What Serena doesn't know

Ordinary Conversations

The thing about a glance is that it can be anything.

A glance is not a declaration. It is not a confession or a promise or an intention. A glance is just eyes moving across a room and landing somewhere for a half-second longer than planned, and it can mean nothing, and it usually does, and I had spent the better part of four days convincing myself that this particular one meant exactly that.

Nothing.

Avery Cole was twenty-six years old. He was Serena's son. He had just returned from three years of military service and was probably still adjusting to the particular sensory overwhelm of civilian life — the softness of it, the noise, the way people looked at each other without tactical assessment. He had looked at me the way any person looks at any other person in a garden on a warm Saturday evening.

Ordinarily.

I had imagined the rest.

By Wednesday, I had filed the whole thing away in the part of my mind reserved for things that don't require further examination and gone back to my life, emails, a client call that ran forty minutes over, Rhea's laundry somehow becoming my problem again, the hydrangeas which were thriving now and did not deserve the neglect I'd been giving them.

Wednesday was a good day. Ordinary and productive and completely free of unnecessary thought.

Which is why, when the doorbell rang at half past two, and I opened the door to find Avery standing on my porch, my first genuine reaction was simply surprise.

"Avery." I blinked. "Hi."

"Hey." He had one hand in the pocket of his dark jeans, the other holding a small paper bag. Relaxed. Unhurried. "Sorry to just show up, Serena sent me. She borrowed your good casserole dish last month apparently and wanted it returned before she forgot again."

He held up the bag.

I laughed, because that was so entirely Serena that it required no further explanation. She had been borrowing and returning things my entire friendship, sometimes the same item three or four times in a cycle that neither of us had ever bothered to break.

"Of course she did." I stepped back from the door. "Come in, I'll get you something cold to drink. It's ridiculous out there today."

He stepped inside without hesitation.

I was aware, briefly, of the state of the house, not embarrassingly so, just the natural self-consciousness of unexpected company. The living room was presentable. The kitchen was mid-afternoon lived-in, a coffee mug on the counter, my laptop open at the table, the remains of a working lunch I hadn't fully cleared.

"Rhea home?" he asked, following me to the kitchen.

"Out. She's been meeting up with old friends since she got back, making up for the academic year, apparently." I opened the fridge. "Water, juice, I think there's a Sprite somewhere—"

"Water's fine."

I filled a glass and handed it to him, and he took it with a quiet thank you and leaned against the counter in the easy way of someone entirely comfortable in an unfamiliar kitchen. I noticed that about him the absence of awkwardness. Most people carry some version of it in new spaces. Avery simply didn't.

"How are you settling back in?" I asked, because it was the natural thing to ask and because I was a person who asked natural things in natural conversations.

"Better than I expected" He turned the glass slowly in his hand. "The first few days are strange. Everything feels too quiet and too loud at the same time."

"Too quiet and too loud," I repeated. "That's a specific feeling."

"You get used to a particular kind of noise. Then you come home and the noise is different, and your system doesn't know what to do with the difference." A small pause. "It settles. It just takes time."

I leaned against the opposite counter and looked at him properly for the first time since Saturday — or rather, for the first time since Saturday without the buffer of other people and wine and the busy orchestration of Serena's dinner. He was looking back at me with an expression I couldn't immediately categorize. Calm. Attentive. Like I was something worth paying attention to.

I decided it was just his manner. The army had given him stillness.

"Serena said you were quiet on Saturday," I offered. "She was trying not to hover."

Something warm moved across his face. "She hovered."

"She always hovers. She just does it at a distance so she can deny it."

He laughed at that with a low, genuine sound and the kitchen felt smaller suddenly, which was a function of the afternoon heat and nothing else.

"She talks about you constantly," he said. "Has my whole life."

"Likewise. You and Rhea were practically mythological figures to each other growing up. The friend's child. Always spoken about, never quite real."

"And now?"

"And now you're standing in my kitchen drinking water." I smiled. "Less mythological."

He looked at me for a moment. "Is that good or bad?"

"It's just true," I said easily.

He nodded slowly, like I had said something worth considering. I got the brief odd sensation of being studied — careful, unhurried — and then he looked down at his glass and the sensation passed, and I was being perfectly normal in my perfectly normal kitchen.

We talked for another twenty minutes.

About Serena mostly her relentless energy, her inability to sit still, the way she had redecorated her living room three times in two years. About Rhea, briefly, he asked about her degree with what seemed like genuine curiosity and I answered with the particular pride of a mother who has watched her daughter grow into herself. About the neighborhood, about how much had changed and hadn't. About a restaurant two streets over that I recommended, and he said he'd try.

Ordinary conversation.

Easy and warm and completely without incident.

When he left, he paused at the front door, hand on the frame, and turned back once.

"Thanks for the water."

"Thank Serena for the dish."

A small smile. "I'll tell her you said that."

And then he was gone, down the path, and I closed the door and stood in the hallway for a moment in the quiet of the house.

I went back to my laptop.

I worked for another two hours.

I did not think about the way he had said and now, the particular quality of it, the slight weight underneath the lightness. I did not think about the way the kitchen had felt when he laughed. I did not catalog the specifics of his attention or the way he had leaned against my counter like he had done it before.

I was thirty-nine years old, and I had made peace with being alone, and I was not the kind of woman who read meaning into ordinary Wednesday afternoons.

I made tea.

I answered my emails.

I was completely fine.

AVERY

The casserole dish had been my idea.

I had noticed it in Serena's cupboard on Monday, remembered her mentioning Nadine's name on it in passing weeks ago, and filed it away with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been trained to identify resources and use them.

There was a reason. That was all I needed.

She opened the door in a loose linen shirt and reading glasses pushed up into her hair and I understood, standing on her porch in the afternoon heat, that the Saturday garden had not been the light playing tricks.

She was exactly what I thought she was.

The conversation was easy. She made it easy. She had a natural warmth, intelligence that moved quickly without showing off, a way of listening that made you want to keep talking. I asked about Rhea because it was the right thing to ask and because I wanted to watch her face when she talked about her daughter.

She lit up. Quietly, not the loud brightness of the performance, but the deep steady glow of someone talking about their most important thing.

I thought: this woman had been waiting a long time to be someone's most important thing.

I didn't say it.

I drank my water, asked ordinary questions and laughed at the right moments and left after twenty minutes because twenty minutes was enough for the first time, and I was not in a hurry.

I had the whole summer.

Walking back to my car, I turned the visit over in my mind, her voice, the kitchen, the way she had said it's just true with that small smile, like she had long since made her peace with being straightforward.

I liked that about her.

I liked a great many things about her.

My phone buzzed. Serena.

Did she get the dish? Was Rhea home? Did they talk??

I smiled and typed back.

Dish delivered. Rhea was out. We talked.

Three dots. Then:

And???

I put my phone in my pocket.

I got in the car.

I thought about Nadine's reading glasses pushed up into her hair and the way the afternoon had felt like a door opening.