. Graham. He’s pressing at buttons on a snazzy watch, the gadget letting out various beeps and bleeps. He smiles to himself, clearly pleased.
“Fancy meeting you here, ladies,” he warbles with the most decadent smile I’ve ever seen. Graham’s longish blond hair flops against a glossy forehead, strands that will soon be fully erect thanks to a generous supply of gel. He’s wet, though from rain or perspiration, I honestly can’t say.
Graham is heading home from a morning run along the lakefront in his head-to-toe Nike attire, an overpriced watch that tracks mileage and splits. His clothing matches entirely too well, a lime-green stripe in his jacket to match the lime-green stripe in his shoe.
He’s what one would call metrosexual, though Chris feels certain there’s more to it than that.
“Morning, Graham,” I say. “How was the run?”
Leaning against the wheat colored walls with their white wainscoting, he squirts a swig of water into his mouth and says, “Incredible.” There’s a look of euphoria on his face that makes Zoe blush. She glances down at her shoes, kicks invisible dirt from one shoe with the toe of another.
Graham is a thirtysomething orphan, living in this building because the unit next door to theirs was left to him in his mother’s will when she died years and years ago, and Graham, consequently, made out like a bandit, acquiring not only his mother’s inheritance, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hospital settlement, as well, money that he’s slowly squandered away on fancy watches, expensive wines and lavish home decor.
Graham planned to put the home on the market after his mother died, but instead he moved in. Moving vans replaced all of her eclectic furniture and belongings with Graham’s modern ones, so sleek and stylish it was as if he’d climbed from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog: the crisp lines and sharp angles, the neutral colors. He was a minimalist, the condo sparse but for sheets and sheets of computer paper that littered the floor.
“Gay,” Chris assured me after we’d stepped foot in Graham’s new condo for the first time. “He’s gay.” It wasn’t only the home decor that caught Chris’s eye, but the closets full of clothes—more clothes than even I owned—that he left purposefully open so we would see. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”
And yet women came to call quite regularly, stunning women that left even me speechless. Women with bleach-blond hair and unnaturally blue eyes, with bodies like Barbie dolls.
Graham had arrived when Zoe was still a toddler. She took to him like fruit flies to a bowl of browning bananas. As a freelance writer, Graham was often home, staring blankly at a computer screen and overdosing himself on caffeine and self-doubt. He came to our rescue more than once when Zoe was ill and neither Chris nor I could miss work. Graham welcomed her onto
