“See?” she said. “I’m a basket case.”
He thought for a moment. Then he reached across the table and put his hand over hers.
“No talking, then,” he said. “Let’s just look at each other. And later—”
“Later we can say everything online,” she said.
“Like good online Americans,” he said, and she laughed.
“You can keep holding my hand, though,” she said.
“I should really go wash off the grease.” And that was the truth.
They drove back in a silence that was thoroughly drowned out by the roar of blood rushing through her. There was something she needed to tell him before he went, something that could end the relationship before it started. After shuffling through the metal detectors, they walked hand in hand through the terminal to his next gate.
“I have to tell you about who I am,” she said. “About my family.”
“I know all about the Amazing Telemachus Family,” he said.
She stopped, let go of his hand. “You do?”
“I asked around, and a friend of mine knew all about you. I figured you were waiting for me to look you up. When you finally told me your last name, you made it sound notorious.”
“I did not.”
He gave her an amused look. “Am I lying?”
He wasn’t. She felt a hot dread, nine-year-old Irene stepping before the cameras.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“Without using feeling words?” His voice was amused, his eyes kind. She couldn’t see a hint of the disdain she’d imagined.
“Right,” she said. “Rules.” She put her arm through his, and they resumed walking.
“I do have a lot of questions, though,” he said.
“Let’s talk about it later,” she said. Everything was easy in front of the screen, their words zipping effortlessly between the satellites. They’d talked about his divorce, her near-marriage to Lev, his stressful job and her mind-numbing one. Mostly they’d talked about their children. He had joint custody of his ten-year-old daughter, Jun, and worried about the effects of the divorce on her. Irene fretted about Matty, master of sulking and secrecy, who was spending an inordinate amount of time alone in his room.
LAST DAD STANDING: You can’t worry about it. Kids are like that.
IRENE T: You have a daughter who tells you everything.
LAST DAD STANDING: Matty’s a teenage boy. I never told my parents anything, and look how I turned out. Divorced, in therapy…Oh wait. You should worry.
IRENE T: You’re in therapy?
LAST DAD STANDING: Was. I’ve kind of slacked off lately.
IRENE T: Maybe I should get Matty a therapist. When I talk to him, I feel like it’s a cross-examination.
LAST DAD STANDING: Permission to treat teenager as a hostile witness, your honor.
IRENE T: Exactly!
Her family’s history in the psi business had been the only topic she hadn’t had the courage to bring up, and now that he’d hauled it into the light she couldn’t believe she’d held on to the secret so long. The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.
Right now she needed to walk without words, arm in arm with a handsome man who was inexplicably willing to put up with her insane demands, who was not freaked out by her history as a pint-size mind reader.
A man who was about to leave her.
She and Joshua stood without speaking, and as the time to board approached she leaned into him. He put his arm around her.
There you are, she thought. The scent of him touched off something in her back brain that made her think of sunlight and wood and salt.
The PA blared. “That’s me,” he said.
“I know,” she said. She did not want to let go of his arm. But she did it. That was the Irene thing to do.
“Thank you for coming out here,” he said. “Taking time off.”
“I figured the grocery store could get along without me,” she said.
“I’m coming back through again on Thursday,” he said. “Maybe we could do this again? It’ll be in the afternoon, so maybe we could, I don’t know, have a drink. Go someplace nice?”
“I’m sorry this was so weird,” she said.
“It wasn’t weird at all.”
The PA called his section again. He looked over his shoulder, and when he turned back he saw the change in her. She couldn’t hide it.
“Oh, Irene.” He thought she was sorry to see him go. She was, but that wasn’t why she was holding back tears.
Then she saw him understand. “Fuck,” he said quietly.
The first lie hung in the air between them. It had been weird. Crazy weird. And he’d been too afraid to tell the crazy weird woman who’d driven out here to meet him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
He stopped himself in another lie. Because he did mean it, and he knew that she knew that he meant it. Both lies were too small to worry about. It was that they were the first in an unstoppable cascade of untruths and half-truths and polite lies and outright deceptions that would pile up around her until she couldn’t see him anymore. She’d been caught in this avalanche before. She didn’t think she could dig her way out a second time.
When she was young, she thought she’d gotten the best talent in the family. No one could take advantage of her. No one could pull the wool over her eyes. While everyone else meandered through life as prey for hucksters and con artists and cads, she was fully armed with x-ray specs and a shoulder-mounted bullshit detector. She was the girl who could not be fooled.
God, what a fool she was.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Irene, please, I don’t want to leave like this.”
“It’s okay,” she lied. “It’s okay. I just can’t—”
Can’t what? she asked herself. Can’t do this again. Can’t even start this.
“I just can’t.” And then she walked away before more words, his or hers, could trip her up.
She drove home slowly, for safety reasons. The state of her soul was not fit for Chicago traffic. When she finally pulled into the driveway, she sat for a long time, staring blankly over the steering wheel. Then Buddy stepped out of the front door wearing an apron and oven mitts. He waved for her to come in.
“Well, fuck,” she said.
Inside the house, the air was thick with the smell of warm cookies—white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. A dozen were already on the cooling rack, and Buddy was pulling another pan from the oven.
“I need all of these,” she said. He nodded.
Mom had directed her cooking lessons at Irene, but it was Buddy who’d memorized her recipes. He would make them, but only on his schedule. You couldn’t ask him to make Mom’s pepper steak, or the bean and bacon soup, or the macadamia nut cookies. You had to wait for the whim to strike, then hope you were around to reap the benefits.
Mail sat on the counter. She shuffled through the stack, dreading a bill addressed to her, but the only thing of interest was a fat envelope for Teddy, from ATI—Advanced Telemetry Inc. He’d gotten these envelopes for years, on a monthly basis. He never opened them in front of her, and she thought she knew the reason why.
Matty appeared in the kitchen door, still wearing the yellow Bumblebee shirt Frankie had gotten him. “What is that?” he asked.
Buddy shut off the oven, grabbed three semi-cooled cookies, and walked out the back door. That was the other thing about his impromptu cooking events: cleanup was on you.