Chapter 10

M ina was very displeased. Her pretty nails clicked on the mug she held, just as they had so many months ago when I’d first discussed splitting up with Briggs. “I don’t know about this, Addie,” she said doubtfully. “You have a pet together?”

“We’re just friends, sharing a pet,” I agreed. Because it was working out very well, actually. I went over to Granger’s house early each morning to check on the plants (which didn’t need a lot of extra water now that the weather had cooled so much) and to help with the cat, who was really only mildly interested in me. Her heart belonged to Granger entirely, but she accepted my offerings of food, clean water, and an emptied litter box. He had renamed her Cacau, “cocoa” in Portuguese, because she was exactly that color. Her little white paws reminded me of the marshmallows you would put in hot chocolate, too. That was called chocolate quente , which I’d learned when Granger had made a cup for me since I’d been talking about her coloring. He’d recently bought pots and pans, it seemed.

Anyway, he and I worked together to tend to the little cat and we also talked a lot, mostly in English but with some Portuguese. Those conversations sometimes lasted for a while and a few mornings, I’d almost been late getting to my real job.

“Is this the man who had previously told you that he’s not interested in marriage or children?” Mina asked.

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “Why would I care about those things? I just told you that we’re only—”

An enraged bellow from the baby monitor made us both turn our heads, but it was all right. Today the barber was visiting for Mr. Campbell’s monthly trim and shave, and he claimed to have very sensitive hair follicles. We were hearing a lot of pain-filled moans and unhappy shouts, but at least my presence wasn’t required. Mr. Campbell insisted that I couldn’t be present while he was in his state of dishabille, by which he meant that his tie was off for the haircut.

“Imbecile! That was agonizing!” his voice echoed through the monitor. “Is my ear intact?”

“Poor guy,” Mina said, and since I knew that she meant the barber, I agreed. Unfortunately, she wasn’t distracted for too long from my situation, and she returned to tapping her nails in that unhappy way. “Are you considering what you want, Addie?”

“If you’re asking if I’m thinking about getting serious with another man, the answer is no. I’m not, not yet,” I said. “It hasn’t been that long since the accident. It took me twenty-three years to find Briggs, so I bet it will take me about as long to find someone else. Ha, ha.” It wasn’t funny to me, though.

She was similarly unamused. “You can’t spend your whole life waiting—”

“Mina!” I interrupted. “You used to be so fun to talk to. Remember how we would have tea and chat? We were friends, but since things went bad between me and Briggs, you’re always so…you just get so…unkind,” I finished. “I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but your criticism is very unpleasant. It’s hard to hear.”

“I just don’t want you to make mistakes. I know that your mother isn’t giving you this advice,” she told me.

“I have Nicola for advice. If I asked her, she would fill my head with all kinds of helpful tips.”

“But you’re not asking her. You’re making crazy decisions, like leaving the man that you loved to chase after some dream of a person who doesn’t want the same things that you do.”

“Who knows what I want anymore?” I demanded. “I thought I wanted a life with Briggs—”

“Just because he was in the accident and you lost him, that doesn’t mean that you should ever give up on your goals,” Mina cut me off, and when I was about to argue back again, she kept talking. “I did that, Addie, and I don’t want it to happen to you. I sacrificed what I wanted and gave up my dreams to make things work with a man, and I’m telling you that it wasn’t worth it. I never should have done it.”

“What happened?” I asked curiously.

“Are you wearing sandpaper gloves?” Mr. Campbell howled through the baby monitor. “It feels as if you’re massaging my scalp with broken glass!”

“I met someone when I was young,” she continued. “It was clear from our charts that things weren’t meant to be but I decided that I knew better. Our synastry…” She rolled her eyes heavenward toward the planets that had messed with her. “So many challenging aspects. Mercury opposite moon, Saturn square Mars. I could go on, but the point is, I should have listened. I also should have listened when he told me that he liked his life as it was, and that he didn’t plan to change it. I kept thinking…” She cast her eyes sideways this time and she shook her head, too.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “That sounds terrible. You must have been so disappointed.”

