Freddie likes being needed.
If she tries hard enough, she can almost forget writing. Forget her goal to put a portfolio together before the holidays, to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was a silly idea anyway. How would she ever get to Iowa? The program always seemed like a stamp of legitimacy. She wondered what kind of pieces they wrote, what they discussed in small groups.
She hears the toilet flush and the water running. Greg brushing his teeth, as he always does, before breakfast and coffee. When he comes down, his charcoal hair will be slicked in place, his face will be cleanly shaven. He never looks wrecked the way she feels.
Wouldn’t she know if he really was ill, if the first round of medication the doctors started him on in August wasn’t working?
She plunks an English muffin into the toaster and puts out two cereal bowls. She sighs as she looks at the clock—how do the minutes just rocket by? She tiptoes up the stairs, and waves to Greg as she stands outside the bathroom. He is wearing the black silk robe that he wore for a Halloween costume several years ago—before Addie, before everything. Now it comes out in colder weather. “Hey,” he says.
“Well,” she says, “the Clark Gable robe has reappeared.” He had been going for an old Hollywood smoking jacket look with the costume, had grown a mustache and held a pipe.
He models it. “I think I’ll enjoy my breakfast in it.” His chest underneath looks solid. He is the most solid person she knows. Once, when they were dating, he pushed her car, the transmission dead, down the street to a safe spot.
“You should wear the robe to work.” She looks back at him once more. She can’t help it. She tries to memorize him.
Greg splashing hot water on his face. Greg’s hand gripping the razor, his other hand in a fist as though he could beat up anything. Greg with his hazel eyes, Wizard lying on the bathroom floor looking up at him.
She touches her daughter’s door and is gripped by something aching and slow. Turning the knob, she hears the sound of the humidifier. Addie is so perfect, lying there next to her worn stuffed penguin, her arm slung off the side of the mattress, her Pottery Barn Kids sheet with the parakeets. Freddie should turn off the humidifier, which usually wakes Addie. She should raise the shade. She steps closer to her beautiful girl, her eyelashes so long and still. Freddie cannot bear this, she thinks. Greg, she thinks. She bends down to kiss Addie’s head, backs up, and leaves the room.
From across the hall, Greg raises his eyebrows when she returns Addie-less. “I don’t think she needs to go,” she says.
“She has school,” he says. “She has art today. She loves art.”
“I know.” Freddie clears her throat. “But she’s sleeping so nicely… I’m not going in either.” She wiggles her toes in her slippers and looks him in the eyes. “Let’s all be together.” She wants to put her head on his shoulder and weep, but he would hate that.
Greg dries his hands on the white towel. He touches a spot of blood on his neck, a shaving nick. “I have work,” he says, and walks past her. “We didn’t plan this.”
Plan? Does he want to talk about plans, really?
She stays in the hallway and watches him walk down the stairs. She thinks of the small pajama shirt folded on the kitchen table.
She notices the clean line of his neck, how square his shoulders are. She notices his black robe, the way it bounces as he walks. He has to step over the cat, which lies on the middle step. She thinks he shakes his head briefly as he lifts his knee and clears the cat. And then she notices with the last few steps that he holds on to the railing more tightly than he ever has. As if he’s bracing himself for something. As if he looks out the window and sees rain.
2. The Best Applicant
He has come to appreciate gray. Most of the offices at Garroway & Associates are some form of gray: gray tweed chairs in the lobby, gray seagrass wallpaper, swathes of gray carpeting, men and women in gray suits, gray computer monitors, and grayish paintings with orange sunsets. Greg Tyler likes the fog-and-steel feeling the whole place gives him.
In the hallways, light jazz music plays from the satellite radio station, and once in a while, Greg thinks how lucky he is. This is the kind of place he always dreamed about working in when he took finance and marketing courses at BU, and here he is in this office with a view of downtown Wharton. It overlooks the statue with the wishing fountain, the Regent Theater, the big solid Wharton Library where his daughter, Addie, likes to take the marble stairs two at a time, and in the distance, trees and the bridge over the Naugatuck River.