June
Room 314 has twenty-six desks, a radiator that knocks at ten past every hour, and a boy in the back
row named Laurence who took Of Mice and Men out of my hands in October and has not given it back.
"You're still doing Lennie’s voice too slow," he tells me, second week of November, from the back.
We're on the last chapter. Half the room knows what's coming and the other half has been told and is
pretending not to know.
"How would you do it?" "Not in that de ep voice, he’s big but he shouldn’t sound like that. It's
different." Laurence has purple hair now, done for him by Wren, the girl who ran into me on the stairs in
October, who sits next to him and corrects his spelling. “He just doesn’t know who he is yet.”
I put the book down on the desk. "Say that again." "He doesn't know who he is yet?” "Write that
down," I say to the room. "All of you. That's the essay. Six hundred words, Monday. Laurence, you're
excused from writing it because you already said it, and you're going to read the last three pages to us
instead.”
He reads it. He does the voices perfectly and for once, all the students listen.
Harold puts his head in at the bell. He's got the cardigan on. He looks at the twenty-six kids putting
their coats on in silence, and at Laurence still holding my book, and at me, and says, “If you want to stay
here beyond June, there will be a place for you.”
Tanya sent a photograph on the seventh. A baby with a red face and a white hat, asle ep on Carla's
chest, and under it a text caption.
TANYA
Rose Carla Curtis. 7 lb 1 oz. Say hi to Aunt June.
I've looked at it every day. I haven't answered it but I finally send congratulations, because this has
never been the baby’s fault. It’s not really Tanya’s, either. She filled a space that wasn’t hers to take, but
Matt is the one who left it open.
On the eighteenth, a Tuesday, at nine at night, with thirty essays on Lennie's identity on somebody
else's dining table, my phone lights up with his name for the first time in three weeks.
Matt
Can I take you to dinner. Thursday. Anywhere you pick. I won't bring anything and I won't ask you
anything. I'd just like to sit across from you.
I read it twice. I look at the fir eplace, which is going, because I've learned how to make it go.
June
The Greek place, I write back. West Fourth. Seven.
The r eply is one word again. Okay. He's early. I can see him through the window from the sidewalk,
at the table in the corner under the photograph of Santorini, with a glass of water and nothing else in front
of him, no phone on the table, no folder, no bag, his hands flat on the cloth. He's shaved. He's wearing
a shirt I bought him. He sees me through the glass and stands up and doesn't sit down again until I've sat,
and the waiter, who remembers me from the saganaki with Priya,
brings the wine I like without asking and looks at Matt with interest and goes away.
A rejected mate can leave the pack, but the bond rarely gets the message.
"You look well," he says. "I'm sle eping." "I can tell." He turns his water glass a quarter turn. "I'm not."
"I can tell that too." We order. The octopus. He's never had it and he says he'll try it, and I know he's
doing it because I ordered it, and I let him. The saganaki comes and he doesn't do the lighter thing, he lets
the waiter do it, and he watches the flame go up and down with the whole of his attention, and I remember
that he used to do that, watch things, before the phone.
"I'm going to tell you what I've done," he says, when the waiter's gone. "Not because I want credit.
Because you said, if you want to say a thing, say it yourself, and I've been saying nothing for three weeks
because I was afraid of getting it wrong, and I think saying nothing is also wrong, so I'm going to say it
and you can stop me."
"Go ahead." "Thirty-eight B is listed. It's been listed since the twenty-fourth. There's an offer, it's
under what I paid, I'm taking it. The loss is mine, it's not coming out of anything that's ours. Tanya's not
moving in. She knows. I told her two days after you took the books, in person, on her coffee table, with
Carla in the door." He turns the glass again. "I told her I wouldn't be in the room. Not outside it. Not in the
building. And I wasn't. Rose was born on the sixth at four in the morning and I sat on the bed and didn't
go. I sent an orchid. I picked it myself off the website and I don't even know if orchids are what you send
for a birth.”
