This Close to Okay(48)
“Wow. These are the best answers. I’m truly impressed.”
“I told you I’m trying to impress you. Glad it’s working.”
“Stop it. Okay, so I asked because I heard someone mention ‘cleaning off your table.’ Like, you imagine taking off the shit that weighs you down and start simple. What would you put back on your table after you cleaned it off? What are the things you would keep? Like, for example, I would take my infertility off the table. In the past I had every pregnant woman in this neighborhood memorized. How far along she was, how big she was getting. Everywhere I went, it seemed like there were at least ten pregnant women there or women with newborns. I’d take that and those feelings off the table and Joel’s affair, his new life. But I would keep this house. I love this house. I don’t know how I would’ve survived my divorce without this house. My shelter…it’s protected me in more ways than one,” Tallie said.
She told him Aisha called Fox Commons Tallieville and often stopped by with wine so they could do face masks and watch Masterpiece or marathon trashy reality TV. She talked about how Lionel, Zora, and River came over for dinner often and how her dad and stepmother visited, too, but usually Tallie drove the thirty minutes to their farmhouse to see them. Only her mother liked to pop in unannounced.
“And in the spring and summer, I have peonies and black-eyed Susans, sunflowers and hostas, salvia and hyacinths in the garden. There’s a pair of pale blue hydrangea bushes back there the size of small hatchbacks…hot pink knockout roses circling the birdbath…Oh! And I like looking out the window and watching the squirrels eat. Sometimes I’ll be eating, too, and I like to think, look at us! Just little creatures, sharing a meal together!” Tallie said, remembering the last time she’d done that. Such a small, sweet light of pure joy.
Emmett was turned away from her, loading the utensils into their skinny dishwasher baskets.
“That’s pretty damn cute. And I do love this house,” he said, his voice ghosting into the wide-open appliance.
“So…what’s something you would put back on your table?”
“Peace.”
“When’s a time in your life you had peace?”
He turned to her and crossed his arms, put both hands under his armpits, his thumbs stuck up flat against his shirt. Tallie noticed the biceps she either hadn’t seen before or had ignored.
“Probably before I got married,” he said, kept his eyes on Tallie.
“Oh, no. I hate to hear that.”
“My wife was so beautiful, and I loved her deeply…every part of her. She had a sweet heart, too, but she wasn’t a peaceful person, and we didn’t have a peaceful marriage. She was dangerous at times…difficult…restless. Grew up having a lot to deal with. Our relationship was hard, to say the least, but I was wild about her. Pure madness. I will never get over her. She was my ace…my whole heart. Still is,” he said with an unquiet intensity that rocketed through the air and seemed to blow back her kitchen curtains. Tallie let it settle before speaking again.
“You light up when you talk about her. Through the pain and the blushes…you do. I can see it pouring out.”
The corner of Emmett’s mouth lifted. He raked at his hair. His face: like hard rain when the sun was shining.
“But you fought a lot?” she asked.
“Yes, we did.”
“Understandable. You were so young. How bad did your fights get?”
“Sometimes I’d have to hold her to get her to calm down, and it worked, but she hated it.”
“Hold her like how? Show me,” she said.
Tallie stood and faced him with her arms at her sides. Emmett lifted her hands and put each of them on her opposite shoulder. He hugged her tightly; she tried to move but couldn’t. She tried harder, to no avail. When the fear snuck in, she told herself, It’s happening. I’m trusting him to do this. I’m trusting him to do this.
“You’re strong,” she said into his shirt, after squirming some more before giving up. He let her go. The blood rush of relief.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“You didn’t hurt me,” Tallie reassured him. Breathing hard, she brushed her hair from her face and stepped back. “Um…do you have any sort of relationship with Christine’s family?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“And your relationships with your previous girlfriends’ families? How were those? Bad breakups can ruin all that, I know,” she said, leaving him plenty of room to bring up Brenna or whomever he wanted to discuss.
“They were all fine, I guess. Until they weren’t.”
“I keep asking you to talk about everything because I want to help, if I can. I know it’s been a hard few days for you on top of the fact you’re still grieving. And for some, that never goes away. People like to say time makes it easier, but that’s true only for some people. All this to say I appreciate you letting me keep an eye on you this weekend, Emmett,” she said.
“You always focus on how everyone else is doing, so maybe I’m keeping an eye on you, too.”
His words, that truth, made her dizzy. After her divorce, she’d begun thinking of herself as a piece in an art museum—she had to be handled a certain way in the right environment or she’d be ruined. She hadn’t been able to say this aloud to anyone, but it was as if Emmett had listened to all she hadn’t said and somehow knew. She hugged him, comforted by his body heat in that white shirt, those muscles she’d admired earlier, his strong arms now pressed to the sides of her neck. I’m trusting him to do this. And as she imagined him restraining her like that, hugging her and squeezing and never stopping, she relaxed into him more.