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  I stood there staring at my cell phone. The screen said the call had taken fifty-four seconds. In fifty- four seconds, I could have done damage. I could have told him I loved him. I could have told him that when he came to see me in the carriage house, I thought he was about to say that he loved me. What if I’d said something real, that couldn’t be explained away, and Janie checked the message? What if she found Peter’s phone on the dresser and saw that there was a call from me? What if she decided to check the message because she missed me and just wanted to hear the sound of my voice and how my day was going? What if I’d actually said, “I love you. Leave Janie. Choose me.” I wished I could go back to before Peter ever met Janie, when sometimes I just wanted to hear the sound of Janie’s voice, and knowing how her day was going made me feel better.

  I ran downstairs, grabbed my purse from the coffee table, and sat down on the couch. Joe jumped up and sat next to me. He pushed his nose into my purse while I tried to sift through old receipts and bent business cards. I pushed him away. He thought it was a game. He pawed at my hand and stuck his nose back in my purse, pulling out a granola-bar wrapper with his teeth. He jumped off the couch and proudly marched it around the living room. I took it away from him and went back to riffling through my purse. I was starting to panic. Joe ran upstairs and came back with his favorite rubber bone, jumped on the couch, and dropped it in my purse. “Stop it!” I yelled. He licked my cheek, completely unfazed. He took the bone back and settled down on the couch next to me to give it a good chew.

  Finally, way in the bottom of my purse, folded up in quarters, I found Diane’s check. I’d just thrown it in there, like it was a receipt for groceries or the paper wrapper from a drinking straw. I was so hurt by it that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge its importance. I wanted to pretend it was garbage, but the truth was that I needed it. I needed to pay my bills, I needed to find a new home, and I needed to accept Diane’s terms. I needed to stay away from Peter.

  I unfolded the check and smoothed it out against my leg. I cleaned the receipts and garbage out of my purse and put the check in my wallet.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning, I went to the bank, first thing, before I even had coffee or showered. I threw on some sweats and my coat and drove over. I wanted to deposit the check in the ATM machine, so I wouldn’t have to deal with anyone, but I knew that was a dumb idea. So, I stood in line, hands shaking, fighting back tears and losing the fight. When I got up to the teller, I handed her the check and my bank card.

  “Checking?” she asked.

  I nodded, pulling a crumpled-up tissue out of my coat pocket. I blew my nose, hoping she’d think I just had a cold. Maybe she wouldn’t notice the tears.

  I half expected her to push the red button that was probably right by her knee, like I’d seen on TV. Guards would come out and take me away for questioning. Because how the hell would someone like me, who had negative numbers next to her name, show up with a check for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars? How could they not demand an explanation? But she just slid the check back and asked me to endorse it, and kept her hands above the desk while she processed it. She handed me a receipt and asked me if there was anything else she could do for me. I shook my head and gave her a weak smile. I shoved the receipt in the back pocket of my jeans and walked out the door. And, with that, I had washed my hands of Peter.

  I expected to be a wreck when I got back into the car. I expected to feel like I’d lost everything. Like no one loved me and no one ever would. I expected to cry more. But, instead, I felt relieved. I felt like I could finally move forward, and it was my decision to move forward this time, instead of the decision being made for me. Pete decided to pick Janie. Pete decided to marry her. And he decided to come see me on his wedding night. Diane decided to pay me off. My mother decided to keep me at arm’s length at the end when she was sick. Those were all things that happened to me, but this was something I was choosing to do for myself. I finally felt like I had a little bit of control over something in my life. I felt like I had the freedom to move forward.

  I got home and made myself a real breakfast, the kind of breakfast you eat when you’re starting something-the first day of school or the first day on the job. I made eggs with cheese on toast, and started a pot of coffee. I made Joe a plate of eggs too, and we sat on the kitchen floor together and ate.

  Joe slurped up his eggs with so much enthusiasm that he flung little bits of them everywhere. All over his fur, all over the floor, all over me.

  “You’re so gross!” I told him. He ignored me until he got every little last bit of egg off his plate.

  The phone rang. I got up to answer it, leaving my empty plate for Joe.

  “Hi, Van.” It was Alex. “I was calling to see if you were still game for pound cake at Louis’s house this afternoon.”

  “I’m still game,” I said, smiling. Moving forward felt very good.

  “So here’s the thing,” Alex said, when he picked me up later that afternoon. “I talked to Louis last night and I know what he’s up to.”

  “What?”

  “He made me promise that I’d let him tell you, so I will. But it’s huge. And it could be a really good thing for you, but maybe it won’t be. I don’t want you to feel pressured about this. Don’t give him an answer about it while we’re there. And I won’t let him do the thing where he just assumes you agree with him and that’s that. I love Louis, but he can be really overwhelming and I don’t want you to get overwhelmed. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. My mind was racing around trying to figure out what he could possibly be talking about. What was Louis up to? Why did it involve me?

  When we got to Louis’s house, he greeted us at the front door in a gray box-plaid three-piece suit with a bright red tie, and shiny black and tan shoes. His hair was slicked straight back.

