“I said I didn’t want to get into it, okay? I’m here now. Can you please just be supportive? I didn’t come here to defend myself. I came here for a friend.”
Jaime softened. “Of course,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready to talk, we’ll talk. You can stay here as long as you need.”
Chas came out of the kitchen and set down two Simple Dessert Plates, each with a wedge of pie and a dollop of cream. “I’m heading out to practice,” he said, rubbing Brutus’s head. “I’m sorry to run. You know how those practice rooms are. It’s like a reality show trying to get one.”
“Win the reality show for me,” Jaime said.
“I will, baby,” Chas said, kissing him on the cheek.
“Can you believe how much I lucked out?” Jaime said, holding Chas’s chin.
“All right, all right,” Chas said.
“No, really!” Jaime said. “He even makes my lunch every day.”
“Wait, those are your little sushi rolls?” Ava said.
“Yep,” Chas said. “Little sushi rolls for my little tuna.”
“Oh god,” Jaime said.
“You’d make a good engineer,” Ava said. “Those rolls are perfect.”
“No,” Chas said. “I’m happy keeping a safe distance from all that. Nice to meet you, Ava. Brutus.”
Ava turned to Jaime. “Anything else you’re hiding from me?” she said as Chas closed the door behind him. “Any children?”
“No!” Jaime laughed.
The pie was so luxuriously tart and sweet that Ava momentarily forgot about her bewildering evening with Mat, who now felt far away, like a distant, unpleasant dream. She closed her eyes as she chewed. “I never want to do anything besides eat this pie. I don’t even want to go back to work. I’d be happy if I never looked at cat furniture again.”
Jaime poured them each more wine. “Andie probably wouldn’t even recognize STÄDA. It’s changed so much since she was there.”
Ava’s head buzzed from the wine, but she still felt the adrenaline course through her at the mention of Andie. “It’s true,” she said. “Can you imagine her working for Helen Gross?”
“Helen Gross would be working for Andie,” Jaime said.
Ava stretched across Jaime’s Dignified Sofa, pushing Brutus to the far end with her feet. “She was the best,” she said.
It was a simple, devastating fact.
Jaime nodded. “She was,” he said. “I miss her all the time.” He wiped at his cheek with his sleeve.
“Actually, do you want to see what I use my Very Nice Box for?” Jaime said.
“If there’s a shrine in there, I’m going to have to leave,” Ava said.
“No,” Jaime said. “Well, not exactly. Open it.”
She did. Inside were Calm Bins holding dozens of clocks and watches. Most of them Ava recognized from Andie’s notebooks. Some of them had never made it past the prototype stage. “Do you mind if I . . . ?”
“Of course,” Jaime said.
She sorted through the wall clocks first, and then the bedside ones. All of them appeared to be working. She could remember every design clearly, how Andie had poured her focus into each one, never leaving an unfinished design orphaned. She tried to remember the names of the clocks that never made it to shelves, like the Insightful Desk Clock, which was made of wood. And then the watches, some of which Ava had forgotten about: the Loyal Wristwatch, which glowed in the dark, and the Earnest Wristwatch, which had a bright yellow second hand and no numbers.
“What’s this?” she said, pulling a chain from the smallest Calm Bin. At the end of the chain was a pendant.
“Andie made that for me,” Jaime said. “I’m so paranoid about somehow losing it that I don’t wear it.”
From her reclined position on the Dignified Sofa, Ava held the chain up above her face. She saw that the pendant was actually the copper balance wheel of a wristwatch.
“It’s from our first prototype of the Straightforward Wristwatch,” Jaime said. “Turn it over.”
Ava sat up and flipped the balance wheel in her palm. A tiny inscription ran along its circumference: For JR. With affection. “How did she even . . .” Ava said.
“It’s my favorite thing,” Jaime said.
Ava was struck by the realization that there was more to Andie than she had come to know. The thought moved and saddened her. She had been so consumed with her own grief that she hadn’t really considered that Jaime was carrying his own around—and that she didn’t have to hoard all the pain. It was arrogant to think that was even possible.
“We lost the same person,” Jaime said. “We can talk about it, you know.”
