Chapter 3
The Boyfriend
On Saturday mornings Mark made pancakes.
He did it in his own kitchen, which was on the eleventh floor of a glass building by the river and looked like a page from a catalog. There was a white marble counter and a very good pan. There was a coffee machine that cost more than Sarah's car. He stood at the stove in a gray T-shirt with the sleeves pushed up, flipping pancakes with a flick of the wrist, and when she came out of the bedroom in his old college sweatshirt he looked up and smiled as if he'd been waiting all week for exactly her.
"There she is. Sit. Eat. You're too thin."
"I'm not too thin."
"You're a little thin. It's fine. I like it. I just want you to eat." He slid a plate across the marble. The pancakes were thick and golden, with blueberries, and a pat of butter sliding down the side. There was a small jug of maple syrup. It was the real kind, from Vermont. She had once said she liked it, in passing, on a Sunday two years ago, and every bottle since had been the same brand.
She sat on the high stool and ate.
They were very good. That was the thing about Mark. He did not do anything halfway. He did not make a bad pancake, or forget a birthday, or arrive late to anything. He had walked into her life three years ago at a charity run for the children's hospital, in a pair of very bright running shoes, and said, "Excuse me, I'm told you're the person who knows where the water is." She had told him it was behind the tent. He had said, "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all day," and she had laughed, and he had asked for her number, and it had been so easy. She had thought: this is what it's supposed to be like.
"What?" said Mark.
"Nothing."
"You were smiling."
"I was thinking about the run."
"The run." He grinned. "I knew it. I knew the minute I saw you with that cup." He leaned across the counter and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers were warm. He did it carefully, as if she might break. "I'm going to marry you know."
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it."
She did not answer. She picked up her fork. It was a thing he said, perhaps once a month, in a light fond voice, and it was always the same. It made her feel two things at once. One of them was warm. The other was a quiet, small, practical voice at the very back of her mind, which said: not yet. She did not like that voice. She did not know where it came from. She had learned to eat a pancake over it.
They went to the farmers' market at ten.
It was the last one of the season, in the parking lot behind the old train station, under a row of tents. The air smelled of cider and cut flowers. There was a man playing a banjo, badly, and a stall selling a hundred kinds of squash, and a table of soap shaped like loaves of bread. Mark held her hand the whole way. He bought her a bag of apples. He bought a jar of honey, because he had noticed on Thursday that her kitchen was out.
"You didn't have to," said Sarah.
"I wanted to."
"I'd have remembered."
"You wouldn't. You never do. You'd eat toast with nothing on it for a week, and say you were fine." He put the jar in her tote, and kissed her on the temple. "It's my job. I notice."
He did. It was true. That was what she would have said, if anyone had asked her about it. He notices. He noticed when she had a cold before she did. He noticed a new haircut on the first day. He noticed that she had stopped wearing a certain blue scarf, and asked about it, and was kind when she said it had been her father's.
It was also true that he noticed other things.
He noticed, at the cheese stall, that a man behind the counter had looked at her a half-second too long. He did not say anything. He only put his hand on the small of her back, and kept it there, and turned her gently toward the next table. He noticed that her phone had buzzed in her bag, three times, and asked, in an easy voice, who's that? She said it was Tessa. He said, what does she want? She said she didn't know, she hadn't looked. He said, you could look. She did. It was a photograph of Ben's new hot sauce, called Divorce Court.
"Funny," said Mark.
"Isn't it?"
"You should invite them for dinner."
"I will."
"You should. I like Tessa." He squeezed her hand. "She's a bit loud. But she's got a good heart."
They went on, past the soap, and the banjo. Sarah bought a small potted rosemary because she was sad about it, and he carried it for her.
It was in the afternoon that it began, as it usually did, over something small.
They were at his place, and he was dressing for his mother's. It was her sixty-fifth birthday. There was to be a lunch at a restaurant, with a cake, and his stepfather, and Mark's aunt Pam. Sarah had put on a pair of dark jeans, and a soft sweater in a color the label had called oatmeal. It was her favorite. It was big in the arms, and had a loose neck, and made her feel as if she were being held.
She came out of the bedroom, and Mark looked up from his tie.
He did not say anything for about two seconds.
"Is that what you're wearing?" he said.