“Now, looking back, I’m only disappointed in myself for believing that I knew better and thinking that I could force the universe to bend to my desires. Isn’t that silly?”

“So you’ve been fighting with me all the time to prevent me from making mistakes? I appreciate that, Mina,” I said sincerely. “I’m sorrier than you could know that things didn’t work out with Briggs and I’m certainly sorry about what happened to him. I’m not trying to force Granger to be someone that he’s not because he’s made it very clear to me that he won’t change.” Why should he have? He had what he wanted already, so there was no need to look for more.

“Are you thinking that you will, though? Do you think that you’ll adjust and feel ok about missing out on the life you’d planned?” she asked. “Because that was my mistake. I told myself that even if he didn’t change his mind, then I could. I thought that I would learn to be ok with wanting less, with lowering my expectations and modifying my plans for the future. I forced myself to believe that I was fine with what we had because I loved him so much and that what he offered was enough.”

“Well, not everything works out exactly as we want it to. That’s just normal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s normal to compromise, but that wasn’t what happened to me,” she answered. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve regretted what I did. I wanted to live in New York,” she said wistfully. “I thought I’d have a career at a newspaper. I wanted to be married with at least one child. I suppressed all those dreams in order to have a life with him, and I regret that very much.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Were you so much in love that you couldn’t see the truth about him and about yourself?”

She nodded. “I absolutely loved him to the point of blindness. And also, the sex was so amazing that I wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe I wasn’t thinking with my brain, if you know what I mean.”

“Wow.” That word expressed amazement, but also some envy.

Now she got a slight smile. “You wouldn’t have known it by looking at him, but the man was a god in bed. I had orgasms for hours.”

“Wow,” I repeated, and now it was total envy. “For actual hours?” That had never been my experience with bedroom-related activities—not hours, and not even minutes. Not even seconds, unfortunately. Briggs and I hadn’t been overly compatible in that way, but I’d had hopes that things might have improved as we kept getting used to each other, and he’d assured me that all of his previous girlfriends had been very happy with their sex stuff.

I thought a lot about what she said, but I concluded that it really didn’t compare to what I was doing in my own life. Mina and I were in very different situations, I told myself as I drove over to Granger’s house the next morning. It was Saturday so I was off and rather than meeting Juliet to go shopping as she’d requested, I’d decided that his garden really needed some more attention. I wanted to get everything ready for the winter and there was definitely weeding to accomplish, besides my usual morning rituals with the cat. I would then go back to my rented apartment, alone because no partner lived there with me. In fact, I couldn’t even keep a cat of my own.

But this was such a different situation from my co-worker’s, because it was what I really wanted. Mina had been unhappy because the relationship she’d had with her mystery guy hadn’t been enough for her, but my friendship with Granger was perfect for me. We weren’t romantically involved and we certainly weren’t having sex which resulted in multi-hour orgasms…holy Mary. My mind went straight to imagining that, and I almost had to pull over to get myself under control.

The man himself, the real one and not the naked one in my mind, waved to greet me when I pulled into his driveway and parked next to his old truck. He was wearing a shirt because the weather was getting colder as the seasons changed again, and it was such a shame. If it were summer all the time, or if we lived in the Southern Hemisphere, then he wouldn’t have had to bother with extra layers this morning, and wouldn’t that have been nice for everyone?

But I shook my head at myself because that type of objectification was really inappropriate. He couldn’t help it that he had the kind of body that women wanted to…there was a lot I wanted to do but it was really gross of me to consider a friend like that. If the shoe was on the other foot and he thought of me and my body in that way—

Oh, I wished he would.

“Addie?”

Now Granger was standing next to my car, bending down to look at me through the window. “You ok?”

“Yes,” I assented, nodding, and he stepped back so I could get out.

“You were staring at me like how Cacau watches the robins through the window.”

I knew exactly how the cat looked at birds. It was as if she saw a big mouthful of something delicious.

“I was just working on the drainage in the corner of the yard,” he told me. That remark led to a very normal, non-naked, non- sexual discussion of soil erosion and gutter issues, and then I started on the chores that I’d wanted to do and played with the cat a little. She was allowed outside when we were watching and when she wore her collar with the bell, to protect those robins.

