Page 70 of Faking the Heat

“Because it’s five hundred people in dress uniform asking me where my girlfriend is.”

“Will she be there?”

And that is the question, isn’t it. I have not been thinking about it with considerable discipline for four days.

“She had an invitation,” I say. “Before. When we were still. She had one.”

“So she might come.”

“She might.”

Becca puts the invitation down on the counter, very precisely, like she is setting a piece of equipment where somebody will be able to find it.

“Then here is what’s going to happen,” she says. “You are going to sleep tonight, properly, in a bed, because I am going to be here and I will know. Tomorrow you are going to eat something that isn’t from a vending machine or a box of sugar. And on Saturday you are going to get that uniform out of the dry-cleaning bag hanging on your closet door, which I also saw, and you are going to put it on, and you are going to go and stand in that ballroom where she can find you.”

“And do what.”

“Say the sentence.”

“Becca.”

“I know you already said it. She already heard it. But say it again. Then give her some grace.” She holds my eyes. “You told me it felt terrible. Do you remember what I said?”

“You said that’s how I know.”

“That’s how you know.” She picks up her duffel and swings it toward the guest room, and stops in the doorway, and doesn’t turn around. “I told you on that call I’d like to see what you look like when you stop keeping a professional distance from your own life. I flew almost nine hundred miles on a swapped rotation with a man named Todd, and I would very much like to find out this week.”

She goes into the guest room and shuts the door.

I sit at my own counter for a long time as the light goes off the floor and the loft turns grey and then blue.

Then I get up and go to the closet, and I take the dress uniform out of the plastic, and I hang it on the outside of the door where I will have to look at it.

Every day.

Until Saturday.

Chapter thirty-one

Unexpected Allies

Mandy

The restaurant smells like garlic, heavy cream, and the impending doom of a conversation I’ve been avoiding for twenty-six years. Luigi’s is the kind of place my mother loves, white tablecloths stiff enough to stand on their own, dim amber lighting that hides the dust on the wine racks, and waiters who treat every pour of red like a religious rite. It’s quiet, tucked away from the Chicago wind in a basement space that usually feels cozy, but tonight, it feels like the inside of a vacuum. The walls are lined with framed photos of Italian landscapes, but I can’t focus on the rolling hills of Tuscany. My eyes keep darting to the empty chair beside me.

I was supposed to be doing this at their kitchen table.

I told my mother on the phone a few days ago that I would drive out and see them. Just me, Thursday or Friday, and I meant it the way you mean things that are still several days away and therefore not yet real. Then she rang back on Tuesday to say that she and my father had been thinking, and that there was no sense in me driving anywhere so soon after a move, and that they would come in instead and take me somewhere decent.

So they came to me. I offered to close the distance, and my mother closed it herself, faster, and from the other direction, which is the most Carol Peterson thing that has ever happened to me.

I check my phone for the tenth time, resting it in my lap beneath the heavy linen napkin. The screen glows briefly, showing the text from Sterling that is still there, mocking me with its sensible, necessary boundaries. Department ball tonight. Dress uniform, the whole circus, can’t get out of it. Can’t make dinner. Good luck with them.

I don’t blame him. I really don’t. He’s a firefighter; he saves people. It’s what drew me to him long before I ever admitted it, that steady core of reliability. But as I sit across from Robert and Carol Peterson, I feel like the person left in the burning building while the hero drives away. I am alone, and for the first time in my life, I don’t have a project, a deadline, or a fake boyfriend to hide behind. The silence at the table is punctuated only by the clinking of my father’s ice in his scotch and the distant, muffled sound of an accordion playing in another room.

“Sterling is truly dedicated to his work,” my mother says, smoothing her napkin with a precision that makes me want to scream. She’s wearing her ’visiting’ pearls and a cardigan that matches her eyes, a cool, collected blue. “It’s a noble profession. Difficult for a wife, of course, but noble. It requires a certain type of sacrifice that not everyone is prepared for.”

“He’s a good man, Mandy,” my father adds. He isn’t looking at the menu. He’s looking at me; his eyes narrowed behind his wire-rimmed glasses like he’s trying to adjust the focus on a blurry image. He has that look he gets when he’s assessing a totaled sedan, looking for the hidden damage beneath the hood. “But he’s not here. And you look like you’re waiting for the floor to open up and swallow you. You’ve been shredding that bread roll for five minutes, and you haven’t taken a single bite.”