The Backup Plan

Chapter 8: The Third Thing

The phone rang at nine-thirty on a Wednesday. Norah had made instant noodles and we were eating them on the coffee table with the news on low, and my phone was on the arm of the couch, and hers was face up next to the bowl.

She looked at the screen for two seconds.

Then she looked at me.

Then she picked it up, answered it, and hit speaker, and set it face down on the cushion between us.

"Norah."

Justin's voice had changed. In the mall it had been light, easy, a man enjoying his own afternoon. This was different. This was a man who had practiced a tone in the car before he dialed.

"It's been a while," he said.

"It has."

"I was thinking about you."

She twirled noodles around her fork and didn't eat them.

"Okay," she said.

"I heard something. About your husband. The software thing." A pause he'd planned. "Is it true?"

"What about it."

"I'm not — I'm not asking for numbers, that's not why I'm calling." He laughed, and the laugh had a seam in it. "I just heard, and I thought about you, and I thought — you know, I should have said something a long time ago. I've been doing a lot of thinking."

"That's new."

"I mean it." The voice dropped half an octave, into something softer he must have thought sounded sincere. "I've been going over it. What happened with us. The way it ended. I think I handled it badly."

Norah set the fork down on the rim of the bowl.

"Which part."

"The whole thing. All of it." Another pause, longer this time, the kind a man takes when he wants you to fill it. She didn't fill it. "I think about it more than you'd guess. Honestly. You were — you were the best part of my twenties. I know that's a weird thing to say now."

"It's a weird thing to say now."

"I know." He did that laugh again. "Look. Can I see you? Just once. Coffee. Twenty minutes. I have things I want to say to your face, that's all. Nothing else."

"No."

"Norah —"

"Justin. What do you actually want."

"I told you."

"You told me you've been thinking. People don't call because they've been thinking." She picked the fork back up, put it down again. "You heard my husband has money and you started going over your options. That's what this is."

"That's not —" He stopped. Started differently. "Okay, that came out wrong. I'm not calling about money. I'm calling because I made a mistake, and I'm allowed to say that."

"You are."

"So let me say it."

"Go ahead."

He took a breath, and when he spoke again the seam was gone and something harder was underneath, the thing he'd been holding under the soft voice the whole time.

"It was my mother," he said. "You know how she is. She's always had to run everything, she doesn't stop, she doesn't listen. I was twenty-five. I was trying to keep the peace in my own house. You don't know what that was like."

"I know what it was like."

"Then you know why I —" He caught himself. Pulled the soft voice back on. "Look. I'm not saying I was right. I'm saying I was young, and I got pushed, and I've regretted it for two years. That's all I wanted to say."

"Okay."

"You're not going to give me anything, are you."

"What would you like me to give you."

"I don't know. Something. Some sign that you ever —" Another stop. "Forget it."

She picked up a piece of the apple I'd cut earlier and didn't eat it either.

"You keep saying you regret it," she said. "You keep saying you panicked and you were young and your mother's a lot. You've said all of it. You haven't said one word about what actually happened."

"Norah —"

"Let me finish."

"I'm just saying —"

"Justin." Her voice didn't rise. That was the thing I noticed most, that it didn't rise. "Do you actually know anything about him? About the man I married."

"I know enough. He's quiet. He's the kind of guy who stands in a room and doesn't say anything and lets everybody forget he's there."

"That's what you think quiet means."

"Am I wrong? He barely opened his mouth at the mall. That's not a husband, that's a piece of furniture." He did the laugh again, softer. "Does he even know you? Does he know you sleep with the hall light on? Does he know what the first day is like for you, the way you get on the floor? Do you think a guy like that notices any of that?"

The laugh he did after it had a shape to it. Like he was proud of the question. Like he thought he was the only person alive who'd noticed those things, and this was the part where she was supposed to go quiet and think.

She turned the piece of apple over with her thumb.

"First," she said. "Yes. He knows I sleep with the light on. He bought me a lamp for my side of the bed so it wouldn't wake him, and then he started sleeping on the left so the light wouldn't be in my eyes. He knows about the first day because for two years he's had a heating pad on the nightstand before I get there and ginger tea on the counter, and he doesn't make a thing out of it, he just does it, and I find it there, and I don't have to say anything, that's the whole point — you asked if he notices, and what you mean is does he perform it, and the answer is no, he just does it. There are hot packs in the drawer in the bathroom. You want to know who put them there? Go ask him. He'll give you a one-word answer and go back to whatever he was doing."

Silence.

"Second," she said. "He's not quiet. He just doesn't waste it. You've met him twice and both times you decided what he was before he opened his mouth, and you've been living off that guess for two years. He doesn't talk to people he doesn't need to be understood by. That's not the same as having nothing to say. You've been in rooms with him and you never once noticed him noticing you. He does. He just doesn't think you're worth the sentence."

She sat back.

"Third —"

She let it sit there.

I looked at the phone face down on the cushion, and then at her, and she wasn't looking at the phone or at me. She was looking at the wall, at nothing, at whatever she'd been carrying around for two years.