“Want to have lunch?”

I looked up and wiped off my forehead on my sleeve. Fall had gotten a lot colder, but I’d been working hard. “You mean, do I want to go to Amunì?”

He shook his head. “Come on inside.”

I followed and was pleasantly surprised to see some changes in the house. First, he had a couch now, one that looked a lot like the loveseat I had—except for its size, of course, since his living room could fit a more grand scale of furniture. Or maybe it was a more normal scale, I thought, because his new sofa wasn’t overly large. I also thought that the house looked cleaner. There wasn’t even any cat hair that I could see although I knew that here, Cacau had the run of the place. At Briggs’ house, she’d been confined to the mudroom next to the garage, which was why I’d always entered through the front door. I picked her up because I thought that had to have been terrible for her, to be stuck in that windowless little pit of a room. No wonder she’d been so ornery.

“It’s that bad?”

“What?” I asked.

“Now you’re staring at my new couch with tears in your eyes,” Granger said. “Is it ugly? I liked yours, so I tried to get the same one. But big enough to fit me.”

“No, it’s not ugly. I really like it,” I assured him. “And your house looks clean, too.”

“I thought you’d noticed how dirty it was before.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! Did you see it on my face, like how you said I show things there?”

“No. I noticed when you wiped your hand over the chair before you sat down.” He laughed in the quiet way that I’d come to appreciate a lot. “I hired someone to clean, and so far she and the cat are getting along.”

Thank goodness no one had been injured. I followed him into the kitchen, where I saw more surprises. There were dishes stacked on the counter and one of the cupboards was open, revealing food inside. He went to open the refrigerator and I saw that it was stocked, too.

“What should we make?” He surveyed his groceries.

“I guess you went shopping,” I noted.

“I got some things for myself when I went to get more cat food.”

“Which I owe you for,” I said, and he told me no and started take out ingredients. Soon I was set up with a sandwich that looked delicious and we sat on the chairs he’d brought in from the living room and balanced our plates on our laps.

“I guess my next purchase should be a table,” he said, shifting but holding his lunch steady. “And new seating. These are a little hard on the ass.”

My first thought, to my everlasting shame, was that I could massage it for him. I coughed on a bite and put down the plate to get a glass of water. While I recovered, Granger mentioned some other things he planned to do around his house, like painting the front door green, buying a bed rather than sleeping on the mattress and box springs piled on the floor, putting up curtains so that the neighbors weren’t always looking in and waving, and then working on his back yard, too.

“It sounds like you have a lot of ideas,” I said. “It’s really exciting.”

“Is it?”

I nodded. “It’s nesting, which I’ve always loved. You know, making your house a real home,” I explained. “Getting comfortable where you live.” I paused. “Why didn’t you do that before? Why now?”

He swallowed his mouthful of sandwich before answering. “I never cared too much about this house. It felt more like a hotel room, a place I’d move on from.”

I felt my heart speed up. “Are you thinking about leaving Detroit?”

“Not now, but I was before. When Benedetta died, I wasn’t going to stay. We had a condo in Midtown and I sold that. But then I saw this house and I liked it.”

I nodded, because it was a beautiful place.

“I thought that I’d make some repairs, then leave and rent it out. Then I moved in to do that and got too involved in opening the restaurant. But ‘nesting’ has never occurred to me, no matter where I’ve lived.” He smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever done it before.”

I was very, very glad that he’d stayed, but I didn’t totally understand that decision. “You could have left and opened the restaurant in another town.” He didn’t have ties here, after all, no family and no history.

“I could have,” he agreed. “But I like Detroit. I already owned the building in Corktown, too.”

“You mean the restaurant? You own it?” I thought back to when my sister Sophie had researched him. The property records for that address showed that it was owned by a company, I remembered, but Granger was nodding.

“Yeah, I own some land around Detroit.”

“Do you have a real estate company?”

“That makes it sound too fancy. I picked up some properties here and there and it’s smarter to hold them in an LLC.”

