“No, but thanks,” Everett said. “I really need to figure out this puppet.”
“Ev-er-ett,” Natalie said, pronouncing each syllable of his name like it was its own word. “You’ve gotta take a break. Please don’t fashion your life after one of those tech-bro gurus who, like, only eats Soylent and never sees his children and sleeps four hours a night.”
“For starters, I don’t have kids. And also the take-out boxes prove I eat something other than Soylent.”
“You’re gonna have a stress-induced heart attack at the age of forty, dude.” Natalie got up and crossed the room, then smooshed her bike helmet over her golden curls. “You need to relax once in a while.”
But what Natalie didn’t understand, and what Everett couldn’t possibly explain to her, was that work never stressed him out. Natalie worked in marketing and she loved her job, but she spent zero time thinking about it when she wasn’t there. She didn’t respond to emails at ten on a Friday night. She didn’t spend her weekends visiting the office. In other words, she had a healthy work-life balance and necessary boundaries.
But Everett never wanted boundaries when it came to work.
“Okay,” Everett said, staring at one of his sketches, already back in the work zone. “I really can’t tonight, but next time, promise.”
Even though he wasn’t looking at her, he could practically hear Natalie rolling her eyes. “Next time, then. I’m gonna hold you to it. All right, I’m off to have dinner with my girlfriend and enjoy an evening watching terrible reality television, like a normal person who knows how to chill out. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
“I will,” Everett said, waving as she shut the door.
The next time he looked at his phone, hours had passed and it was after midnight. He cleaned up all the empty take-out boxes and went to sleep.
5
Teddy, Kirsten, and Eleanor all stared at the leopard-print chair sitting beside the nonfunctional fireplace.
Richard had insisted that Teddy keep the chair in the basement, on account of it looking “ugly” and “like something a grandma would buy.” But Teddy had always kind of loved it. And after a text that morning from him asking her to please get her things out of “the town house” (he still called it that and she still thought of it that way—the town house, as if it were the only town house in the world), she’d borrowed Josie’s truck, showed up when she knew Richard would be at work, and hauled it out of the town house and into Kirsten and Eleanor’s place.
Kirsten tilted her head to the side, like she was examining a painting. “I wouldn’t say it . . . matches with anything.”
“Leopard is a neutral,” Teddy insisted.
“It’s certainly cheerful!” Eleanor gave her a bright smile.
Kirsten narrowed her eyes. “Is it, though? It makes me think about dead animals. Not cheerful.”
“It isn’t real leopard,” Teddy reminded them. But then her shoulders slumped. “I knew I should’ve left it on the curb. Richard always said it was awful, and he was probably right.”
Kirsten and Eleanor looked at each other, and Teddy couldn’t miss the entire conversation that took place in one glance.
“Keep it,” they said in unison.
“It looks great,” Kirsten said. “Cosmopolitan!”
“Chic!” Eleanor added.
“Sophisticated.”
“Unique!”
“Okay, you’re overdoing it,” Teddy said, shaking her head. “I know you’re only feeling sorry for me, but I’ll accept your pity if it means I get to keep the chair in here.”
“Can we please address what’s sitting on the chair?” Kirsten asked, holding up a throw pillow that read IT’S FALL, Y’ALL! “I know for a fact that this wasn’t in our apartment this morning.”
Teddy raised her hand. “I also took that from the town house. I bought quite a bit of seasonal décor and I thought you guys might appreciate it more than Richard did.”
Kirsten held the pillow out in front of herself. “I like it because it’s true. It is fall, y’all.”
“Right now I’m really enjoying the thought of Richard sitting in discomfort on a throw-pillow-less couch,” Eleanor said, staring off into space as if she was picturing the scene.
“Well, now I feel bad,” Teddy said.
“Don’t feel bad,” Kirsten said, putting the pillow back on the chair. “Not to be a gender essentialist, but I don’t think men care about throw pillows. They’re content to live in throw-pillow-less squalor.”
Teddy smiled, grateful that they were trying to make her feel better . . . and grateful for their friendship, in general.
Kirsten, Eleanor, and Teddy had been friends since they met at a Jens Lekman show in college at the Wexner Center shortly before Teddy met Richard. It turned out that “Swedish pop music in an art museum” was one of the few places their interests overlapped, and if it weren’t for that concert, they never would have met. Kirsten went out only if it was for an art-adjacent reason, Eleanor loved pop music but hated being out late on school nights, and Teddy almost never went anywhere by herself. That night, however, she felt like she would crawl out of her skin if she had to spend one more night at home. She went to the concert, where, even if she was technically alone, she could be surrounded by other people who liked the same music she did.
And so all three of them had ended up there, wearing the exact same argyle-print ModCloth dress. None of them looked the same in it—Kirsten was tiny and pale with a blond pixie cut, Eleanor was plus-size and Korean with long black hair and blunt bangs, and Teddy was sized somewhere in between them with brown hair that rolled past her shoulders in waves. When they spotted one another, it had been like one of those movie moments, all long glances and slow smiles and being drawn together across the room as if by magic.
They discovered that even if they didn’t have much in common other than the music and the dresses, they were deeply in friend love with one another.
Teddy had met and started spending the bulk of her time with Richard soon after that, and so she’d missed out on doing most things with Eleanor and Kirsten. But now that she was here, she thought maybe she would feel like an equal part of their relationship again, that maybe she could turn the isosceles triangle of their friendship into an equilateral triangle.
“This is the first time all of us have been under one roof,” Eleanor said, eyes wide, jolting Teddy back to the present. “That reminds me: we need to have a pajama-movie night.”
“We’re all in our pajamas right now,” Teddy said.