Page 66 of On His Mind

There is nothing in that sentence. Not one word of it is wrong. I could repeat it to any living person, and they would hear a generous man being kind to an intern.

“Thank you, Oliver.”

I shake his hand.

Lyla walks me to the elevator. She looks at the box in my arms, which holds a coffee mug and two mechanical pencils, one of which isn’t exactly mine but ended up in my possession anyway.

“This is good,” she says. That’s all. She reaches past me and presses the button, and when the doors open, she says, “You’ll find somewhere better.”

They close on her standing in that beautiful lobby, walking back to her desk.

My mother calls at seven-forty. She’s already heard.

“Explain it to me,” she says, and her voice is calm. “Because I’ve been sitting here for an hour, Penelope, and I cannot construct a version of this that makes any sense.”

“I don’t want Chicago.”

“You’ve never been to Chicago properly, Penelope. Not as an adult. You’ve been a child here. It’s not what you think it is here.”

“I don’t want it, Mom.”

She sighs, taking a moment. And when she comes back, she’s precise. “You have thrown away a two-year project. A position that would have made you a junior architect before you were twenty-two, at a firm men your father’s age would have wept for. You have made Richard Whitmore look foolish for extending himself. You’ve made me look foolish — every woman at that table on Saturday now knows my daughter was handed the opportunity and selfishly said no.” A breath. “There are three firms in that city, and all three of them talk. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You have closed doors tonight that you cannot reopen. At twenty years old. Over some feeling you can’t articulate. Without once discussing it with me.”

Every word of it is true. Every single word. My hand is steady on the phone. My heart is going like something is chasing me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Then undo it. Call him in the morning. He’ll take you back. He’d take you back tonight.”

I stare at nothing. “No.”

The silence goes on long enough that I look at the screen to see whether she’s hung up.

“I see,” she finally says.

“Mom—”

“I’ll call you on Sunday.”

She hangs up. I set the phone on the counter and hold the edge of it with both hands. Then I sit down on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and stay there a while. There is no triumph. Not one particle. Whatever I imagined this would feel like, it doesn’t. I feel like someone who has broken something valuable on purpose and is sitting in the room with the pieces. My hands shake for about twenty minutes. Then they stop. I get up, and I wash the dishes in the sink.

Later, in my bedroom, I take the list out of the back of my sketchbook and unfold it. I look at my list. The building I want. The portfolio. The summer. All of it in my careful architect’s hand across the top two-thirds, where I planned my year. And second from the bottom: say no to my mother.

I take a pencil and draw a line through it. One clean stroke, ruled, the way I’d strike a wall I’d decided against. And then I take out the other piece of paper, the one I folded up that night and kept without telling him. I open it. Four words in his handwriting, pressed hard into the page.

Have a good year.

I look at it for a long time.

I don’t text him.

Chapter 17

Percy

Thereareelevengamesleft when March ends, and I dress for none of them. I sit in the stands in a shirt and tie. That’s the deal for the third goalie. You’re on the roster, you travel when there’s room on the bus, and on game nights you put on the tie Josh bought you at a Kohl’s, and you sit six rows up behind the bench with the other guys who aren’t dressing, and you watch.

I watch Cole’s feet and what he does with his head when the puck goes behind the net — how he swivels instead of turning, keeps his shoulders square, and never gets caught in the middle of anything. I watch him lose one on a deflection in Ohio, and he doesn’t care, immediately, visibly, on to the next shift, because a goalie who carries a goal into the next five minutes gives up two more.