“Hey, Ava, what’s wrong? Do you want to talk about it?”
“You’re not going to meet him,” she said. She turned to face Mat, who lay back in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if he were solving an equation in his head.
“I—Okay . . .” he said quietly.
Ava could see he was hurt, but she allowed the ambiguity to hang there. She didn’t want Mat’s sympathy or awkwardness. He looked small, over on his side of the bed.
“It’s not like that,” Ava said. “It’s—” She sighed. “There’s something I have to tell you. There was an accident—the car accident I mentioned. A few years ago. It wasn’t a small crash. It was really, really bad. My parents, and Andie. They all—nobody—I was the only one—”
She felt like she was going to be sick. She didn’t know if she could bring herself to say it, but she didn’t have to.
“Oh,” Mat said softly. “I—I’m so sorry. Come here.” He wrapped his arm tightly around her and moved his thumb across her face to wipe a tear. Something about this simple service made it impossible to stop more tears from coming.
“No,” she said. “I misled you, and I don’t know why, except that I didn’t want to talk about it. I hate talking about it. It’s such a horrible story.”
But for the first time, held in Mat’s arms with as much time as she needed, she felt like she could. Mat listened as she told him everything she could remember. That she and Andie had been planning to announce their engagement, the smell of roasted nuts, the light, the scream, the crunch.
Mat squeezed her tighter. “It must be so difficult to go through life with this hanging over you.”
“What’s difficult,” Ava said, her throat tight, “is not having my family.” The words came out more sharply than she’d meant.
“Maybe this is a dumb question,” Mat said, “but . . . are you just, like . . . constantly really angry?”
“Yes,” Ava said.
“Anger is the worst,” Mat said. “I can’t imagine dragging that feeling around all the time.”
It was a simple statement, but it gave shape to a feeling that Ava had not given much attention to. Part of her was angry, yes, but she had always considered the anger a useless part. An extra bolt in the assembly bag. What was she supposed to do with it?
Mat took his shirt from his nightstand and blotted Ava’s face with it. It smelled like wood and sweat, and soon it was not his shirt against her face but his mouth. His kiss was long and deep and necessary. “Ava?” he said, pulling away.
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to take care of you.”
“You what?”
“Maybe that sounds . . . stupid and sexist,” he said. “But it’s what I want to tell you. I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to make sure nothing like what happened to you that day ever happens to you again.”
“There’s no way you can—”
“I’m telling you, it’s what I promise,” Mat said. “Nothing like that will ever happen again. You’re safe with me here. I won’t let anything like that—”
“But how can you—”
“Because I said so,” he said. “Because I promise. You are my little lamb.” He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
Ava kissed him. She wanted to devour him. She didn’t care if nothing in his apartment coordinated, or if his dresser drawers were all askew, or if he had subpar Remy sheets or no clock anywhere, or even if he had an environmentally unfriendly toothbrush. She decided in that moment that not only did she not care about these things, she couldn’t believe she ever had.
* * *
When Ava next woke, it was to the smell of coffee. She squinted at her phone. “Shit,” she said. “My alarm didn’t go off.”
“Yes it did.” Mat handed her a cup of steaming coffee, which she sat up to drink, the covers pulled up to her armpits. “You slept through it. I didn’t want to wake you up.” Emily was at his heels, wheezing, looking between them.
“But Brutus,” Ava said. “And . . . the Very Nice Box. I’m supposed to inspect the prototypes at eleven and it’s already—”
“I hate to remind you of this again,” Mat said, “but I’m your boss. And as your boss, I say it’s fine. In fact, it seems like you have a cold. I can hear it in your voice. I think you should call in sick.”
“I don’t have a cold!”
“I said you seem like you have a cold,” Mat said. “Sleeping in? That’s unlike you. You must have been up all night sneezing and coughing!”
“I don’t think—”
“You’re taking the day off,” Mat said. “And I am too.” He fit a scarf around his neck.