Ava nodded. She unclasped the chain and fit it around his neck. “One thing I know for sure is that Andie would not have wanted this locked up in a box.”
Jaime smiled. “Speaking of what Andie would have wanted for us . . . I know I’m not allowed to ask for details about my nemesis, aka Mat Putnam. But have you had your eye on anyone else?”
The construction site engineer came immediately to mind.
“You have!” Jaime lit up. “Who is it?”
Ava covered her face with her hands. “No one. Okay. Well, I don’t know her name. But she’s a site engineer for the Vision Tower. She’s . . . the hot one?”
Jaime clasped his hands at the confession and Ava could feel the excitement of the crush begin to take shape now that she had named it.
“I know some of those workers! Wait, is that why you’ve been spending so much time down on Two?”
Ava hid her face in a Supportive Pillow. “No,” she said, her voice muffled.
“I love it. Tell me everything, starting with—”
Jaime was interrupted by a distressed voice coming from the street. At first Ava thought a fight was unfolding, but by the second wail it became clear that there was only one voice.
“Ava!”
Brutus perked up.
“Is that . . .” Jaime said, looking at her wide-eyed.
Ava was too tipsy to feel afraid. She looked out the window. Mat was three stories down, yelling up at the building. Before she had time to move away, he spotted her.
“Ava! I know you’re up there!”
Jaime raised his eyebrows. “How does he even know where I live?”
“He must have followed me,” Ava said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ava! Please!” Mat shouted. “I need to talk to you!”
Jaime opened the window and leaned out. “Go away! Literally zero people want you here!”
“What?” Mat yelled back. “Ava!”
Jaime shut the window.
An arrow of panic shot through her. “Shit,” she said. “What do I do?”
“Well, I can tell you want not to do—”
“Ava!”
Mat had begun to ring all the buzzers, and Ava could hear neighbors through the walls, growing irate. Her mouth went dry.
“AVA!”
“I have to go down there and calm him down,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” Jaime said. “Stay here. I’ll take care of it.”
Before she could argue, Jaime had slipped out the door. She could hear a brief, muffled exchange, and then the yelling stopped, and soon he was back inside. “It’s resolved,” he said, and without another word he fixed Ava a bed on the Dignified Sofa and set a Thoughtful Glass of water on the Very Nice Box. “Get some sleep, Ava,” he said.
“Thank you for not saying ‘I told you so,’” she said.
“I was extremely close, but I restrained myself,” Jaime said. He leaned over to hug her, and she let him.
“Thank you,” she said into his shoulder.
43
It was dawn when Ava woke on Jaime’s Dignified Sofa with refreshed anxiety: Mat had been lying to her. The run-in with Amir repeated itself in her mind as she folded the Cool Sheets, washed her Thoughtful Glass, and left Jaime a note thanking him. She couldn’t make sense of it all, which felt even worse than the lies themselves. S
he clicked Brutus onto his Curious Leash and closed the door quietly behind her.
In the Swyft home, her head felt heavy, as though it were full of sand. An ache throbbed above her eye. Brutus sat next to her, panting out the open window. She envisioned Mat standing outside her building, waiting for her to come home, but to her relief, he wasn’t. “Let’s go,” she said to Brutus, pulling him out of the car. As she pushed her way inside, it occurred to her that Mat might actually be inside her apartment. He still had a key, after all.
She opened a new chat to her SHRNK. I think I need your help, she wrote, climbing the stairs. Something happened last night.
An ellipsis appeared. Ava was so focused on the screen that she didn’t immediately notice that something had fallen from the crack in her apartment door when she pushed it open.
She picked up what had dropped—a manila envelope—while Brutus whined at her feet. “I know,” she said. “I know you’re hungry.” She filled his Favorite Dog Bowl and sat on her Practical Sofa, turning the envelope over.
A note was scribbled on the front of it, and she recognized Mat’s crude handwriting immediately.
Lamby,
You know how I’m paperless? Well, this is the exception.
Inside the envelope was a newspaper clipping. The paper was soft and the edges were worn, and pale crease lines crossed the center. It had been folded and unfolded many times over, and each corner contained a small hole, as though it had once been tacked to a bulletin board.
