Page 88 of Faking the Heat

Sterling

Just say it badly.

Six years. Four minutes in a hallway. A blue spiral notebook that I have carried up three flights of stairs like it was evidence in a case I was bringing against myself. Two thousand miles of my sister. A speech I composed three separate times on the Kennedy and threw out somewhere around Fullerton because every version of it was a document.

And she sits on a cardboard box four inches from my knees, in pyjamas with squirrels on them, with her hair doing something structurally unsound on one side, and tells me she doesn’t need it to be good.

“I love you,” I say.

It comes out flat and slightly too loud, like a man reading a number off a gauge.

“I’ve loved you since a Tuesday in September six years ago when you put a double-shot latte down the front of my boots and then tried to fix it with a napkin for ten minutes, and I stood in that coffee shop and thought, oh no. Not, oh good. Oh no. Because I understood immediately that this was going to be the organising fact of my life and there was nothing I could do about it, and I have spent six years building a very well-run life directly next to it.”

She has both hands over her mouth.

“I’m not finished. You said badly, so I’m doing badly.” My voice is not working properly and I keep going anyway. “I have been useful to you for six years. I moved your furniture and I fixed your sink and I came out at two in the morning about a spider, and I told myself that was love, and it was, but it was also a way of never having to ask you for anything. Because as long as I’m the one who shows up, nobody ever has to decide whether to keep me.”

“Sterling,”

“And then your building caught fire and I got three weeks of the actual thing, and it was so much better than the six years that it frightened the life out of me. And when I finally said it, you didn’t answer, and instead of standing there for four more seconds like a grown man I went and did a twenty-four and then picked up another sixteen, and then I stood in my own kitchen for nine days telling myself a story about a woman who left me.” I put the notebook down on the floor. “You didn’t leave. I went to work. I want that on the record.”

She is crying now, which I had rather hoped to avoid.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the whole thing. It was extremely badly done and I have nothing else prepared.”

Mandy takes her hands away from her face.

“Rule Seven,” she says.

“What?”

“Rule Seven. Don’t get weird.” Her voice cracks straight through the middle of it. “We’re in catastrophic breach of Rule Seven.”

And that is how I come to be sitting on a cardboard box in a rented one-bedroom in Lincoln Park at half past eight in the morning, laughing so hard I have to put a hand on the wall, with tears coming down my face, while the woman I have loved since I was twenty-two laughs at me from four inches away.

“Give me the notebook,” she says.

I hand it over. She flips it open on her knees and goes through it, and I watch her face do the same thing mine did on my kitchen floor last night.

“Bathroom schedule is sacred,” she reads.

“That was yours.”

“It was a good rule.”

“It was a great rule. We kept it for eleven days.”

“Groceries split, no ledger, no martyrdom.” She looks up. “You broke that one immediately.”

“I did not.”

“Sterling, you bought me a nine-dollar tea because I mentioned hibiscus once.”

“That isn’t groceries, that’s reconnaissance.”

She snorts, and turns the page, and then goes quiet. And I know exactly which page she has landed on, because I sat with it for a long time last night.

“You found it,” she says.