“You are?”
“Yeah, I feel a slight . . . scratch in the back of my throat,” Mat said. He showed her his phone. There was an email to Judith in his sent folder:
Heya Judith,
Sick, taking teh day off. Mat
Ava stared at the email. The message she began drafting to Judith was very different:
Dear Judith,
I apologize for emailing you this late in the morning. I was up all night with a cold and hoped to be well enough to work today, particularly given the arrival of the Very Nice Box prototypes, but after substantial deliberation, I don’t think I should risk spreading this virus to anyone else.
I’m sorry to miss such an important day and will be back as soon as I possibly can—surely by tomorrow.
Very best wishes,
Ava
“I guess it’s been a while since I’ve taken a sick day,” Ava said. She looked over the email three more times before sending it, then unsending it, then rereading it, then sending it.
“It’s been five years and two months,” Mat said. “I checked.”
“You can do that?” Five years and two months. It was when the accident had happened. Ava had taken five weeks off to recover in the hospital and was back at her desk as soon as she’d gotten clearance from her doctors, her arm still in a cast, her knee at once fragile and heavy.
“Are you impressed?” He bent to kiss her, and the memory of the night wafted back to her. She appreciated that Mat didn’t feel the need to offer more sympathy or linger on the revelation.
She opened her Bark Bud app. There was a message from Kaamya and a photo of Brutus. Brutus did great. Did his business and ate all his dinner. Ava felt a swell of pride. “Brutus did great,” she said to Mat. She sipped her coffee, which he’d made perfectly—the right amount of milk, and no sugar. The mug was a Fervor mug, whose ads promised its contents would remain hot even in freezing conditions. “He is the best dog ever born.”
“He’s tied for the best dog ever born,” Mat said, fake outrage on his face. Ava looked down at Emily, who snorted.
“Sure,” she said. “We can say that.” Emily panted heavily while Mat crouched and scratched her head.
Ava’s phone dinged—a new email from Judith. Her stomach dropped. But why shouldn’t she get a day off? Mat was right—she hadn’t called in sick in over five years.
Dear Ava,
I understand perfectly.
Sincerely,
Judith
21
“Put on something warm,” Mat said, tossing Ava one of his beanies. “It’s freezing out there. And before you ask, yes, I hired Brutus a Bark Bud.”
They rode up I-278 in the backseat of a Swyft. The financial district towered above them, skyscrapers intermittently blocking the sunlight, until eventually the city became a maze of gridded neighborhoods, empty except for small clusters of men on their stoops. They were somewhere deep within Queens that Ava had never been.
The low multifamily homes thinned, making way for warehouses, and through the long service alleys Ava could make out that they were near water. Mat held her hand in the backseat. An entire day away from work: it was exhilarating. It was delinquent. The time off was a gift she didn’t know what to do with, a check she wasn’t sure how to cash. She would need to completely reorganize her week, for one. M
onths ago this sort of disturbance would have caused her intolerable anxiety. But she felt safe now, in the backseat with Mat. She was breaking the rules with her boss’s permission. She allowed herself to rest her head on his shoulder and watch a series of warehouses blur by.
Finally the driver pulled into an enormous, empty commercial lot. Ava looked around for signage but couldn’t find anything. “Are we . . . here?” she said.
Mat smiled. “Just trust me,” he said, kissing her and unbuckling his seatbelt.
He thanked the driver and climbed out behind Ava, slamming the door behind him. She took another look around as the car sped away, and then she felt Mat’s hands on her shoulders as he gently rotated her until she was facing a low brick building with wide tinted windows. “Walk,” he said, and she did, up to the building’s squat entrance.
Inside, they were greeted by a slender man who led them into a drab conference room and asked them to fill out a form. At the top of the page, Ava read:
Steinway & Sons
Piano Factory Tour
Waiver of liability
She looked up at Mat. He was smiling at her, waiting for her reaction. “I thought you might like to see how a Steinway’s built,” he said, “because of what you told me about your mom’s piano. The tours were completely booked through the fall, but one of the guys had the hookup.”
