Page 110 of On His Mind

“Yes.”

The silence goes long. I stand at my window in my brand new coat with the phone against my ear, and I don’t fill it. It takes everything I have not to fill it, because filling her silences is my oldest reflex.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” she says finally, and the concern’s gone thin, and underneath it is cold. “Someone has, clearly. This is not the daughter I raised.”

“Maybe not.” My throat’s tight. “I’ll call you on Christmas.”

“Do what you want, Penelope. You always do.” The line goes dead against my ear.

I stand there for a while with the phone in my hand and my heart galloping. I’m shaking a little, and I don’t feel triumphant. I feel like someone who just pulled her own hand out of a door that’s been closing on it for twenty years. It hurts. It hurts exactly as much as I knew it would. But I held it. I didn’t cave.

I put the phone down, make more tea, and my hands take a while to stop.

I go to the firm in the afternoon because I need to be somewhere that isn’t this apartment and isn’t my mother’s voice. Renata’s got the Halvorsen elevations up and a problem with the setback on the north side. I get into it, and for two hours I’m solving a real thing on a real building, my hand sure, the work clean, the world narrowed to a fenestration pattern and a zoning envelope.

I check my phone at the firm. There’s nothing, and I put it away like I wasn’t checking.

I check it in the car. Nothing.

I check it at home while I heat something up that I don’t eat, and I hate that I’m checking. I make myself stop because I know exactly what I’m doing, I know exactly who I’m waiting on, and I know better than anyone alive what a fool’s errand it is to wait on Percy Deveroux to text first.

He doesn’t text me. A year and a half, and he texted first maybe twice, and I think it nearly killed him. He rations every word. I know now that he will not come to me. If I want him, I’ll have to be the one standing in the open.

And I already did that. Last night. I stood all the way out in the open. I’m not doing it twice into silence — I don’t have another one of those in me, not this soon, not after cracking myself open and driving home to nothing.

So I put the phone face down on the counter, and I tell myself that whatever happens now happens.

At 9:40, the phone lights up.

I turn it over.

Percy: Can I see you tomorrow?

I sit down on the floor of my room, leaning against my bed. And I read it four times. Because anyone else in the world sends that, and it’s nothing — a question, the smallest possible normaltext. But it’s not nothing. I know what it took for him to type that out. And I won’t ever tell him how much I appreciate this and how much I needed to hear from him.

Me: Yes.

Percy:Ivory home?

And there’s the problem, sitting right there. Ivory will be home. Ivory’s always home. My apartment isn’t a dark house I can sneak into off a side street — it’s a lobby with a front desk half the time, an elevator, a hallway, a roommate on the other side of a thin wall who misses nothing and asks everything.

Me:I’ll handle Ivory. Just tell me when.

Percy:Tomorrow. Late.

Me:She has a thing Thursday. I can come at eleven.

Percy:Can I come there?

Me:Yeah

Percy:I’ll text you when I’m close.

I read it back. He’s coming here. To my building, my floor, my door — which means he has to get out of that house without being noticed by four hockey players.

Thursday is the longest day of my life, which is a stupid thing to feel about a Thursday. I sit through a two-hour crit. I keep my sketchbook closed because I know what’s in it. I keep my phone in my bag because I don’t want to be counting the hours.

Ivory leaves at seven, thank God, in a cloud of perfume and a dress I helped her zip, off to Drew’s thing, telling me not to wait up like I ever do. The second the door shuts, I feel the apartment change. It’s all mine, empty, and waiting.