She read the headline: “Haverford Sanitation Worker Saves Young Man from Dumpster.”
The image was of a burly man in polyester safety gear and a hardhat who had his arm around a tall, lanky teenager with long hair, sunken shoulders, and a crumpled, stained suit and tie. The sanitation worker beamed at the camera, but the teenager looked off to the side. Ava read it while Brutus licked his Favorite Dog Bowl clean.
Haverford, PA:
A young man was rescued from a Dumpster outside the Haverford School yesterday by Haverford Township sanitation worker Keith Kowalski, after he was apparently locked inside it by one or multiple classmates. The victim has been identified as eighteen-year-old Mathew Putnam. Mr. Kowalski discovered Mr. Putnam during his routine garbage route.
“Heard banging, heard a voice,” Mr. Kowalski said. “Opened it up, there he was. Anyone would have pulled him out. My son gets bullied, so I was especially sensitive to it.”
Mr. Putnam demurred when asked about the events leading up to the incident. “Just some guys joking around,” he said.
But he was reportedly inside the Dumpster for nearly eight hours. When asked why he was in a suit, Mr. Putnam responded that he had been on his way to an interview at the University of Pennsylvania, where he hoped to enroll. “That interview would have been today,” he said. “I missed it.”
Mr. Putnam’s father, Neil Putnam, offered the following comment: “They can stuff my son in a Dumpster, but I’m getting him into Penn come hell or high water.”
Mr. Putnam says he will not press charges and has refused to name any of his peers involved in the incident. This is a developing story.
Ava reread the article, turning it over in case there was more. But no; there was only an ad for a diner in Bryn Mawr. She studied the photograph again. The boy in the photo, the look in his eye, reminded her of the way Brutus would look up at her in the rain: betrayed, hopeless.
She pulled out her phone and saw that her SHRNK had written back. Of course, Ava. What’s going on?
She closed the window and opened a text to Mat. You can come over to talk, she wrote. I’ll be leaving soon.
I love you, Lamby. On my way.
It wasn’t long before he knocked meekly on her door. He looked sheepish and bedraggled, not unlike the photo in the newspaper clipping, aside from the long scraggly hair.
“Where did you sleep?” she said.
“I got a Float-Home,” he said. “Can I sit?”
Ava nodded.
“So you read it?” Mat sat next to her on her Practical Sofa.
Ava nodded again. “Mat,” she said, “I don’t—”
“I know,” he said. “But listen. When I was a kid, I wasn’t like this.” He gestured to himself. “I had no self-confidence. I was tormented at school by these kids whose dads basically owned the school. I wasn’t safe anywhere. But my parents paid crazy money for high school, so I didn’t want to complain. Some kids rebel, but I decided to work really, really hard. I convinced myself that if I worked hard enough I could get away from the Main Line forever. I was completely focused on getting into Penn, and I wanted it more than anything. That was the dream. Penn, then Wharton.”
He was sitting very still, and his gaze was so direct that Ava had to look away.
“The day of my interview, I left school early to give myself plenty of time to get to Penn’s admissions office. And who’s in the parking lot? Scott fucking McCormack. The worst. He was pissed. He’d been trying to intimidate me, to get me to ditch my interview, because he knew Penn would only accept a certain number of applicants from our school, and he was one of them. He knew I was smarter and worked harder. I tried to get in my car, but he was quicker. He punched me in the ribs and shoved me into the Dumpster behind the auditorium. I can still hear the sound of him kicking the metal from the outside. I was in there for what felt like an eternity until a guy came to collect the trash. I missed my interview, and I didn’t get in. Penn, Wharton, down the drain. Over. Ava?”
She had closed her eyes and held the bridge of her nose. “But your dad . . .” she said. “Your dad said he’d make sure you got in.”
“My dad thought he could bribe his way into anything,” Mat said. “Well, not this time. And that quote certainly didn’t help.” He gazed at her expectantly. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “This was my ticket out. And it just, like . . . evaporated.”