"They're what you send." "Okay." He breathes. "There's a trust for the baby. It's through a lawyer, a
number, on paper. That's the money now. She's got a night nurse on it for as long as she wants one and
she's got Carla and she's asked me not to come
to the hospital and I didn't, and she hasn't called me since, and I haven't called her." He looks at the
saganaki. "That's the Tanya part."
"And the other part." "The other part is I hired a president. Helen Marsh. She ran retail for the people
in Ohio who've been beating us on price for four years. She starts January second. She gets the spring line
and the day-to-day and Denise as chief of staff, with a title and the money that goes with the title, which I
should have done five years ago. I ke ep the board and the strategy and Milan. I'm out of the building by
six. Denise has it blocked and she's told me she'll know if I touch it, and I believe her."
"You didn't quit." "I didn't quit." He looks up. "I thought about it. For about an hour, on the floor of
the study. And then I thought, June would hate that. She'd hate it. She'd think I'd made myself into a thing
she had to feel guilty about. The company's the company. I built it at that table with you. I'm not going to
hand it to someone and sit at home being sorry at you. I'm going to run it in fewer hours and be home at
six, and if that's not enough, that's fair. But it's true."
The octopus comes. He tries it. He chews for a long time and says, "That's good," in a surprised voice,
and eats another piece.
"I'm not telling you this so you'll come home," he says. "I want to be honest about that. I'd like you to
come home. I'd like it more than I've liked anything. But I'm not sitting here doing a list so you'll hear the
list and pick up your bag. I'm doing it because you asked me to say things and I never did. I let Denise say
them. I let Tanya say them for me, to you, before you got your shoes off. I'm saying them."
I put my fork down. "Why," I say. "Why what?" "Not what. I heard the what. Why did it take me
leaving. You had seventeen years, Matt. You had a birthday, you had Athens, you had a car on
Twenty-Third with the hazards on. You said yes to all of it. And then you closed on an apartment. I've
been sitting downtown for a month trying to understand why it took a bag by the door for you to hear a
sentence, and I can't get there, and I'd like you to try."
He doesn't answer fast. He looks at the tablecloth and then he looks at me and he doesn't do the face,
the whole-face apology, the one that's gotten
him out of everything. He just looks tired.
"Because she asked," he says. "That's the honest answer, and it's not a good one. Tanya asks. She's
asked since we were seven for whatever it is she wants that day. Every Tuesday, every sink, every time
she was crying in a car, she asked, and I answered, and it felt good, June. It felt useful. And you never
asked. You told me where the wine glasses were and you unpacked the kitchen and you put on the green
dress and you never in seventeen years said, Matt, I need you to do this, until the car on Twenty- Third.
And by then I'd spent so long being the person who answers that I didn't know how to hear a thing that
wasn't a request. You said it once. I said yes because I say yes. And then I went and did what I always do,
because doing it was the only helping I knew, and I didn't think about both at once until you were standing
in the door with the suitcase." He stops. "I liked being needed. I said that to her and I'm saying it to you
because it's the only thing I've figured out."
I look at him. "That's not a good answer," I say. "No." "It's an honest one." "Yes." "Okay." He waits. I
can see him waiting for the rest of it, for the verdict, and I don't have one, and I'm not going to invent one
at a table under a photograph of Santorini so that he can stop looking at me with that face.
"I'm not coming home," I say. "Not tonight. Not this month. I've got a lease and I've got twenty-six
kids to teach, and I'm going to be there Monday at seven-thirty to read their essays. That's my life. It's not
a thing I'm doing while I wait for you to fix yours."
"I know." "Do you?" "I do. I saw the shelves." He picks up his fork and puts it down. "Can I ask one
thing. You said I wouldn't and I'm asking anyway, once."
"Ask." "Thursday. Again. Here or anywhere. I won't bring anything." The waiter comes and takes the
plates. He asks if we want dessert and Matt looks at me and doesn't answer for me, which is new, and I
say baklava, one, two forks, and the waiter goes.
"Thursday," I say. We split the baklava. He walks me to the corner of West Eleventh and doesn't ask
which building, and I don't tell him, and he says goodnight and puts his hands in his pockets and walks
north, and I watch him go until he turns on Seventh, and he doesn't take his phone out once in a block and
a half, and I count.