Page 21 of What August Heard
I looked at Callie.
“She’s helping,” Callie said.
“She is.”
“Voluntarily.”
“Looks like it.”
Callie set a placemat down very slowly. “She’s jealous of you,” she said. “That’s what this is. She’s decided to out-you you.”
“That’s not a sentence.”
“You know what I mean.” Callie nodded toward the kitchen. “Yesterday she was going after you for being too humble and too thrifted and too flower-girl. Today she woke up and decidedto be humble and helpful and dressed down. Because those are your things and she wants to take them away from you.”
I looked at Margaux handing Jennifer a spatula.
“Maybe she just had a change of heart,” I said.
Callie picked up another placemat. “August.”
“People can have changes of heart.”
“Put the fork down the right way. You keep putting the fork on the wrong side.”
I moved the fork.
Inside the kitchen, Poppy appeared from somewhere with a full pitcher of orange juice, carrying it with both hands and her tongue slightly between her teeth. She set it carefully on the counter and Margaux immediately thanked her and told her she was so helpful and so sweet.
Poppy looked at Margaux.
“It’s my chore,” Poppy said. “I do it every day. It’s not a big deal.”
She picked up the pitcher and carried it out to the patio table.
Fletcher came in from the hallway just as I was going back through the french doors for the napkins. He had his phone in his hand, the tail end of a work call, and he was nodding at whatever the person on the other end was saying. He looked up and saw me and nodded once in greeting.
Then he saw Margaux at the counter.
He stopped nodding at his phone.
She turned around when she heard him, and her face did something that looked like relief and delight in the samemoment. She crossed the kitchen to him, both arms going around his neck, and she kissed him.
He kissed her back.
His face was toward the french doors. Toward me.
His eyes were open.
For one second, standing in the doorway with a fistful of napkins, we looked directly at each other over Margaux’s shoulder. His eyes were open and he looked embarrassed in a way that went all the way down, not surface embarrassed, bone embarrassed. Like he was sorry for something he couldn’t say out loud.
I looked away first.
I went back to the table and counted the napkins and realized I had grabbed too many and went back inside for absolutely no reason except to have somewhere to go.
Poppy appeared at my elbow on the patio.
She had her juice. She sat down next to me and looked through the french doors at the kitchen, where Margaux was now laughing at something Jennifer said, touching Fletcher’s arm, keeping her body turned toward him like a sunflower that had chosen a very specific direction.
