“It does that,” Ethan said. He was already under the sink with a flashlight. “Does it do that often?” “Old disposal, probably original to the house. Hand me that wrench. She picked up the wrench from the toolbox he’d opened on the floor and handed it down to him. He noticed she handed it correctly.
Handle first without being asked. Small thing. He noticed it anyway. I have a property manager, she said. I can call him. I’ve got it. Ethan, you don’t have to. Victoria, he said her name the way he said Lily’s name when she was arguing about something she didn’t need to argue about. I’ve got it. She was quiet. He heard her move.
The sound of a chair being pulled out. The soft settle of someone sitting down at the kitchen table. Staying but giving him room. It took 20 minutes. The disposal needed a reset and a clear jam. Someone had apparently put something hard down there. And Ethan’s best guess was a piece of Lily’s Halloween candy that had gone missing two weeks ago.
He didn’t say that part out loud. when he slid out from under the sink and tested it, a clean, normal hum. Victoria looked up from the papers she’d been reading. “Thank you,” she said. “It needs replacing eventually. Another 6 months and it’ll go again.” She looked at him steadily. “6 months,” she repeated. He hadn’t meant it the way it landed.
He wiped his hands on a rag and didn’t pursue it. That was how most of their conversations went in the second month. threading carefully past the landmines of the arrangement. The constant awareness of what this was and what it wasn’t, the easy distance they’d both agreed to and were both in their separate ways starting to find slightly harder to maintain.
Lily was not helping. Lily was in fact aggressively not helping in the way of small children who have no awareness of adult complications and an unairring instinct for the exact moment when two grown people most need emotional reinforcement. She decided she liked Victoria with the same decisive completeness with which she decided she liked particular foods or songs fully immediately without ambivalence.
She left drawings on Victoria’s desk, not the refrigerator drawings. Those were family drawings for Ethan. These were different. A woman with dark hair at a big desk. A woman with dark hair reading a book. Once disconcertingly, a woman with dark hair and a little girl holding hands outside what appeared to be a castle, which was either the Princeton house rendered impressionistically, or something Lily had invented entirely.
Victoria put every single one in the top right drawer of her desk. Ethan saw her do it once from the hallway. She didn’t know he was there. She looked at the drawing for a moment, a long moment, the way she’d looked at her father’s diploma, then folded it carefully and put it in the drawer. He went back to the kitchen and said nothing.
The days continued. Ethan drove to Milbrook. He ran jobs with Marcus and Pete. He came home. He’d started thinking of the Princeton House as home without meaning to, without catching the moment it happened, and made dinner when he got there before Victoria, or ate with Lily when he didn’t. On the nights Victoria worked late, he’d find her in the kitchen at 10 or 11, standing at the counter eating leftover whatever he’d made, reading something on her phone.
“You eat standing up,” he told her one night. “I eat when I have time.” That’s not the same thing as eating. Thank you for that nutritional insight. Sit down. She looked at him. He pulled out a chair at the table. After a moment, she sat. He got her a glass of water without asking. You do that, she said.
Do what? Take care of things. People. She said it observationally, not warmly, like noting a quality in a subject she was studying. You do it automatically. My dad was the same way. He sat across from her. Drove my mom crazy sometimes. She’d say he was always solving problems instead of just sitting with them. Was she wrong? She was right.
Actually, he was better at fixing things than feeling them. He paused. I used to think I was different from him. Now I’m not sure. Victoria looked at him over her water glass. Is that a bad thing? Depends on what needs fixing. She looked down at her phone, then apparently decided to put it down.
It was a small gesture and he was fairly sure she didn’t realize she’d made it. The board meeting went long today. She said Graves tried to introduce a motion about executive oversight review. He didn’t have the votes, but he made it close. How close? 5 to four. He needed six. She said it neutally, but he could hear the effort in the neutrality.
He’s going to keep trying. Yes, he’s patient. He’s been at this company for 30 years and he knows how to wait. She turned her fork over in her hand. He said something to me after the meeting in the hallway very quietly. He said, “I hope your personal situation is as stable as it looks. He’s probing. He knows something doesn’t add up.
He just doesn’t know what.” She looked up. He’s going to dig. Then we give him nothing to find. She studied him. You’re calmer about this than I expected. I’ve dealt with difficult clients, he shrugged. People who want something from you and dress it up as something else. You learn to not give them the reaction they’re looking for.