She did get it. His future had been shattered, and he had tried to restore it. The same urge had chased her after the accident; how many times had she tried to rewrite the facts of it? How many times had she reworked the timing of their departure, the direction of the sun, the speed of the car? How many of her dreams had straightened the crooked parts of her waking life? “I’m sorry,” Ava said, “but—”
“No, I’m sorry. I just wanted to explain,” Mat said. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I guess part of me was worried you’d judge me.”
“It’s not an excuse,” Ava said. “It’s not an excuse for lying to me.”
“I wanted to go to Wharton so badly,” Mat said. “I was so close.” He held up his finger and thumb to illustrate. Ava restrained herself from reminding Mat that the interview he had missed was with Penn, not Wharton, and that anyway it took more than avoiding a Dumpster to get into Penn.
His eyes gleamed with tears. “I’m so sorry, Ava.” He put a hand on Ava’s knee as if she were the one who needed comforting. “I lied,” Mat said, and his voice shook. “And I am sorry for that. You’re right, it’s not an excuse. But it’s a lie that should have been true. I deserved to go to Penn, I deserved to go to Wharton. I would have gotten in. Pretending it was true was the only way I could think of to get over the trauma. I just got so swept up in the lie that I felt like I couldn’t undo it, even with you. And I trust you more than anybody.”
“So . . .” Ava said, frowning, “you just . . . what? Ate cheesesteaks for six years after high school?”
“Honestly? Kinda,” Mat said. “I hit rock bottom. Spiraled out. Major depression. Cheesesteaks were the least of it.”
“How . . .” Ava started, staring at her lap. “How am I supposed to trust you?”
She forced herself to meet his eye. The question was not rhetorical. She desperately wanted to know. She wanted to restabilize, to return to the version of herself who believed in him.
“C’mon, Lamby, you know me.” He squeezed her knee. “I’m optimistic, I’m driven, I sometimes do stupid things because I’m scared. Tell me that’s not wh
at you see in me. You still know me, beyond this whole—this whole situation.”
“This lie,” she corrected.
“Beyond this lie,” he repeated. He pulled her into a tight hug.
Ava grappled with the facts as he held her. He had lied, twice. He was part of something adjacent to a men’s rights group. He had followed her to Jaime’s apartment. And then there was another inconvenient fact: she had been happy with Mat, happier than she had been in years. What would her SHRNK say? Who could you be if you let yourself be happy? The answer to the question was simple: she could be in his arms, loving him, his flaws included. After all, she had contributed to the flaws; she had held him to such a high standard that he was doomed to disappoint her. And anyway, their relationship was bound to encounter stress and occasional collapses, the same way new STÄDA designs were pushed to failure.
Yes, that was a good way to think about this. The first run of a new storage cabinet was subject to stress testing, during which giant mechanical arms opened and closed the doors at variable speeds and with variable force, until inevitably a hinge snapped or a handle started to wiggle. Then the team would begin again, this time with better hardware. There were always at least five failures, even with the best, most well-conceived designs. The Very Nice Box had undergone seven. As Mat held her, Ava imagined a screwdriver rotating clockwise, tightening a hinge.
“Okay,” she said, releasing herself from his embrace. “Why don’t I make us some eggs and toast.”
“Scrambled, with a little cheese, the way I like?” Mat said.
As the butter melted on her Eternal Cast-Iron Pan, Ava opened the conversation with her SHRNK. Never mind, she wrote. I’m working it out.
44
Ava accepted Mat back into her life the same way she had accepted, after the accident, the screw in her wrist. It was unfamiliar at first, having him back. But after a few days the ease of their reinstated routine overshadowed her doubt. It took energy to be angry, and Ava couldn’t resist the comfort of normalcy. Mat went to his Good Guys meetings but never threatened to take Ava along again, or to tell her about his Personal Flex. She was grateful for that. He drove her to work each morning and picked her up. She was grateful for that too. He cooked her dinner, walked Brutus during the day, and worked a handful of freelance jobs on her Practical Sofa. It wasn’t long before the Wharton lie was just an asterisk next to the fact of their relationship. Mat had padded his résumé, but he’d been good at the job. He hadn’t really hurt anyone, and Ava knew she had overreacted.
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