“The guys?”
“Yeah, from Good Guys.”
Ava couldn’t believe he remembered. She had mentioned the Steinway one morning in the car before work. At the time she had been careful to avoid the emotional details. She hadn’t been ready to tell him about the transcendent sound of her mother’s playing, how it filled every inch of the old house. She was moved by the gesture. He had been listening. And she was so overwhelmed by emotion that she considered asking him to take her back to work. But she resisted, signing her name at the bottom of the form.
He had booked them a private tour with a small, smiley man who wore round glasses, a flannel buttoned to his throat, and an elegant wooden name tag that said STUART. The tour began in the basement, down a flight of wide concrete steps and past a set of heavy doors. It was quieter than Ava would have imagined, and darker. The air was humid, thick with the scent of wood and glue. The only light came from high above them, where the walls peeked out above grade.
On this floor, Stuart quietly explained, they would witness the home to the first step in the piano-making process, where the solid, curved back frame of each grand piano was formed. Down here the sunlight couldn’t change the wood’s complexion, and a natural humidity kept it from drying and splitting before it could be formed. Ava had to lean in to hear him, and she hung on every word, willing herself to remember everything.
Each back frame was made from strips of hardwood cut so thin they could bend. They were shaped around a form, glued together, and clamped until they hardened into the shape of a piano. Six men, each with a clamp, stood around it, working in unison. They looked up at each other every few seconds to ensure that they were on track. If any one section tightened too quickly, the delicate pieces would slip out of alignment.
This, to Ava, was beauty in its purest form.
They exited past the station’s finished product: dozens of piano husks stacked unceremoniously in a row, marked with chalk. In Ava’s mind they were elegant enough to be the final product, but they weren’t regarded as such. She didn’t see the craftsmen admire their work. They checked the seams, wiped away excess glue, and moved on. The entire factory felt like this—humble and unobserved, its pulse quickening at each step.
At the next station men and women in clean forest-green jumpsuits worked quickly, measuring the piano’s many strings, unrolling heavy coils, and winding them around a massive, cast-iron frame that would sit snugly inside the wooden pieces that they had seen at the previous station, Stuart explained.
Workers moved around the cast iron in a coordinated bustle, like bees around a hive. They pulled, fastened, and clipped. The floor manager struck a tuning fork and made tiny adjustments as they went. Together they could wind hundreds of strings in a matter of minutes. Ava couldn’t tear her eyes away. She was so absorbed in the tour that she had forgotten Mat was with her.
“Like it?” Mat said to her, surprising her out of her trance.
“I never want to leave,” she whispered, keeping her eyes on the workers.
On weekends Ava’s parents and their friends had crowded the living room with guitars and fiddles and the space would buzz late into the night with beer and music. They’d argue boisterously about what to play next until the ensemble thinned one by one and it was just her mother at the piano bench and her father on the couch, listening, half asleep.
Throughout the tour Mat came and went from Ava’s side, often walking a few steps ahead. At each station he approached the yellow line that separated the tour from the work areas, getting very close. He would peer over the edge, occasionally joking with the craftsmen. Not so long ago this would have made Ava fume. She would have hated the part of him that felt free to be large, an impulse that she had spent years winding tightly within herself. But today she saw a childish excitement, a boy who was enthralled and unafraid, and she followed freely in his wake.
The next floor was devoted to carving and sanding, the final details before the pianos were painted and oiled. This station was the most spacious, the brightest, and the chilliest. Instead of working in an efficient grid, the few woodworkers spread out, each claiming a patch of sunlight.
Ava and Mat watched as the woodworkers smoothed each piano, sanding it down until the wood was like silk. An older man chiseled away at the maker’s mark on one of the pianos, and the words Steinway & Sons slowly emerged from the walnut.