"Third," she said again. "You were sitting right there. That afternoon at your mother's house. She sat across from me and she said it, out loud, in that voice she does, and she said the reason your family was having second thoughts had nothing to do with you or me or how we felt. She said you were going to run a company someday, and there would be dinners, and there would be people at those dinners asking when you were going to have a family, and they would need to know the answer was yes. And you sat next to me on the couch with your hand on my knee and you didn't say one word. You didn't tell her she was wrong. You didn't say it didn't matter. You didn't even say 'let me think about it.' You looked at the carpet and waited for it to be over. And then the next morning your father called mine about the ring and the money for the venue. That's the third thing. That's the only thing. Everything else you've been saying on this call for twenty minutes is a way to not say that."

Nothing from the other end. Not a breath. Not a word.

"You want me to tell you it wasn't really you," she said. "You want somebody to say you were just twenty-five and your mother is a lot and it wasn't your fault. And then you want somebody to say you didn't lose anything. Those are two different people and you want me to be both of them at once."

"You don't —"

"I don't. And I'm not going to." She picked up the fork. "So."

"What does he have."

"He has one thing."

"What."

"He's never once made me wonder if he wanted me. That's it. That's the whole thing. You don't have to guess what he's going to do, because he's already done it before you asked." She put the fork down on the bowl. "And you know what the funny part is. It's not even money. It's got nothing to do with the money. The money came after. The money is only what made you call."

Silence.

"Well," she said. "Good night."

She reached out and ended the call and set the phone down face first on the table.

She sat back against the couch. Her hands went to her lap and closed around the hem of her shirt and held on.

She looked at me.

"Is that it?" I said. "Do I have to do anything?"

"No."

"Okay."

"He'll call again."

"I know."

"I'll handle it."

"Okay."

She took the piece of apple she'd been holding the entire call and ate it, all at once, and chewed, and reached for the fork in the noodles that had gone cold, and ate a mouthful of those too, and looked at the TV, which was on and which she wasn't watching.

We sat for a while. She didn't say anything else. I didn't either. The noodle bowl went from warm to not warm. She ate about half of what was left in it, slow, and set it down, and picked up the phone and turned it over in her hand and looked at it, and set it back down.

She got up with the bowl and her plate and took them to the kitchen. She didn't come back for a while. The sink ran. I heard the cabinet under the sink open and close, and the little click of the dishwasher door, and the water stopped, and started again, and stopped.

When she came back she had a second apple, peeled, cut into eight pieces, arranged on the small plate the way she does, and she set the plate between us.

"Blocked," she said.

"Okay."

She picked up a piece of apple and ate it. "He'll ask somebody to pass a message. Or he won't. Doesn't matter."

She was steadier than I was. That's been true since the first week. It's not that she doesn't feel it. It's that she'd already done all the feeling a long time ago, in a car in a driveway with the engine off, and she's not going to do it twice.

"You had the third thing ready," I said.

"I had it ready for two years." She ate another piece of apple. "The first half, anyway. The last part I figured out in the car that night, driving home from their house after the money was gone. I sat in the driveway with the engine off for like fifteen minutes."

"You didn't say it at the mall."

"There was no reason to say it at the mall." She picked up a third piece. "There was no reason to say it at my aunt's dinner table, and I wasn't going to say it in a restaurant parking lot, and I wasn't going to say it to a doctor. I said it to him. That's the one person it was for."

I didn't say anything.

"You're doing the face."

"What face."

"I don't know what the face is. It's a face."

"I'm not doing a face."

"You're doing it." She ate the piece of apple. "There are eight pieces. Two of them are for you."

I took one.

"You put a heating pad on the nightstand," I said.

"Did I get the drawer wrong."

"No. It's right."

"Okay."

"You didn't have to say any of that."

"I didn't have to." She picked up another piece of apple and turned it over, thumb on the peel, the way she does. "I know."

She picked up the remote and turned the volume up two clicks and looked at the screen. Neither of us was watching whatever was on it.

"It's not going to make the family stop," she said. "He's not even the one who says the thing. His mother is. She'll say it to somebody else and it'll come back around and I'll be at a wedding and somebody's going to be polite to me in a way that isn't polite."

"You're still not going to the wedding."

"No." She ate the apple piece. "I told Chloe 'not today,' which she'll read the way she wants to read it."

"You said no to Derek."

"I said 'not today' to Chloe about Derek. Which meant no." She put her feet up on the coffee table and leaned back. Her arm went along the top of the cushions behind me and her hand came to rest on the back of my neck. She doesn't do that.

"You just did the thing," I said.

"What thing."

"Where you say no to people."

"I say no all the time."

"Not like that."

She was quiet for a second.

"Okay," she said. "I know."

We sat with the TV on. Something about a city council. Neither of us turned it up.

"You want me to text Chloe in the morning and say we're not doing the thing with Derek."

"No. I'll do it." She took her feet down and got up. "You peel. I'll text. That's the split."

"That's the split."

She went into the bedroom and the light came on under the door, and I sat with the TV on and the plate in front of me and the apple slices. There were five left.

She came back out ten minutes later with her toothbrush in her mouth and said, around it, "You want the last two."

"I thought there were eight."

"I ate another one."

"You told me the pieces were for me."

"I said two of them were for you. I didn't say I was going to sit there and look at the other ones."

She went back in. The light went off.

I sat for a while longer. The phone was still face down on the coffee table where she'd left it. I didn't touch it. Nothing on the other end of it had anything to do with me.

I put the plate in the sink. The water in the pipes knocked, and under the floor somebody in 4B was watching something with a laugh track, and the radiator ticked.

I turned off the TV and stood in the dark kitchen for a second, listening to the building.