  Alex grabbed my arm, and when I looked up at him, he was pressing his lips together for dear life, trying not to laugh.

  “Come in! Come in!” Louis said, waving us in, and planting kisses on our cheeks as we passed him.

  “I feel underdressed,” Alex said, pointing to the hole at the knee of his jeans.

  “Eh,” Louis said, waving Alex’s comment away like it was inconsequential. “I have a business proposition for our Vannah here and I wanted to look like business.”

  Alex laughed. It was a kind laugh, like he and Louis were both in on the joke. He said, “Well, you do look like business.”

  Louis laughed along with Alex and reached up to give his cheek a good pinch.

  Louis’s ranch house was just a big rectangular box, and I could see from our spot at the front door that the kitchen table was set up for coffee, and the pound cake was sliced and arranged on a plate, but Louis had us sit down in the living room. Alex and I sat on the bulgy brown couch. From the squeak of it, I could tell that it was vinyl, not leather, and I tried to sit as still as possible to avoid any embarrassing noises.

  Louis sat in a red velvet wing chair across from us, his arms on the armrest and his feet resting on a small red footstool. He looked like a king on a throne. The canary yellow shag carpet had been vacuumed, haphazardly, leaving a weird pattern of vacuum trails around the room.

  Louis took a deep breath, exhaled dramatically, and then did it again. “Okay,” he said, looking at me. He gave me a warm smile and his eyes almost disappeared behind his chubby, wrinkled cheeks. “You and Joe should live here.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to sound appalled. I couldn’t imagine what had been going through Alex’s head that he could possibly think that moving in with Louis would be a good thing for me. “Wow, I really don’t know what to say.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “You know, I uh, I need my space, and I’m home a lot, and I think that it might just be hard to live with-here with . . .”

  “No, no!” Louis said. “Just you and Joe. Not me. I’m going to Florida.”

  “Louis’s brother lives in Florida,” Alex said, “and he�
�s been talking about moving there forever now.”

  “I’ll miss this guy,” Louis said, pointing at Alex, “but winter is bad for my arthritis.” He opened and closed his hands to show me that he was stiff. “You need a house. I need to move. Maybe it works?”

  Alex cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows at Louis like he was trying to remind him not to push.

  “All right, all righty,” Louis said. “You don’t answer now. You see the house!” He stood up and raised his arms in the air grandly. “Kitchen, you’ve seen it! Living room. This is the living room. Here, here,” he said, waddling over to me. He grabbed my arm and dragged me out to the garage to show me that there was a keypad to open the garage so I could walk Joe without bringing a key. “Very clever,” he said. “They think of everything these days.” He shook his head in reverence to the brilliant minds at work engineering garage door openers, and gave me a big smile. “You like?”

  “It’s convenient,” I said, trying not to give Louis too much to twist into an answer, like Alex warned. But I did like it. I mean, I didn’t like the canary carpet or the orange and green walls, but I liked the idea of buying a house that I knew wasn’t going to fall apart around me. I liked the idea of having a real home with a fenced- in yard and a garage door keypad. I liked the way Louis had said “our Vannah.” I liked the way that this home felt like a real home, and I hoped I could change the carpet and the paint and still keep that feeling.

  When we got back to the kitchen, Alex was leaning in the door frame between the kitchen and the hallway eating a piece of pound cake, cupping one hand under the other to keep from spilling crumbs. He was so tall and lanky. His head was only a few inches away from the top of the door frame. The way his straw-colored hair flopped around his face and his shirt and jeans hung from his body, he looked kind of like a scarecrow-a ridiculously hot scarecrow. He caught me staring at him and winked.

  “Now, let me show you the bathroom.” Louis clasped his hand to his face in a way that even he seemed to know was dramatic. “You will feel like a queen in this bathroom.”

  When I got to the doorway, Alex grabbed my sleeve, spilling crumbs, and whispered, “I’ll help you paint.” His breath was warm on my ear.

  “Phew,” I said. I loved that he was committing to a future painting date. He wanted to see me again. He wanted to paint with me. And he wanted me to know that he wanted to.

  “I’d better get this.” Alex pointed to the crumbs on the tile.

  “Okay.” I patted his arm as I walked past him.

  The bathroom was very bright. The linen closet and shower doors were mirrored and the mirror over the sink went from the counter all the way to the ceiling. The rest of the bathroom was done up in a complicated 1970s Greek Revival pattern of blue and white tile.

  “This room, this is Gloria. The perfect mix of color and white,” Louis said, and I noticed that his eyelashes were wet.

  He reached over to me and grabbed my hand. He looked at me in the mirror over the sink, instead of looking me in the face.

  “Don’t you break this boy’s heart, Vannah,” he said. “I deserved it. This boy-oh, this is a good boy. This is a good man.”

  I watched my face flush in the mirror.

  “I don’t think it’s my heart to break,” I said to Louis, still watching my cheeks.

  He pulled my hand up with both of his hands and held it flat, with the palm facing up.

  “It’s here,” he said, peering into my hand like I was holding a baby chick. “Maybe you don’t see it yet, but it’s right here.”