“Oh.” I would have to ask Juliet, the real estate star, about her opinion on that.

“Benedetta had already started to refurbish and outfit it. I guess I felt like…” He thought for a moment, looking off into the distance. “She moved here for me,” he said. “We got married and she left Europe, she left her family and all her friends to come to the States. She had to start over in a place she’d never even visited and in another language. She was alone a lot, too, because I was gone so much.”

“But she knew…” I had been about to say that she’d known what to expect when she’d married him, but the truth was that no matter how much you thought you understood your situation, it was very possible that you were wrong and didn’t get it at all. I had been very wrong about Briggs, for example. “You felt like you owed her,” I said, and he nodded.

“We had been living on the East Coast but she wanted to come here,” he continued. “She’d visited a friend from culinary school who lived in Oak Park and she thought that Detroit was coming back. She wanted to be a part of it, and I said sure. Again, I was gone so often that it didn’t matter much to me where I had my home base. She moved and I made it back as often as I could. We were leading pretty separate lives, though.”

I thought about her picture on his desk, how he looked at her face every day. How separate could they have been?

“Do you mind hearing about this?” he asked. “You may have a high tolerance for oversharing, since you said that Skurwysyn told you all about the woman who gave him ‘Cuddles.’”

“I don’t think that you’re oversharing and I don’t mind hearing about your wife, not at all,” I said. “She’s part of your life and it would be silly to pretend that nothing came before me.” As I said the words, I understood how they might have been misinterpreted. “I’m not saying that…I just mean, as I’m a point in time, I don’t care…I’m interested…”

He didn’t seem offended or alarmed that I’d insinuated that the two of us were somehow together as a couple; he just kept talking as if he’d missed that, and I was very glad. “You and that guy were together for what, three years?” he asked me.

I nodded, although I didn’t remember mentioning the length of my relationship.

“And you didn’t seriously date anyone before him,” Granger continued, and I was absolutely sure that I hadn’t ever shared that information.

“Why do you ask?” I hedged, because the answer to his question made me look a little backward. My sisters all had a lot more experience with men than I did. Nicola, who had worked steadily and a lot like a dog throughout her life, had still made time to go out with several different guys. But she was so beautiful, it made sense that men were always after her. Grace, for all her loopiness, had a string of boyfriends in her wake, Brenna often had someone she claimed was boring her, and Juliet? She was notorious among us for her love-em-and-leave-em behavior. Even Sophie had a past with men before giving up on them permanently. Again, though, my sisters were gorgeous.

But me?

“I was only curious,” he mentioned, and shrugged as if he really didn’t care so much.

It wasn’t such a big deal. I relaxed and then heard myself admit the truth aloud: “Briggs was my first boyfriend. I was twenty-three, but he was my first real boyfriend. I’d had boys who were friends,” I explained, “especially the ones on the hockey team in high school, and I went out a few times. One of the people I dated was Sophie’s best friend and I know she made him ask me, which was so nice of both of them.”

He nodded and still seemed underwhelmed by that very embarrassing nugget of information, which was something I’d never confessed before—I’d never even told Nicola that I knew how Sophie’s friend had escorted me around only as a favor. “I never was serious about anyone before Briggs,” I concluded.

“Why him?”

Because he stuck around. Because, unlike Sophie’s friend who had finally told me I was nice and everything but no, Briggs had gone the distance. He’d kept on texting, kept showing up when we had plans, and kept making more of them so that we kept seeing each other. “I don’t know,” I said evasively. “I guess I liked him the best. What about you? Why did you get married?”

He seemed surprised. “Because I loved her,” he said simply and sugar, that felt terrible. I’d just told him how I didn’t mind talking about Briggs’ former girlfriends and that Granger’s wife had been part of his life and it was silly to pretend that she wasn’t. But hearing those four words had felt like an ice bath on a hot August day. He’d loved her, obviously, totally, and without any hesitation or doubt.