Each craftsman had a set of tools, and no two were alike. What individuals collected throughout their career reflected their personality in some way, Ava believed—whether they used an oak or a walnut mallet, the number of chisels they required, the way the natural oils in their hands left unique marks on their wooden levels. These collections were beautiful, and reminded Ava of the rotation of things her parents had in their old farmhouse. Books, wooden boxes, terra-cotta planters—things from an era when everything was made by hand. These artifacts had felt important to Ava, and she had held on to them after the accident. At a certain point, though, they began to feel like stones that had been removed from the shore: unique but drained of color. This is how Ava herself had felt since she’d lost her family—that she had been removed from her home, sapped of her texture. Or at least that had been the case until now.
She looked across the room, her gaze resting on Mat in his thick sweater. His cheeks were pink from the chilly draft, and he stood a head taller than everyone else in the room. She found it hard to look away. There on the factory floor, with the light streaming in strong and low across downy piles of wood shavings and sawdust suspended in the fragrant air, he was as beautiful as the oak mallet, the tuning fork, the level. She loved him.
22
Falling in love with Mat was the feeling of jumping from a very high perch, yet somehow it was also the feeling of safety; of a key sliding into a lock; of gears meeting precisely; of the teeth of a circular saw running along the wood’s grain; of a sharpened pencil. How could all of this be true at once? Ava’s heart skipped as their Swyft navigated back to her apartment, the woody, lacquered smell of the Steinway factory lingering on her jacket, in Mat’s hair, in his sweater as they leaned with each turn the car took.
They’d had no dinner plans—when was the last time she hadn’t planned three meals ahead?—and Mat was ordering sushi on his phone. “What do you like?” he said.
“Miso soup? And a California roll?”
“Miso soup and a California roll? What is this, the Great Depression?” Mat said. Ava watched him order things she would never have considered. A galaxy roll, a tsunami roll, a ka-blamo roll, a nemesis roll. Plus two miso soups, two orders of gyoza, seaweed salad, edamame, and fried chicken.
“Seems excessive,” she said.
“Thinking ahead,” Mat said conspiratorially. “Leftovers for tomorrow.”
“Don’t you think bringing the same leftovers to work after we both played hooky is a little obvious?” Ava said.
“One thousand percent,” Mat said. “Which is why we’re taking tomorrow off too.”
“Are you high?” Ava said. “We can’t take tomorrow off. We’ll get fired.”
“Ava,” Mat said, laughing, “it’s common knowledge that two consecutive sick days are more convincing than one.” He pulled his STÄDA credit card out of his wallet and tapped the numbers into his phone.
“Is STÄDA paying?”
“Yep,” Mat said. “The Very Nice Box.”
“The Very Nice Box what?”
“There. We discussed the Very Nice Box. Now STÄDA can cover our dinner.”
Ava watched him fit his card back into his wallet. He reached his arm around her, squeezed her shoulder, and kissed her cheek. The doubt must have been written on her face, because Mat turned to her. “Ava,” he said, the seatbelt cutting across his broad chest, “you’re allowed to break the rules every once in a while. It’s actually encouraged. It’s called Positive Delinquency. They were huge on this sort of thing at Wharton. It boosts morale and makes us feel that we’re getting away with something, when really we deserve a nice dinner. You haven’t taken a day off in literally years. The least STÄDA can do is buy you dinner. And believe me,” he said, “I’ve seen the numbers. They can afford a few sushi rolls.” He slid his hand into the space between Ava’s thighs and pressed against her.
“Okay,” Ava said, closing her eyes. She pushed herself against the edge of his hand. “Tell me what you want to do tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Mat said. “The world is our oyster. Beacon? Kingston?”
“No, not upstate,” Ava said. The crash played out in her mind, but this time she was able to observe it from a distance, as though she were a rubbernecker passing by.
The Very Nice Box Page 14