“That was quick,” I said.
Her steps slowed as she approached, a sheen of sweat over her exposed arms, the top of her chest. “What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the files.
“Work,” I said. “Grabbing my laptop.” Like I needed to account for any movement in my own house. And then, like I could beat her to it, save myself with a piece of the truth: “Hey, I heard a phone ringing. You just missed it.”
She stepped to the side, pacing through the loft. I could see the muscles in her calves, in her upper arms. The tendons in the back of her neck. “Probably spam,” she said. “I think I was given a phone number that must’ve recently belonged to someone else.”
I wanted to tell her, No, it was the lawyer. I wanted to hear what she had to say. But there was no way to do that without giving myself away.
She pulled one leg back into a stretch. “I barely made it around the block. It’s too hot to run,” she said. She started to laugh. “But Mac, my God. He acted like…”
I waited, hanging on her every word. Desperate to know what she saw, what she knew.
She wiped her face with the bottom of her green tank top. “You know,” she said, “he came to see me once.”
I shook my head slowly before finding my voice. “No, I didn’t know that.” I wondered if it was before or after the day he’d shown up in my kitchen, telling me about Ruby’s call.
More than that, I didn’t like where the conversation was going—the guilt that had lodged deep inside and was being dragged to the surface. I hadn’t gone to see Ruby. Not once. Cutting her out after the trial as someone who had existed and then no longer did. How easy it had been for the rest of us.
“I guess he wanted to make clear that we were over. Just in case I wasn’t sure,” she said.
I tried to picture it, Mac sitting on the other side of some plastic shield or maybe across a table—I didn’t know how it had gone. Ruby crying. Or not crying. Narrowing her eyes at him. Laughing at the situation, at his cowardice.
But no, I was the coward. Mac had been brave, had gone to see her where I had not. I had read him all wrong, pegged him as someone who avoided adult responsibility, when really, he’d been the only one to do what the situation called for.
“Now I look at him and I don’t remember what I saw in him,” Ruby continued. She smiled to herself. “Well, I do remember.” A single high-pitched laugh. “I remember, anyway, when I was too young for him. God, I loved the chase. Loved it because I knew he was always looking at me, even when he wasn’t supposed to.”
I flinched. Ruby hadn’t been a kid when they’d met. She’d been nineteen or twenty. Too young for him, yes, but not that young. From my perspective, he’d barely tolerated her back then. I wasn’t sure which of us was misremembering.
“Something about those Seaver boys, huh?” she asked. She gave me a look halfway between a grin and a wince. I didn’t know what she was implying. “They love them around here, those boys who never seem to fully grow up. Not the girls, though. Not people like me.”
She was right. Hitting on exactly how the neighbors here viewed her. Maybe it was because Ruby had been in college when we met her. She’d walked dogs and brought in our mail, come home late or not at all, owned roller skates and laughed loudly, spoken more from impulse than from tact. Maybe it was because her father never seemed to have a handle on her himself, always asking if we’d seen her.
“How’s your dad?” I asked her. As if she needed a reminder that she had somewhere else to go. Somewhere else to be now that she’d gotten what she’d come for. One of those missed calls, of course, could’ve come from him.
Her expression darkened, her eyes narrowing on the edge of mean before her gaze flicked away. “He died,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”
“Oh. Oh, no.” I shook my head, a sudden wave of grief washing through me, though I hadn’t had much contact with Mr. Fletcher other than when he’d neglected to accept Ruby’s things. He’d seemed too mellow for his daughter, too lost, like he’d given up attempting to control her long ago. The path my own father had taken with my brother, whereas my mother had gone to the other extreme.
When Mr. Fletcher retired, he moved to Florida. Perhaps figuring Ruby was old enough to figure things out on her own, like the rest of us. And she’d shuttled herself the two blocks over, to me.
“I didn’t know,” I said. I closed the distance between us, placed my hand awkwardly on her upper arm. “I’m sorry.”