He didn’t seem to notice my shock, because he continued to tell me more. “We met while I was stationed in Italy and we were both very young. She seemed so sophisticated to me because she knew about fine wine and fancy food, how to dress well, good table manners. They were all things that I’d never put much thought into. When I got to know her better, though, I realized that she was actually very na?ve. She’d had her parents, brothers, and a whole big, extended family to watch out for her. She’d never had to worry much about fending for herself, not like I had. She’d never really had to be responsible and accountable.”

“But you fell in love anyway,” I said, and I understood why. It was the same reason that my dad had gone nuts over my mother, and they had gotten married after dating for only a few weeks. “She was very beautiful.”

“You’ve seen her picture on my desk at work,” he responded, and I nodded. I had spent a lot of time looking at it. “We did fall in love, and then I was leaving Italy and I told myself that this was my only chance. I thought, ‘When I go, it’s all over.’ Like there weren’t phones and airplanes.” He shook his head. “I guess that I didn’t believe in object permanence. Do you know what I mean?”

“Like with babies? If something is out of sight, it’s out of mind?”

“Exactly,” he said. “I was sure that she would instantly forget me when I was gone. So, instead of saying goodbye or suggesting that we could try long-distance, I asked her to marry me and she said yes. We were both total jackoffs.”

“Why would you say that?” I asked, flabbergasted. “It’s such a romantic story!”

“Maybe the story is, but the reality wasn’t,” he told me. “It was just hard. We didn’t know each other very well and I wasn’t prepared to have someone depend on me. Benedetta needed that.”

“Well, of course she wanted to lean on her husband. Just like you could lean on her,” I added.

“No, I didn’t do that. I’ve never depended on anybody and I couldn’t figure out what she wanted from me,” he explained. “I wasn’t ready for marriage and she wasn’t ready to leave the nest, but there we were. We tried to make it work because neither of us wanted to quit.”

“And you loved each other,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but—” He broke off. “What does your boss call his doctor?”

“Are you talking about Mr. Campbell’s analyst?”

He nodded and then said, “You’re not my analyst. You don’t need to listen to all this history.”

“I want to.” Even if parts of it were painful to hear, I was interested in Granger. “I want to learn about your life and your problems.”

“In the end, none of our problems mattered,” he stated. “Benedetta died, and it was over.”

I blinked.

“Did that sound harsh?”

“It did,” I confessed. “But you’ve had a long time to come to terms with her death, so I think it’s natural that you’d be more comfortable with talking about it very plainly. Also, you’re not someone who beats around the bush.”

“No, I’ve never been that. It hasn’t always gone over well with women, though.”

“For some women, it might take getting used to,” I said. “I’m already comfortable with direct speech due to Nicola and especially due to Briggs. She doesn’t sugarcoat and he told me everything very plainly, too. He was a very, very direct person.”

Granger started to say something, taking a breath and opening his mouth, but then he stopped.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I was going to tell you something, but it was also going to be harsh,” he answered, and I gestured at him to go ahead, which he did. “I don’t think Briggs was direct,” he told me. “I think he was a jackoff.”

“You’re not the only one who feels that way. He didn’t really have a lot of friends,” I confessed. “He didn’t get along with his coworkers and I think that was one reason his boss sent him out of the office so often. But Mina liked him. So did my mom.” I thought about that. “Mina didn’t really know him and I never told her what he did.”

“What do you mean? What did he do?”

I still wasn’t prepared to talk about it. “His own mother really, really loved him,” I said evasively. “She never told him that he did one thing wrong. Nicola wasn’t like that with us.”

“But Nicola’s your sister, right?”

“She mostly raised me and my siblings,” I explained. “She was very careful about teaching us the difference between right and wrong.” And saying that opened up an unfortunate vein of stories, kind of like I’d tapped into a silver lode in a mine. I talked for a while about my sister Nic and then about my other sisters, too, and it morphed into me discussing the recent problems that my brother Patrick was having with the mother of his child (she was refusing to speak to him, and Nicola and Sophie were both saying that it was Patrick’s fault but Juliet and Mom were defending him). I had more to say about Juliet and how I was worried—

Oh. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m doing it again, going on and on about my family, and I know it’s about as interesting as listening to a traffic report. You have things to do, and you finished your sandwich like three hours ago. And you already said that these chairs are hard on your…”

“A traffic report is a monologue,” Granger answered. “You and I were having a conversation.”

