Page 191 of Across His Line

“Tonight?”

“Right now.”

She looks down at herself. My mother’s sweater. Her jeans, with the knee going thin. Her socks, which have a hole in the left heel.

She looks back up.

“Okay,” she says. “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I shower in four minutes. I don’t know what to wear, which has never happened to me in my life. I end up in a dark sweater and jeans and stand in front of my closet for another full minute looking at the jacket my mom bought me in October before I decide it looks like I’m trying, and then put it on anyway.

She comes out of the guest room at the same time I come out of mine. She’s changed into the black top she wore to the party and her jeans with her hair down. She’s holding her coat over her arm.

We look at each other across the hall.

“Is this okay?” she says and looks down at the top.

“Yeah,” I say. It comes out rougher than I mean it to.

My mom is in the kitchen when we come through. She looks up from the cutting board. She looks at me in the jacket, then at Tessa with her hair down. Her knife stops on the board.

“We’re getting dinner,” I say.

“Have fun,” she says, and goes back to the onion, very carefully, without another word, which is how I know she’s going to have a lot of them later.

There’s an Italian place nearby, two doors down from the bank where my mom used to work with candles stuck in wine bottles and Christmas lights strung across the ceiling in loops. It’s loud and warm and packed with people doing the last of their shopping, bags under the tables, everybody’s coats on the backs of their chairs. They put us in a booth in the back by the kitchen door where it’s quieter.

She slides in across from me.

And I know, the second I sit down, that this was a mistake. Not because I don’t want to be here. Because I wanted this. I wanted it to be a date. I wanted to sit across from her at a table with a candle on it in a jacket I put on even though it looked like trying. And now I’m here, sitting in it with her looking at me over a menu, and there’s nowhere for any of it to go. It’s all just sitting on the table between us next to the breadbasket.

She’s nervous, too. I can tell. She reads the whole menu. She puts her napkin in her lap and takes it out and puts it back in.

We order. She gets the cheapest pasta on the menu, and I watch her do it and don’t say anything, and when the waiter turns to me, I order two of the appetizers she looked at longest and a bottle of sparkling water. The waiter put the appetizers in the middle of the table when they come, and she looks at them, and at me, and eats half of one.

We talk. About normal things. The pasta. Palinski in the snowbank. The church my mom wants to drag both of us to on Christmas Eve, and what the pastor’s sermons are like, which is long. She tells me one thing from the laptop, a woman who teaches people how to run a bakery’s books, and how she charges for it, and I ask her how many customers, and she tells me, and then she says, “Stop calculating,” and I say, “I’m not,” and I was.

And under all of it, the whole time, sitting there between us like the candle, is the question neither of us has asked.

She puts her fork down. She looks at her plate. She looks at me.

“Is this a date?”

I could say no. I could make it easy. I could say it’s dinner, and shrug, and let her off the hook, and let myself off it, too.

Instead, I say, “I hope so.”

She goes still.

She doesn’t go red, which I notice. She just looks at me across the table with the candle moving in her eyes, very still, like she’s holding something she’s afraid she’ll drop.

“Is that what you want?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Is that what you want?”

She takes her bottom lip between her teeth. She looks down at the table. She looks back up.