No One Knows Us Here(50)

Margorie approached the case, her keys jingling in an exaggerated way. She acted like she didn’t recognize me, or like she didn’t know me at all. And god. She was right. She didn’t know me.

Or she did know. She knew everything the minute I—dressed in a tight velvet dress—waltzed into the store with the man I said was my boss. She knew then that there was no boyfriend in San Francisco. Only this.

“My girlfriend wants to give me the sales pitch,” he said to Margorie as she twisted the key in the lock and opened up the case. “She used to work here.”

“She knows that,” I said to Leo. I tried to catch Margorie’s eye, but she wasn’t looking at me. I sensed something behind her ice-cold expression. Fury? Yes, that was definitely what I was picking up from her—it came off her in waves. So I’d lied. I’d lied only for my own vanity, so she’d think I’d made something of myself. I wanted her to admire and respect me—was that so difficult for her to understand? It didn’t affect her, anyway! Why be so judgmental? This was why I didn’t want to tell her the truth in the first place.

All that ran through my head. Meanwhile, she’d walked away, leaving me to talk knives with Leo Glass. It wasn’t difficult. I knew the sales pitch backward and forward.

“The edges are hand finished to nine-degree angles and then cooled with nitrogen,” I told him in a monotone voice. “The handles are ergonomically designed, smooth in the palm. Feel that?” I placed a ten-inch chef’s knife in his hand, and he gripped the handle firmly, mimed chopping and slicing motions. He grinned and jutted the knife away from him, like he was winning a sword fight.

“All you really need to get started is a good Santoku knife,” I said, but Leo reached for the one with the long, narrow blade.

“I want this one.”

I tried to talk him out of it. What did we need a boning knife for, anyway? A skinny six-inch blade with an extrasharp tip for gouging into joints. Scalpel sharp. You don’t like dealing with raw meat, I reminded him. All that cold skin and bone and gristle. He wanted to make pasta. Salads. Cheese plates. We didn’t need a boning knife for any of that.

He didn’t listen. He got them all. The paring knife, the serrated utility knife, the bread knife, two Santokus, the ten-inch chef’s knife I’d balanced on my finger, the honing steel, the scissors, the magnetic strip we would install over the counter ourselves with the power drill. And the boning knife—he got that, too.

Everyone in the store pitched in, carrying boxes up to the counter, wrapping up glasses and placing them in boxes. They laughed and chatted and high-fived each other, buzzing around us like bees. I stood there, in my dress, and tried to disappear.



“You’re upset,” he said when we were in the back seat of the car, driving away.

I was fuming. If someone drew a cartoon version of me in this moment, there would be smoke billowing out of my ears. “You humiliated me.”

His eyes widened as big as they could go. “Humiliated? What?”

“Did you think I’d like parading around my old workplace dressed like this? You told me to dress up.”

“We were going to lunch. It was a nice restaurant.”

“No one else was dressed up. No one is ever dressed up.”

“You look beautiful.”

I glared at him.

“I thought you’d enjoy it,” Leo said. “We’ve been having fun lately, right? Cooking? The cake for my birthday. We made marinara from scratch. Remember?”

“It was last week.”

“And I couldn’t even slice a tomato with my knives—I pressed down and just squished it.” Leo petted my hair. “You’re cold.” He jabbed at some buttons and tilted the vents toward me. Heat streamed in. Outside, the streets were slick with rain, and the sky was dark. It was the middle of the day, but it felt like the end. I closed my eyes. I was exhausted all of a sudden. I wanted to go home, get out of this awful dress, and crawl under the covers.

Wendy would be home in a couple of hours. I could tell her I was taking the rest of the day off. We could watch a movie. She was used to me “working from home” now. I had a flexible schedule, I had told her. She didn’t seem to pay much attention one way or the other. All those weeks I’d spent faking going to the office had been pointless.

“Tomatoes are out of season in the middle of the winter anyway,” I said to Leo.

“The point is my knives suck. You told me that.”

I smiled a little.

“There,” he said. “That’s better.”

My Mirror was vibrating. I opened my bag, trying to read the caller information on the screen, but I couldn’t get a proper look.

“Answer it,” Leo said.

I fished the device from my bag. “It’s Wendy’s school.” He nodded and I accepted the call.

“Hey.” It was Wendy’s voice at the end of the line, soft and far away. She was calling from the nurse’s office, she told me. Could I pick her up?

“What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Just come pick me up.”

Leo was already rapping on the glass between us and the driver.

We arrived at the school moments later, in record time. I thanked Leo for dropping me off, but he got out with me, escorting me across the parking lot, and I didn’t know how to stop him, how to make him go back to his car and drive away. I can take it from here, was all I could manage. Don’t be silly, he had replied.