by Ruthie Knox
It felt like at least this time, this one night, the adventure would be whatever happened between them. A cup of tea with an unrelated human who had the power to stop his heart—the possibility of it—was something he had given up believing would happen a long time ago.
It was this loss of faith, he thought, that had led directly to his cocking up his relationship with his brother. He’d been so stuck in his own life, and bitterly envious of Neville’s willingness to start all over again in favor of passion, and of his brother’s ability to fall in love.
He was a romantic, possibly. Something not even Bea or Rosemary or anyone had ever suspected about him.
Not that he would fall in love with this Allie-from-Wisconsin, of course.
Not at all. Allie just meant there was some hope in life, yet. Perhaps. Maybe.
Or maybe whiskey made him absolutely mad.
“So I’m feeling like we’ve got to bring the Force back into balance here,” Allie said. “You know about my whole thing with my mom and the sperm donor. I need, like, at least two of your worst secrets to even things out. What have you got?”
“I tried to blackmail my brother into marriage.”
“You did? I don’t believe it.”
“You could ask him yourself, if you’re still around in a few days. He’s coming to visit with his…his partner, I think they say. Mary Catherine. Cath.”
“Was it Cath you tried to make him marry?”
“No, she wasn’t in the picture yet—or rather she was, but I didn’t understand that. He was working for the family’s bank at the time. I was the boss. He’s quite a bit younger, you see, and our mother was worried he wasn’t settling into his responsibilities as he should have been.”
“Slacking off? Whoring around in the gutters of Paris?”
“Nothing like that. He came to the office as he was meant to. But he lived in a flat in Greenwich, playing rugby with the lads on the weekends, and painting.”
“What does he paint?”
“Oil portraits, primarily.”
“Sounds scandalous.”
Winston remembered clearly what it had felt like to be scandalized by Neville’s choices, which had proven to be the right choices for him. But with Allie sitting beside him encouraging his confession with a teasing smile, he felt only regret that things had turned out as they had.
“I told him he had to be engaged to someone suitable by the bank holiday weekend or I’d have him fired. Then, when he turned up with Cath, who he was quite obviously taken with, I declared her unsuitable and did my best to bring an end to it.”
“Wow. That’s kind of a lot.”
“I know.”
“Like, soap opera a lot.”
“I’m aware.” He sipped his tea and reminded himself there was nothing she might say or think about him that he hadn’t already thought of himself.
“I mean, it sounds like a lot of work you put yourself through. Why did you care so much who your brother married, or whether he got married at all?”
“I told myself I wanted him to be happy. I was…frustrated with him. We were raised to expect we would have certain responsibilities, a certain social position to keep. Our mother especially made it clear how she wanted us to behave, and Neville was younger, and looked up to me.” He tried to think how to explain how much pressure he’d felt to do the things he’d done as a young man. How it had seemed there was only one decision to make when Rosemary fell pregnant, only one sort of house to buy, one kind of life to live. “Neville did what he was meant to do, but only to a point, and I could always tell he didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand it.”
“You were jealous.”
“I was. Horribly jealous. But I’d no idea, at the time. I had her investigated. When the investigation turned up some rather unsavory details in her past, I threw them in her face in front of the family.”
Allie sipped her tea, watching him. He didn’t know what she was thinking, but he didn’t feel troubled by his ignorance. He felt safe.
“That is completely sinister,” she said. “I can’t believe they’re coming to visit you.”
“I suspect they’re coming to visit Bea, actually. And to see the sights. But yes. He didn’t speak to me at all for a very long time, and we’ve only just mended our fences enough, sort of, for him to agree to see me.”
It had been simple enough to find the words to apologize to his brother and to Cath. It was harder, still, to find the words to explain how he’d allowed himself to become the villain in his brother’s story.
He’d always believed that bad people did bad things. He’d gone through a run of reading biographies of criminals and dictators last year, looking for pain and its pathways, for other men who’d turned fear into rigidity and control and ultimately used it to hurt people.
It always seemed to begin with the people you loved.
He never wanted to hurt anyone he loved, or see them hurt, again.
“That’s huge.”
“It is.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Winston cleared his throat. Allie smiled, shoved her elbows closer to him across the table and said, “So that’s one horrible secret. What’s another one?”
The words came out, clear and completely unplanned. “Not long after the whole debacle, Rosemary stopped talking to me, and we stopped—” He looked, hard, into his tea.
“Nooo.”
“I thought we’d weather it. Those were the words, I remember, I would say to myself on the way to the office, or staring at the ceiling in the early morning when I couldn’t get back to sleep. That ‘we’d weather it.’ ”
“But she didn’t want to weather it.”
He drank from his mug, the tea warming and loosening his throat. “She was braver than me. Is. Actually, she’s quite…When I met her, at university, she was the most interesting girl I’d ever met. Very clever, and willing to try things, always full of ideas. I think she simply got to a point in life where she knew she’d never be that girl again. With me.”
Allie leaned forward. The overlarge T-shirt she was wearing slid away from her collarbone. It made him yearn. He didn’t know…for what. It was the kind of yearning that felt awful and wonderful and was entirely nonspecific.
