Chương 8
He looked at Miles, then back at me. “You need to fix this.”
The words were so familiar that for a moment they almost worked.
“What exactly should I fix?”
“You brought him.”
“I did.”
“You created the situation.”
“Lois created the lie.”
“That may be, but families protect one another.”
I looked past him at the house. Guests had collected in the doorway beneath the columns. My mother stood at the center, one hand pressed to her pearls.
“When did that start?” I asked.
My father frowned.
“The protecting.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m trying not to be.”
He glanced toward the people watching. “Come back inside. We’ll calm everyone down.”
“Who is everyone?”
“Your mother. Your sister. The guests.”
“Not me?”
He opened his mouth.
The delay answered.
I climbed into the truck.
Miles closed the door and walked around the front.
My father remained in the drive as we pulled away, one hand lifted as if he could still stop us by requesting it politely enough.
For the first mile, neither of us spoke.
The truck’s air conditioner clicked and blew warm air before gradually cooling. My hands lay open in my lap. They looked detached from me.
Miles drove toward the highway.
“I ruined your father’s birthday,” he said.
A laugh escaped me.
It came out half sob.
“You grilled him a steak.”
“Under difficult conditions.”
I pressed my fingertips to my eyes.
He reached toward the console, found a packet of tissues, and placed it near my knee without comment.
“I don’t cry,” I said.
“Good.”
“I mean, I don’t like crying in front of people.”
“I’m watching traffic.”
“You’re also speaking.”
“Can’t prove it.”
I laughed again and then cried hard enough that breathing became embarrassing.
Miles kept his eyes on the road.
He did not touch me. He did not tell me I was brave. He did not promise the day had been good for me.
At a red light, he turned down the air conditioner because it was blowing the tissues off my lap.
When I could speak, I said, “I owe you four hundred dollars.”
“You donated it.”
“I owe you more.”
“No.”
“You were publicly insulted.”
“That happens for free.”
“Your company is involved now.”
“That part is inconvenient.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“There it is again.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Nothing for a minute.”
We drove in silence.
At the next exit, he left the highway and pulled into the parking lot of a diner with a faded red sign. It was the kind of place my mother would have called authentic while requesting sparkling water that did not come from the fountain.
“Our agreement ends at five,” he said.
The dashboard clock read 4:31.
“You want to wait here?”
“I want coffee that stays in the cup.”
I looked at him.
“No performance,” he said. “No family. No invented museum date. We sit for twenty-nine minutes as two people who had a terrible afternoon.”
“That sounds worse than pretending.”
“It might be.”
Inside, the hostess led us to a booth with cracked red vinyl. Miles ordered black coffee. I ordered tea and changed my mind to pie when the waitress mentioned blueberry.
“You don’t like tea?” he asked.
“I like pie more.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said.”
The waitress returned with two forks.
“I didn’t ask for one,” Miles said.
“She doesn’t trust me.”
He took a bite anyway.
For a while, we talked about nothing important. The pie crust was underbaked. The diner’s ceiling fan wobbled. A boy in the next booth was trying to stack jelly packets on his sleeping grandfather’s hand.
Ordinary things reassembled the room around me.
At 4:47, I said, “Why did you agree?”
Miles stirred coffee he had not sweetened.
“You looked like my mother used to look after my father corrected her.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s most of one.”
“You went to a stranger’s family party because I reminded you of your mother?”
“I went because you asked.”
“People ask you for things all the time.”
“Yes.”
“And you usually say yes?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
He leaned back and studied the spoon.
“My truck broke down outside the coffee shop,” he said. “I’d spent the morning at a distribution center where a conveyor failure injured two people. Not badly, but badly enough. Everyone in the conference room kept discussing liability language instead of the men who got hurt.”
I waited.
“I left before the meeting ended,” he said. “That was not especially mature. Then I sat in a coffee shop in a ruined shirt while a woman I didn’t know asked me to stand beside her for four hours because her family had convinced her being alone was a public defect.”
“And that appealed to you?”
“No.”
“What did?”
“The chance to do one uncomplicated thing.”
I looked down at the pie.
“It became complicated,” I said.
“It usually does.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“You didn’t ask my last name until after I agreed.”
“You avoided answering.”
“Yes.”
“That’s lying.”
“It’s withholding.”
“That’s a rich person’s word for lying.”
He accepted that with a small nod.
“I spend time at facilities,” he said. “I don’t announce visits when I want to see how things actually work. The shirt was dirty because I’d been under a damaged conveyor guard with the maintenance team.”
“You crawl under machinery?”
“Not as often as safety would prefer.”
“So Lois was wrong about you being a construction worker, but not completely wrong about the work.”
“She was wrong that it mattered.”
The waitress refilled his coffee.
He thanked her by name. I had not noticed her name tag.
“What happens to Lois?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You own the company.”
“That doesn’t make every answer mine.”
“You could fire her.”
“I could also interfere with a review involving someone who insulted me personally. That would be foolish.”
May you like
“What if the title was only for today?”
“Then the review will find that.”