Well, it was true that he’d been asking questions and making comments, especially about my brother and his responsibilities to the baby and the baby’s mom. He’d said he would look into what Juliet was up to, also, and asked me for her middle name, just in case. I wasn’t sure how or exactly why he planned to find out that information but it was nice that he wanted to help.

“I guess you were pretty engaged in what I was saying,” I agreed. “Were you actually interested, though?”

“Remember how I said that I was out of practice? I told you that a long time ago.”

I thought back. “You said that you were out of practice with people,” I recalled, and he nodded.

“I like talking to you, person to person. I feel like I’m getting back on the bike.”

“The people bike?”

He smiled. “The relating-to-the-world bike. I’m getting better, right? Now you don’t have to wipe off the chair before you sit down. My house doesn’t look abandoned anymore.”

“Speaking of that, it would be a nice day to paint,” I mentioned. “We could go to the store and get my sister Brenna to approve some green colors for your door.”

“You want to do that?”

I wanted to be with him. It wasn’t just his delicious, delectable body or the handsome face he had. It wasn’t even that I loved his hair and the color of his light blue eyes. It was him, himself—like how he’d made friends with the cat who hated everyone. I admired how hard he worked, how he paid attention when I talked. I admired that he’d made his wife’s dream come true for her, even though she was gone.

“I would love to paint with you,” I answered.

So we did. My sister was rude but also very helpful when we sent pictures of the color chips, and I could see that she was interested in the story behind why I was painting someone else’s door—and it was unusual for Brenna to delve too deeply into our affairs, because she was much more occupied with her own. And then, while Granger and I prepped and painted the door and Cacau lay in a patch of sunlight nearby, we kept talking about different things. There was nothing too exciting or important, but it was interesting to me. I talked about starting vegetable gardens in his back yard in the spring, something that I’d tried to do as a kid without a lot of success. He told me about some employee problems at Amunì and listened as I offered a few suggestions based on the background I had in running things at Mr. Campbell’s house. My way was “catching flies with honey” and his was more “kick in the pants.” I thought I might try to adopt some of his strategies and he said he was going to try some of mine with the host who was driving him a little crazy. It seemed like a combination of our styles might work pretty well.

Soon enough, unfortunately, he had to go to the restaurant, and I planned to hang out with the cat until the door was dry enough to close and lock. Then I was heading over to my parents’ house for a dinner with them and some of my sisters. Nicola and her husband would be coming and I wanted to spend more time with him to get to know the person who made her glow like she was lit up inside.

“Thanks for coming over,” Granger told me.

“Sure.” I wiped more green streaks off my arm, because it seemed like that color had mysteriously migrated to odd parts of my body. “I love how the door turned out. Brenna’s a brat but she really has an eye.”

“I didn’t appreciate when she asked what you were wearing, and then said it was good that you already had on rags because it didn’t matter that your clothes might get ruined by the paint.”

I laughed. “She’s always like that, but I don’t mind.”

“Well, I think you look cute.”

I froze.“What?”

“I think you look cute,” he repeated, still ever so casual. He grabbed his wallet and keys and then told the cat goodbye. “You’re so pretty, it doesn’t matter what you wear. Stop in after your dinner if you want.”

“Oh, I will.” I definitely would.

Granger stopped on his front path and turned around, looking at me holding our pet.

“Did you forget something?” I asked.

“No.” He still wasn’t walking. After another moment, he added, “Today was great.”

It had been, I mentally agreed as I watched him drive away. I felt almost tingly with joy until I recalled Mina again and how she’d asked, “Are you considering what you want, Addie?” and, “Do you think that you’ll adjust and feel ok about missing out on the life you’d planned?” But how was I so sure what I wanted? I could suddenly see the pull of compromise.

Anyway, Mina and I had very different situations. I went inside with Cacau and sat on the couch, and I let myself pretend a little, about a real life in this house with someone who loved me.