“Rosemary understood, I see now, how miserable we all were. She had never done anything in the entire time we were together but take care of us. Us. Bea and myself. We were enough that she couldn’t have had time to take care of herself. I think after I treated my own brother so abominably, a brother I loved, had always loved, some tension finally broke for her, made her fierce and kind. Because it was kind, the divorce. Even for Bea. We were…miserable.”
“You said.” Allie’s eyes were wet, and he had to look away. The last time he wept about all of this was when he’d been trying to explain to Bea, and Allie’s empathy—
It was too much.
“She took care of us. Gave us space, and a chance. Now she can take care of herself and, I imagine, try something that brings her back to who she is. Or something. I’m not sure. I try not to keep too close tabs on her, because it’s not for me, Rosemary’s life. Not anymore.”
Allie was staring at the kitchen cabinets. Her knuckles were white around the mug he’d given her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t go on about it.”
“No, it’s not that. It would just be nice, I think. For someone to feel that way about you. I wish I had that.”
“In what way?”
“Like your life was just for yourself.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It wasn’t, like you said, for Rosemary. It isn’t, for me.”
He thought of the woman in the bar, in her costume, her eyes tethered to her mother. How Allie had come apart when her mother slipped out with Justice.
“Thank you for being my mailman, Allie.”
She reached across the breakfast bar and put her hand over his. Her palm was hot from her mug of tea. It was entirely lovely to be touched in s
uch a way, one sympathetic adult to another.
He felt awake.
Chapter 5
Allie slid her hand away, wrapping it around her mug again.
She’d left her fingers on top of Winston’s for longer than she should have, probably. It was something she’d noticed that she missed since Matt, or at least Matt early on in their relationship—having someone to touch. Implied intimacy.
Sometimes when she dropped by her parents’ house for lunch she’d squeeze her dad’s shoulder as he finished his coffee, and she had her visits with the dogs, of course, who always wanted petting. But it wasn’t the same.
She wondered if she’d pushed Winston, though. He wasn’t looking at her. She’d have thought he was tired except he held his body square and tight, resisting the plush backrests of the fancy breakfast bar chairs.
She wanted to say the next right thing, and her mind swooped between thoughts and around them without focusing on one. Probably, she should reassure him that she didn’t think he was a monster. He wasn’t the first man to make bad decisions or push a brother away. She had pushed May away over and over, especially when she didn’t know what she wanted. She had been pushing May away since she left Matt at the altar, and had one great night of sister bonding in its aftermath. For months and months she found herself stopping right in the middle of work, right in the middle of some flow state on a task, as if she had left the broiler on, forgotten to pay some vital bill, and then would realize it was simply guilt.
I haven’t called May to really talk, in ages. I ignored her last text. I’m pretending I didn’t get her email. I blew off our FaceTime date. I’m not going to do anything about it. Not anytime soon.
She focused on the cuffs of his shirt and immediately recognized fine hand-stitching on Indian-milled broadcloth. The online arm of her business had recently sold a similar vintage dress shirt that wasn’t nearly as lovely, for three hundred dollars. In a tasteful satin stitch, white silk thread on white cotton, was his monogram, in a half inch square.
She’d missed it in the dark of the bar, distracted when he’d rolled his cuffs the first time that evening. But now she focused her attention on this small, lovely detail as he removed first one cuff link, then the other, and placed them on the table, one bar crossed over the other, like how he might leave them on his dresser. They gleamed there, exotic chunks of hammered gold.
She’d never known a man who wore cuff links.
He folded back the cuffs of his shirt, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, every movement precise and practiced. It was an end-of-day ritual for him, and observing it close up, she felt like a tourist on safari, twenty feet from an uncaged lion.
She’d seen cuff links behind glass in jewelry stores, had even sold them herself to other collectors in her business, but Winston wasn’t behind glass.
He was right here. With her.
An intimacy that had to be negotiated, because it was anything but implied.
“It’s impossible to explain why someone would leave a nice man.” Her voice was loud in the kitchen, with all of its hard, expensive surfaces.
He looked up at her and leaned back a little. She wondered if he had learned in some fancy business school how to look receptive, how to perform active listening, or if he was truly, truly interested in her.
“Is it?”
“Yes. It is. Because you think, when you’re with him, that you can make that choice anytime—that both of you can choose to be together or choose to break up. But then it turns out, actually, that if he’s a nice man, a man everyone likes, who loves you, that the only way to leave is to have a reason. Like, a good reason, that everyone you know will agree about. It’s like…I’m not explaining this very well.” She glanced at him. “Because it’s impossible.”
“Maybe it would help, I suspect, if you told me what you mean by a ‘nice’ man.”
Allie felt some very tight knot, tangled painfully deep in her gut, loosen, just a little.
