PART 22:

She was someone who had figured out that the damage was real and also survivable. That was not a small thing. I have a therapy appointment Thursday, she said. I know you told me. I might need to stay late after. She wants to do an extended session. I’ll get Cora from her grandma’s. She looked at him. You don’t have to.

I was going to anyway. He set down his mug. Stop pre-apologizing for needing things. We’ve talked about this. She held his gaze for a moment. the slight resistance she still had to being accommodated without earning it and then let it go. Okay, she said. Thank you would also be acceptable, he said. Thank you, she said and meant it.

Spring came and the apartment changed again, the way apartments do when the temperature allows windows to be left open and the air moves through the rooms and everything feels slightly more provisional, slightly more alive. Victoria bought a second plant and then because the second one looked lonely next to the orchid, a third.

Ethan came home one Tuesday evening in April to find her on the kitchen counter, reaching up to place a small hanging planter in the window, which was a use of the kitchen counter he had specifically requested she not make for safety reasons he had explained twice. Victoria, he said almost. You’re going to I have it. The counter has a tilt.

I accounted for the tilt. You absolute. She got the planter in the bracket and stepped down from the counter with the particular satisfaction of someone who has succeeded at something they were told was inadvisable. Done, she said. He looked at the planter. It was a trailing vine of some kind, green and healthy, which in the afternoon light looked genuinely good in that window.

He would not tell her that. You could have asked me to do that, he said. you were at work. I would have done it when I got home.” And the plant would have sat on the counter until she stopped. They both knew he might have done it immediately or might have gotten to it 3 days later, depending on what jobs he’d had.

She knew his patterns by now, the same way he knew hers. “Fair,” he said. “I like having things that are mine,” she said, not defensively, just explaining. “Things I put where I want them.” He understood that, too. 2 years of someone quietly managing her environment had left her with a need to own the small decisions to place things and have them stay where she placed them.

The plants weren’t about plants. Just not from the counter, he said. The bracket is secured, she said. He looked at it. It was in fact properly secured. He wasn’t going to tell her that either. Cora came that weekend and immediately identified the new plant and asked if it had a name.

And Victoria said she hadn’t named it. And Kora said that was the problem and spent 20 minutes on the name before arriving at Gerald, which everyone accepted. Gerald is a good name for a plant, his mother said on the phone when Ethan told her. I know, he said. She’s good with Kora, his mother said. Not a question. She is. And Kora’s good with her. Yeah.

His mother was quiet for a moment. Ethan, I know, Mom. I haven’t said anything. You were about to. A brief silence. I was going to say that your father waited 4 years after his first bad relationship before he let anyone in. And the four years didn’t make him more ready. He was ready when he decided to be. He sat with that.

I’ve decided, he said, I know, his mother said. I can hear it. I just want you to know. I know. The conversation happened on a night in May. It had been raining since afternoon. Not the light spring rain, but the real kind. The kind that made the city smell like wet stone and something older underneath. That kept people inside and turned apartment windows into moving pictures of the street below.

They’d eaten dinner at home, pasta that Victoria had made, which she’d gotten better at over the winter through a process of trial and error that had produced some memorable failures and gradually some genuinely good results. She had a competitive relationship with cooking that Ethan found entertaining and chose not to comment on.

Cora was at her grandmother’s for the week. The apartment was quiet in the particular way it got when Ka wasn’t in it. Not empty because it wasn’t, but more still. You could hear the building breathe. They’d been on the couch for an hour, her with a book, and him with nothing in particular, just the quiet and the rain and the lamp, which had become the symbol of something he didn’t have a word for in either of their lives.

The thing you leave on so the apartment isn’t dark when someone comes home. “Can I ask you something?” he said. She looked up from her book. You’re using the formal opener. What? Can I ask you something? You only say that when it’s actually something. She set the book down. What is it? He thought about how to say it.

He’d been turning it over for several weeks, the way he turned over electrical problems, working through the approach, making sure he understood what he was looking at before he touched anything. He was someone who was careful with important work. He had not always brought that carefulness to personal things, but he was learning.

We’ve been doing this for 7 months, he said, whatever this is. And I keep he stopped. I keep running into the fact that we’re doing it in halves. Her room and my room. Her shelf in the fridge and my shelf. Like we’re still roommates who also happened to He didn’t finish that sentence because it didn’t need finishing. Victoria was watching him.

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