“Smart move. I don’t enjoy it, but I snoop around on there. Joel never changed his password, so sometimes I look at his account.”
“What do you see?”
“Everything,” she said.
“And how does it make you feel when you look at that stuff?”
“Sounds like something I would ask you.”
“It makes me feel curious when you tell me you stalk your ex-husband on social media,” he said, stroking his chin.
She smiled and told him she was trying to stop spying on Joel, but he’d changed so much in such a short amount of time that she could hardly believe they were ever together. Montana Joel, she called him, saying it as if he were a new species of Joel that needed to be taxonomized, tagged, tracked.
“How can he be a completely different person now? He grew his hair out, and now he has this stupid ponytail I hate so much. He’s a father; they have a horse. He bitched about my two cats, and now he has a horse?” she said, raising her voice. Buzz.
“His loss,” he said. There was a reason for cliché—sometimes there was nothing else to say.
Where had Tallie put his letters? He looked at his backpack on the floor by his feet, touched his toe to it. He was wearing the fresh dry pair of socks she’d given him—white with a skinny gold stripe across the toe. Pitching change. The ball game went to commercial.
“I’m not the only person this has happened to…things like this happen every day, I know. But I need to find a way to completely move on with my life, I guess. I’m almost there,” Tallie said. She was staring off, like she was alone and daydreaming, not talking to him.
“What would help you move on completely?”
“A little more time,” she said and paused before adding, “and it would be nice if Joel would admit none of this was my fault and I couldn’t have done anything differently to stop it. I’d especially love to hear him say it wasn’t the stress of in vitro fertilization that pushed him away,” she said and stopped. Emmett didn’t say anything, just listened as she continued. “I know it in my heart, and I know better than to think I can control what anyone else does, but it would feel good to hear him say it. However, I’m never going to tell him I want that, so—”
“Maybe you’ll tell him eventually. Tomorrow can bring something new,” Emmett said, posturing. Wishing he believed his own lies.
“For you, too,” she said.
“I guess so.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I guess so,” he said again. He poured the last of the This is my blood wine into his glass and looked at it in there for how long?
“Emmett, are you comfortable staying here tonight?” Tallie’s voice said, fracturing the deep ecclesiastical spell he’d gone into.
“Only…if you’re absolutely sure it’s okay. I do like it here.”
“Would you like to sleep on the couch or in the guest bedroom? Forgive me for not giving you a proper tour.” She stood and pointed, ticking off the rooms for him. “Laundry room, my bedroom, guest bedroom, office. And the hallway bathroom is yours. I have my own in my bedroom.”
“I’ll take the couch. I appreciate it,” he said.
Tallie disappeared down the hallway. Emmett heard a door click open, the slip of fabric across wood. She reappeared with three thick-knitted blankets: purple, brown, and gray. She put them on the couch and went into the closet again, returned carrying a pillow.
“I knit these,” she said, touching the blankets. “Knitting calms me down. I always have a project.” She reached into a basket by the couch, held up a thick ball of yarn attached to rows of neat knitting hanging from a circular needle. “I’ve started giving most of the blankets away to the homeless shelter. For Christmas and Valentine’s Day, I knit tiny red hats for the hospital nursery.”
“Oh, wow, so you’re actually, like, a good person,” he said. “You aren’t worried I’ll, at the very least, rob you blind while you’re sleeping?”
“Not really. I’m kind of a hippie about that stuff. It’s not like I have a trove of jewels here. The most precious things to me are myself and these two, and we’ll be locked behind the door,” she said, nodding toward the cats.
(A truck shifts and grumbles down the street. The ocean-deep bass of a slow-moving vehicle rattles through the rain, thumping Tallie’s windows.)
“I…um…I wrote my parents a suicide letter and mailed it to them. They’ll get it tomorrow. Saturday at the latest,” he confessed once it was quiet again.
“Oh, no.”
“So yeah…that’s awkward.”
“How did it make you feel, writing the letter?” she asked. Her presence—a cool, minty balm working its way onto his skin, through his muscles.
“I hated it, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. If I didn’t write it, that wouldn’t be fair. If I did…if I had to write it, period, that would be awful, too. So I chose the least awful choice.”
“How do you feel about it now? They’ll get it and you’re still here. I’m so glad you’re still here,” she said, tilting her head to the side.
“Shitty, I guess,” he said.
“Well, don’t you want to call them and explain? Try to intercept it somehow? We could do something,” she said.
“I don’t know yet.” So much darkness, Tallie couldn’t possibly understand, even if he laid it out for her. And he didn’t. Wouldn’t. “But yeah, I’ll sleep on the couch. I appreciate this. I would never…look, I promise not to uh…kill myself in your living room,” he said, noticing her pale pink toenails—Brenna’s favorite color. His eyes burned and welled; he put his head in his hands. He couldn’t believe the thing that broke him open, what finally made him cry, was the color of Tallie’s toenails. That whisper of pink, those screaming memories. Emmett was embarrassed he’d told her too much by crying in front of her. The Giants scored, taking the lead in the bottom of the eighth.
“Listen to me. I hope you’ve heard it plenty of times before, but it’s okay to not be okay. And it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, you crying. So I don’t want you to worry. I’m totally fine with emotionalism,” Tallie said, her voice soft and sweet as that pink polish.
“Do you have to work tomorrow? I’m assuming you have a job,” Emmett said. Sniffed.
“I do have a job. I have the day off tomorrow, though.”
“What do you do?”
“What do you do?” she asked.
Emmett sniffed again. His throat was thick and wobbly. Hot. He wiped his nose.
“I’ve worked a lot of places,” he said.
“But not anymore?”
“Not anymore.”
“I teach high school. English. I scheduled tomorrow off so I could have a break from teenagers,” she said. She drank some wine, put the glass down. Picked it up again and finished it, wiping her bottom lip with her thumb.
“Easy, tiger,” he said.
“Ha! Why do men think women can’t hold their alcohol? It’s like you guys depend on us being weak and vulnerable even when we’re not. You’re drinking tonight, but I can’t?”