Three weeks after the summit, Roesha found Isaiah at the Chicago hospital cafeteria, opening a packet of crackers over a bowl of soup. She’d passed his floor twice that afternoon on errands somebody else could have done. This time she’d come to find him.
“Are you free Saturday?” she asked.
He looked up. “For a consult?”
“For me.”
He set the crackers down. “I can be.”
They went to a used bookstore with a radiator that made more noise than the customers. Isaiah bought a secondhand cookbook because a previous owner had written use more garlic next to fourteen recipes. Roesha bought a mystery and read the last page on the sidewalk. He looked so wounded that she laughed all the way to the bus stop.
At her corner he asked if she wanted to come over the following Sunday. He cooked for his sister and her kids most weekends. They would ask a lot of questions and then forget she was there as soon as the food came out.
Roesha imagined taking off her shoes in his hallway and being handed a plate. She wanted to see who he was with his family. She wanted him to see her on a day when she hadn’t saved anybody.
“Yes,” she said. “What can I bring?”
“Something with a lot of garlic.”
She was still smiling when the bus pulled away.
◆
Five months after the summit, the divorce was final. Dominic found himself standing in a supermarket aisle with two jars of spaghetti sauce, unable to remember which one Sophia liked. He’d helped make bigger decisions in that time. This was the one that brought him to a stop.
He called Clara. She answered on the fourth ring.
“The one with the yellow lid,” she said. “And she’ll tell you she hates onions. If she can’t see them, she’ll eat every bite.”
He could hear a classroom door shutting behind her. She was back to teaching three mornings a week. He wanted to ask if she’d had a good day and thought she might tell him eventually, so he asked.
“One of my students called me Mom by accident,” she said. “I almost answered.”
They laughed. He bought the sauce.
On their last Wednesday in counseling, before the divorce papers were filed, the counselor asked Clara to name something she missed about living with Dominic. Clara had expected to say the company. What came out was, “The way he came home.”
Dominic looked up.
“You used to call from the end of the street if you’d had a bad day. You’d say, ‘I have ten minutes of being an ass left in me. Should I take a lap?’ Sometimes I said yes. Sometimes I said bring it inside. I miss being the person you told before you walked through the door.”
“I miss telling you,” he said.
Clara let herself sit with that. For five weeks she’d come in with evidence. She could tell the counselor which dinners they’d managed to get through without mentioning Roesha and which nights Dominic called the girls before she had to remind him. Today she wanted an answer that couldn’t be tallied.
“If the bond went quiet tomorrow,” she asked, “would you still want to be here?”
“Yes.”
“Would you want to come home?”
Dominic started to answer and stopped. Clara watched him reach for the wedding ring he’d stopped wearing the week before. She pressed her own hands flat against her thighs.
“I want to be there for you,” he said finally. “I want to be in the girls’ lives every day. I don’t know if I can promise the rest just because I wish I could.”
Clara nodded. It was the first answer he’d given her that she didn’t feel the need to cross-examine.
“I need to think,” she said.
He waited until the counselor asked whether she wanted the rest of the hour alone. Clara said yes. The next morning she called Dominic herself. She told him she wanted to stop trying to save the marriage and start deciding how they would raise their daughters apart. He sat on the edge of his bed with the phone in his hand and let her finish every sentence.
◆
In Chicago, Isaiah took Roesha to dinner at a restaurant with paper napkins and a chessboard that leaned to the left. They’d been out twice since the summit. He had let her talk about Covington when she needed to and had changed the subject when she asked. Tonight she was halfway through explaining why she hated chess when he moved the saltshaker onto her side of the board.
“You’ve been using this man as a bishop for twenty minutes,” he said.
“Maybe your pieces should be more adaptable.”
He laughed, and she wanted to hear it again. That was the trouble. There was an easy future here that she could picture down to the takeout containers on his kitchen counter. She’d spent weeks asking herself whether she wanted Dominic because the bond made every room without him feel too quiet. Sitting across from Isaiah, she could finally admit the reverse. Part of her wanted to choose him because the future with Dominic scared her.
“I need to tell you something before you order dessert,” she said.
“I’m ordering dessert regardless.”
She smiled. Then she set her napkin down. “When I pictured you asking me what we were doing, I kept imagining I’d be ready to say yes. I wanted to be. I like being with you, Isaiah. But I keep saving a place for Dominic in my head, and you deserve to hear that from me.”
He looked down at the chessboard. She waited while he thought.
“I was hoping you’d tell me you wanted to try,” he said at last. “It would have meant something to me.”
“It would have meant something to me, too.”
He nodded once. “I’m going to need a little time before I can sit across from you like this and pretend I’m thinking about chess.”
“Take it.”
He slid the dessert menu between them anyway. They ordered two slices of pie and talked about something they’d both miss when they stood up.
◆
Dominic met Roesha on the Covington hospital steps the next time she was in town. She was wearing her work shoes. One had a broken lace. He’d rehearsed an opening line during the drive and forgot it as soon as she bent to knot the two ends together.
“I heard you were back,” he said.
“Edward?”
“Eric. He also said if I use him to find out whether you’re seeing somebody again, he’ll start charging me by the hour.”
Roesha stood up. “He could retire on that.”
Dominic managed half a smile. “I used to ask how often you were in Chicago because I wanted to know if you were with Isaiah. Then I’d go home and put the girls to bed and try to explain to myself how I could be jealous of the man you ate dinner with when you’d had to stand there and watch me hold my wife’s hand.”
“I wanted you to hold hers,” she said. “It hurt anyway.”
He looked at her. He’d pictured her angry. He hadn’t pictured her telling him the truth that simply.
“I had dinner with Isaiah more than once,” she said. “It mattered to me. I told him I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”
“Are you telling me because you want me to know I won?”
Roesha’s face changed. He regretted the question before she spoke.
“I’m telling you because I want to see you,” she said. “If you make it a contest, I’ll go home.”
He took a breath. “I’m sorry. I wanted to matter to you so badly I got stupid about it.”
“You mattered to me when I was trying very hard to wish you didn’t.”
There was a long beat between them. Then Dominic glanced down at her shoes.
“Do you have time for dinner?” he asked. “Somewhere we can get to without putting too much pressure on that lace?”
“An hour. And if you say the word resonance, I’m ordering the most expensive thing on the menu.”
He considered that. “Then I better take you somewhere with paper napkins.”
She laughed before she could stop herself. He held the hospital door for her while she went back inside to get her coat.
◆
They had dinner in a narrow booth by a window that rattled whenever a truck went by. Dominic ordered coffee at eight at night. Roesha asked whether he intended to sleep that week.
“My oldest has a theory about how volcanoes work,” he said. “I get my sleep in installments.”
He asked what she did on a free Saturday. She said she bought books faster than she could read them and went to movies alone so she could eat popcorn without sharing. He admitted he put hot sauce on popcorn. She told him there was no reason for her to know that about him this early.
They laughed. When the food came, he asked how much time she wanted to spend in Chicago. She told him how much the surgical program meant to her, and how often she could realistically come to Covington. He’d been hoping for more weekends. She could tell by the way he set his fork down.
“I can come to you,” he said after a moment. “Some weekends. We’d have to work around the girls’ schedule.”
“Then we work around it.”
Outside, he walked her to her car. She could feel the bond under her ribs, quiet as a hand against a door. She took his hand because she wanted to. When they reached her car, he asked if he could see her again.
“Call me on Tuesday,” she said.
He did.
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