  I looked at him, and our eyes met. He smiled for a minute and then started laughing.

  “All right,” he said, dropping my hand and wiping tears from his eyes. “All right. That was too much. Even for me, that was too much!” He waved his hands in the air and laughed like a little boy.

  The bedroom was surprisingly tame. The carpet was Kelly green but the walls were white and the bedspread and curtains were pale blue.

  There was a small guest room across the hallway with sailboat wallpaper, a red shag rug, and a twin bed with a red, white, and blue quilt. The curtain tiebacks were red plastic anchors.

  “Makes a nice sewing room,” Louis said.

  “I don’t sew,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know how.”

  “Alex knows.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes! For school. He had to practice when he was home on breaks.” Louis did an exaggerated pantomime of pushing a needle through fabric.

  “Practice?” I asked.

  “I practiced my stitching,” Alex called from the hallway, walking in to us. “I had to practice doing stitches.”

  “He and Gloria used to sit in here and stitch away,” Louis said.

  “She made quilts,” Alex said. “I sewed up banana peels. It was over Christmas break one year. It’s not like it was a regular thing.”

  Louis stared into the room like he could still see them there sewing. His eyes got misty again.

  “Okay, we should see the library,” he said, taking a deep breath to collect himself.

  “Oh, this is cool,” Alex said.

  The library was the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Louis opened the door and said, “Ta-da!”

  The room was crowded with tall bookcases that looked handmade, slightly uneven and painted brown with thick, drippy paint. Each shelf was crammed to maximum capacity with magazines. There were sections devoted to Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, TV Guide, and several smaller sections for different hobbies like fishing and cigars, all labeled with blue plastic tape. There wasn’t a single book, just magazines from ceiling to floor.

  There was a big tan saggy leather chair in the center of the room next to an end table stacked with coasters and scarred with drink rings.

  “So, what do you think?” Louis said. “You want the house, I’ll throw in the magazines.” He was beaming. “It’s a good deal.”

  “I’m sure Van likes the house, Louis,” Alex said, saving me from having to answer, “but we’re going to have to give her some time to think about it.”

  “Yes, yes, we will. Patience,” Louis said, holding his index finger up as if he were telling himself.

  After we ate the cake down to the crumbs, Louis slid an envelope across the table to me. “You like the house, this is the deal.” He winked.

  I started to open the seal on the envelope.

  “No, no, no!” Louis said, reaching across the table to get me to stop. “You open it later. I’ll get embarrassed.”

  I folded the envelope over and slipped it in the back pocket of my jeans.

  Alex poured me another cup of coffee and passed the milk, and I realized that the way I’d been feeling the day before wasn’t in my head. I really did belong.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I had such a good time chatting with Louis and Alex that I almost forgot about the envelope, but as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, Alex said, “Go ahead, open it.”

  I wriggled around in the seat trying to reach into my back pocket.

  “What do you know about this?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Alex asked, in mock surprise. “Just open it.”

  The stitching on my jeans scratched my fingers as I pulled the envelope out. I opened it and pulled out a scrap of paper with 40K written on it in pencil.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “Not me, it’s Louis,” Alex said, shaking his head.

  “What is he thinking?” I asked, and then realized it probably sounded rude. “I mean, does he know the house is worth more than twice that?”

  “He knows,” Alex said. His eyes were crinkling up at the corners, and he was pursing his mouth up in a small smile. He kept his eyes on the road.

  “But why?”

  “The way he sees it-he bought the house for twenty thousand, so he’s doubled his money.”

  “But what about inflation? When did he buy the house?”

  “
Midfifties?”

  “So it cost like what, ten, fifteen cents for a loaf of bread? I mean, he didn’t really double his money, right?”

  “Louis. This is just the way he is. Don’t feel like you have to buy it. Think about it. Okay?” He patted my thigh, and I let myself think that maybe it wasn’t so casual.

  “Is there more to think about? It’s a house for forty thousand.”

  “Well, there’s that.”

  “Joe would have a yard. The room with all the bookshelves would make a good office.”

  “Speaking of a good office, you’re self- employed, right?”

  “How did you know that?” Of all the things we’d talked about, I was pretty sure my job hadn’t come up.

  “I read your file,” he said, softly.

  “My file?”

  “The paperwork you filled out when you brought Joe in.”

  “You’ve been researching me.”

  “Yes.” He flinched dramatically, like it was paining him to admit it, or he was bracing for the aftermath.

  “No fair. When do I get paperwork on you?”

  “Ms. Leone, do you ever answer questions about yourself?”

  “Dr. Brandt, I’m a grant writer.”

  “A grant writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is a grant writer?” he asked in his best reporter voice.

  “I write grants.” I smiled and played along, giving him my best interview answers.

  “Well, yeah, but how does that work, smarty-pants?”

  “I get paid to research and write proposals for organizations.”

  “So people pay you to write requests for money.”

  “Basically.”

  “How did you get into that?”

  “One of my professors did a lot of grant work on the side. She hooked me up with some people. It was supposed to be until I found a real job, but then it took off.”