It was a perfectly ordinary question. It was said in a mild, pleasant tone. He was not frowning. He just stood in the doorway of the closet, with his hands at his collar, and looked her up and down. It was the pause before the question that she heard.
"It's clean," said Sarah.
"I'm sure it's clean."
"I thought it'd be, it's a lunch. It's casual. You said."
"It is casual." He smiled. "It's just, babe, it's my mother. She's going to look at you. She's going to be a little, you know how she is. And it's a very, it's a baggy kind of look. It's a nap look." He crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. They were warm and firm. "I just want her to see you the way I see you. That's all. You've got such a pretty figure. I don't want it to be, I don't want you hiding it."
"I'm not hiding it."
"I know. I know you're not. I'm just saying." He kissed her forehead. "Put on the blue one. The wrap. You look beautiful in that."
She stood there.
It was a very small thing. She knew that. It was nothing, a sweater. People asked their girlfriends to change all the time. It might even have been a kindness. He was trying to help her make a good impression. She looked down at the soft oatmeal sleeve, and she felt a little prickle behind her eyes that she did not understand, and she was suddenly ashamed of it, as of a child who cries because the cake has been cut the wrong way.
"Okay," she said.
"Thank you."
"I'll change."
"You're a star."
She changed. The blue wrap dress did look nice. It showed her collarbones and the line of her waist. She looked at herself in the mirror on the closet door, in the clean white light, and she saw a pretty girl with a brown braid, and a very careful smile.
Good girl, she thought, and was startled at herself.
The lunch went well.
His mother was a small, bright, birdlike woman in a lilac suit, who greeted her with two kisses and a hand on each shoulder. Carol Hollis had raised Mark by herself until he was fourteen, in a two-bedroom flat, and she had never let anybody forget it. She talked a great deal. She told a story about a cruise. She said that Sarah looked thin, and that she hoped Mark was feeding her, and that it was lovely to see a girl wear a proper dress. Sarah smiled and said thank you. She helped cut the cake. When Aunt Pam asked her about the library, she said it was fine. She did not say that the roof was leaking in the nonfiction.
Mark was marvelous.
He made his mother laugh. He told his stepfather a good joke about the stock market. He put his arm along the back of Sarah's chair and kept it there, lightly, the whole meal, as one lays a hand on a dog that might run. Twice he leaned over and murmured, in her ear, you're doing great. Once he said, Aunt Pam loves you. It was true. It was kind. It felt, she thought, rather like being given a gold star.
Afterward, in the car, he talked about his mother.
He did it for a long time. He told her things he rarely said, in the soft, rueful voice she knew was the real one. He said that his father had left on a Thursday. That he had come home from school and found his mother sitting on the kitchen floor, in her work shoes, with the phone in her lap. That he had been nine. He said that nobody had told him why, and that for about a year he had believed it was because he had left a bicycle in the driveway.
"You didn't, Mark."
"I know that now."
"You were a kid."
"I know." He kept his eyes on the road. His hands were tight on the wheel. "I just think about it. When you're, when it's, I don't know. When I can't reach you. I get this feeling, and it's like standing in the kitchen. And I think, she's gone. I think, I've done something." He gave a short, ashamed laugh. "I know it's not rational."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I know."
"I'm right here."
"I know you are." He took her hand and held it against his knee, hard. "I just need to know you're, I need to know where you are. That's all it is. It's not that I don't trust you. It's that I'd die, Sarah. I'd actually die."
She looked at his hand, and the pale skin at the knuckles, and was filled, once more, with the wide, helpless pity that had been the first thing she had ever felt for him.
He's frightened, she thought. It's just that he's frightened.
It was true. It was so entirely true that she could not see round it.
It was the next week that she found out about the hot-sauce night.
Tessa had been planning it for a month. It was a girls' night, at a bar on Canal Street with sticky tables and a good jukebox, to celebrate Ben's Divorce Court getting a mention in a local paper. There would be three of them. Tessa, and a woman named Joy from the children's department, and Sarah. It was a Friday, the first of November. She had said yes in October, without thinking, in the staff room, with a mouth full of sandwich.
She told Mark on Wednesday.
He did not say no. He never said no. He said, "Oh. That sounds fun." He said it in a very light voice. He was cooking, and he went on stirring a pot, and did not turn round. "I was going to book that Italian place. The one you like. But no. Go. Have fun."