“For starters, a nice man always has a reason. For everything.” There was a teeny, tiny window at the end of the galley kitchen. It was so dark outside that all she could see was her face, pale, reflected in it. “There’s a reason for how much gas you’re supposed to keep in the tank, at all times, but especially in the winter. There’s a reason why bright red pants might not be right to wear to a meeting at the bank. A nice man is…reasonable. He’s not ever heedless. Or impulsive, like I am. And so he doesn’t even have to really explain his reasons. The reason is self-evident.”
Maybe Winston winced, or maybe he didn’t. She tried to just keep looking at the small oval of her face in the window.
“There’s so many of the reasons, then, that of course, of course, the way that your life is put together is simply the way life should be. And that means you’re happy, because all the reasons say you’re supposed to be, and anything you might think you want, or you think might make you happier—there’s always a reason you can’t have it.”
“What did you want that wasn’t reasonable? That wasn’t…nice?”
“He left on the closet light.”
When she didn’t elaborate, Winston frowned. “I don’t understand.”
She shook her head. He wasn’t supposed to understand. She wasn’t supposed to tell him, probably, because sex confessions with strangers were uncool. But he’d told her his sex thing, about him and his wife, and about what he’d done to his brother, which was obviously his very worst thing.
It seemed right to try to tell him this.
“He left on the closet light. On the nights he wanted to, you know. Have sex. I’d come in the room to brush my teeth and get ready for bed, and the closet door would be cracked open, and the light would be on in there, with the bedroom lights turned off. And he’d be waiting in bed, already undressed. So I had to…I just had to brush my teeth, and pee, and decide whether I was going to put pajamas on or not. But if I did, it wasn’t—” She drew a deep breath. “It wouldn’t be reasonable.”
She felt his wince, then. She felt hers. This time her face was hot because shame is hot, unforgiving. Elvira had told her that shame was just a lie someone has told you about yourself. She didn’t know, for sure, what the lie was here. She never looked straight at it.
“Allie?”
She didn’t look at him.
“He’s not a nice man.”
She wanted to cry then, and the tears wicked up from that knot deep inside fast and sharp, but she swallowed hard and blinked harder.
When she finally looked at him, his silence patient, he had finally leaned back in the chair. He smiled at her, right away, and his smile was surprisingly easy for someone whose mouth spoke in such a precise way.
“Obviously,” she said, “there’s something to this mailman thing.” She let herself look at him for a long time, this man her lips had almost touched. “I thought, after I left him, that I would do all kinds of crazy stuff. Pick up someone at a bar. Move. Go to the south of France and pick someone up at a bar. The only thing I did was buy a wholesale club pack of Coke and put it in the fridge where anyone could see it.”
Winston obligingly raised his eyebrows in question.
“You know. All the sugar. Caffeine. Or maybe it was the high-fructose corn syrup.”
“Not reasonable?”
“Not even a little. Sometimes I drink them right before bed, just like a giant ‘fuck you,’ and then I read a book with the TV on and fall asleep without brushing my teeth.”
“My God.”
“That’s right.” She cocked a finger gun at him. “Living on a prayer, baby.”
He grinned, and it was so thoroughly disarming that she let her hands fall into her lap, smiling back. The knot in her stomach had warmed and loosened further, and it felt like when she inhaled there was more room than there had been in her body for a long time.
“You’re here, though,” he said. “Here in New York, I mean. And here in this apartment. So you’re certainly capable of doing mad things.”
“You calling me crazy, mailman?”
“I’m merely pointing out that here you are, and here I am, a man who was very thoroughly picked up at a bar. What comes after the picking up at the bar bit?”
“Ruthless therapeutic confessions about our failed relationships. Cold chamomile tea.”
“Had I known, I might have been more wary of your charms.”
“I haven’t explained the part that happens after the cold tea.”
He did this thing then, this absolutely flawless Englishman thing with one eyebrow, that she’d glimpsed in the bar but had assumed was an illusion because no real person could surely convey so much inappropriate interest merely by lifting an eyebrow by a fraction of a millimeter.
“Yeah, so,” Allie croaked. “Since there is obviously so, so much that could happen after cold tea, maybe we should make a list.”
“That sounds perfectly reasonable.” He didn’t linger on his joke, and it made it even funnier as he leaned over and pulled open a drawer to extract a perfect pad of white, heavy paper. Naturally, he had a fountain pen in the inner pocket of his coat hanging over the back of his barstool.
“You understand,” Allie said, her neck scalding hot, “what kind of list this is.”
“Yes.” Winston uncapped his pen with a snick. “This is the list equivalent of an entire gross of Coca-Cola.”
“Absolutely. This is a Coke-before-bed-closet-light-it’s-been…” She gave him a questioning glance.
“Five years.”
Allie coughed. “It’s-been-five-fucking-years list.” She pointed to the paper. “Write that at the top.”
“Write ‘Coke-before-bed-it’s-been—’ ”
“Just write ‘Allie and Winston’s list,’ ” she amended. “We don’t have all night.”
He wrote in all capital letters, his penmanship as perfect as a draftsman’s, in thick blue ink. “Right.”
Allie suddenly understood that she was—wet. Like, not a little warmed up, either. She was pretty sure she should just freeze in one position so she wouldn’t get any more signals from her body that would mess up her swag with Winston.