"We can go Saturday."
"No, it's fine."
"Mark."
"It's honestly fine." He tasted the sauce. "It's just, it's our Friday. We always do Friday. But it's one night. People have friends."
"I can cancel."
"Don't be silly. You've been looking forward to it."
"I could say I'm sick."
"I'd never ask you to lie to your friends." He put down the spoon. He turned, and smiled at her, a bright, brave, wounded smile, like a man being bandaged. "Have a great time. Really. I'll just, I'll be home. It's okay. I've got a, there's a game on."
She went home that night. She lay in bed. She could not sleep. She thought about a game she did not believe he was watching.
He did not call on Thursday. He answered her texts with one word. Fine. Okay. Sure. At seven, when she wrote, Everything all right? he wrote back, Yes. It was the kind of yes that goes through a wall. By eleven she was sitting on the end of her bed with her phone in both hands, feeling the beginning of that awful, familiar, tight panic in her chest, as of a child who has broken something and is waiting for the sound.
On Friday morning she canceled.
She told Tessa she had a migraine. It was the third time that year. Tessa said, in a perfectly kind voice, "Sure, hon." But there was a short silence on the phone, and in it Sarah heard that Tessa had stopped believing her, and had decided not to say.
She sent Mark a message, from her desk. I canceled. Dinner tonight?
The answer came at once.
I'm so happy. You have no idea. I love you so much. Booking it now.
There was a small red heart. Then another. Then a photograph of the two of them, from the summer, in a kayak, laughing.
She looked at it for a long time.
She felt, in a way she could not have explained, as if something had been taken from her, and given back, and she had been told that she ought to be grateful.
The apology came at the weekend.
It was a very good one. He did not make excuses. He sat on her couch, on the Saturday night, in a navy sweater, with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, and said it all in a low, steady voice. He said that he had been wrong. He said that he had made her feel she could not go out. He said that it was a thing he did, a stupid thing, a leftover from when he was a kid, and that he was working on it. He said he had looked it up. There were, apparently, people you could see. He had booked an appointment, for next month.
"You did?"
"I want to be better. For you." His eyes were wet. "You're the best thing that ever happened to me. I know I don't always show it. I get scared. And then I turn into someone I don't like. And I look at your face, and I think, Mark, you idiot, what are you doing?"
"It's all right."
"It isn't."
"It's, we're okay."
"Are we?" He looked up. "I couldn't blame you. If you wanted to leave."
"I don't want to leave."
"Say it again."
"I don't want to leave," said Sarah.
He put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook. She sat beside him, and put her arm around him, and felt him lean into her, heavy and warm, like a child. After a while, he said into her sleeve, in a muffled voice, "Thank you." And she held him, and rocked a little, and looked over his head at the yellow wall, and the plant on the sill, and the dark window, and she thought, for no reason, of the way she had laughed in a waiting room.
It lasted about a second.
She put it away.
On Sunday night she did the crossword.
It was a clean, cold evening. The radiator was clanking. Mark had gone home at six, to do some work, and had called at seven, and at eight, and at nine, to say good night three times. She had a mug of tea beside her, and a blanket round her knees, and a pen. She had finished most of it. There was only one clue left, the same one, in the top corner, with the little white boxes all empty.
Sound of a small mistake.
She thought of the way a man had said, You'd be a liar. To who? The newspaper?
To yourself, Daniel.
She had said that. It was a joke. She had not thought about it since.
She sat with the pen over the paper. The phone buzzed, on the arm of the couch. It was Mark. Night babe. Dreaming of you. Love you more than anything. She read it. She typed you too, and a heart.
Good girl, he wrote. A pause. Three dots. You know you're lucky to have me, right?
It was fond. It was entirely fond. There was a kiss on the end of it. She read it, and her thumb hung over the glass, and for some reason, for the first time in three years, she did not know what to type.
I know, she wrote, at last.
She put the phone face down. She did not write the word. She folded the crossword in half, with the empty boxes inside, and put it under the mug.
Six letters, she thought.
Sound of a small mistake.
Somewhere under the floor, in the dry cleaner's, a machine began to turn, with a long soft rumble, and she sat very still in the dark and listened to it. It sounded like something being washed, over and over, that would not come clean.