“Hello, Catherine,” Sam says, his voice clear as day. “Come on in. Sit wherever you like.”
I slide onto my stomach and press my ear to the vent.
Just for a few seconds. Just this once.
Chapter 5
“It sounds like you’re feeling better, creatively at least,” Sam says. He crosses his legs and glances at the clock on the floor next to the couch, where patients can’t see it. Six more minutes.
“Yeah. That place has got good energy,” Christopher says. “Something about it unlocks me.” Christopher Zucker. Early thirties. Creative director at a new design firm colonizing the former paper mill along the river. Sam started seeing him after Christopher’s doctor recommended he talk to someone about his anxiety. He’s spent the last twelve minutes of the session telling Sam how he’s been working in the coffee shop on the ground floor of his office building, trying hard to overcome a creative block. “Great views, too,” Christopher says.
Sam nods. “Has a patio overlooking the river, right?”
“Yeah, but I mean the girls. Yoga studio on the second floor. If you time it right . . .” He winks—patient attempting to normalize habit of objectifying women through alignment with therapist—and then changes the subject to Sofie, the twenty-one-year-old Czech model he met online. Sam nods, forcing himself to acknowledge a sudden pang of irritation, tracing it back to the idea of Christopher and Annie being at that coffee shop at the same time. Annie mentioned this place to him the other day, telling him she stopped there for lunch after a run along the river, and Sam imagines the way Christopher would have checked her out, the look of disdain she would have given him in return. （She’d hate the guy—his comments about women, his adult scooter.）
Sam has to be careful not to let his mind wander—Christopher can be hard to follow, and staying engaged takes focus—but before he can stop himself, he’s back in Brooks Brothers in lower Manhattan at four in the afternoon on a cold afternoon last fall, where he saw Annie for the first time, standing at the tie rack in tight jeans and a tweed blazer.
“Let me guess,” she said when he approached to ask if she knew what “cocktail attire” meant. “You’re a bad boy turned cool/approachable academic who favors band shirts, but only if they’re ironic. You play basketball on your lunch hour with your nonacademic bros and then tapas and whisky with your colleagues. You’ve been invited to a wedding—his second—somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, and now you need a jacket.” She pointed toward the back of the store. “Wait for me in the dressing room.”
She brought him five different suit and shirt combinations, eight choices of ties, a classic navy blazer. Waited outside the room while he changed, stood beside him in front of the large mirror, swiping away lint and pressing wrinkles from his sleeves.
He bought everything she suggested. “That was more than I’ve ever spent on clothing in my life,” he said, finding her back at the tie display after he’d paid. “You should get a raise.”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” she said. “My boyfriend’s birthday’s coming up. Came in to buy him a tie.” That boyfriend was gone an hour later, about the time Sam and Annie finished their second drink at the bar across the street, where Sam probed her about her life, learned about her childhood in Maine, growing up in a house her father—long deceased—built himself.
She was his date to the wedding the next week, his wife within the year, marrying him in the backyard of their new home the day they closed on the house. Annie Potter, a woman like no other. Brilliant, funny, exciting as hell. He still has trouble believing he convinced her to follow him to Chestnut Hill, New York. Charming, that’s the word she used, the first time she came, ninety-nine minutes on the train from New York. “Did you know petroleum was discovered right here in Chestnut Hill?” she said, tugging him by the arm to point out the historical marker he’d never noticed outside the ice cream shop.
And she still thinks it’s charming. She even likes going to see his mother at Rushing Waters, where she’s made a list of every resident’s birthday, stopping at Mrs. Fields in the strip mall to buy them a cookie the size of a dinner plate, coming home to tell him that this was the right thing to do, moving here to help Margaret.
His mom was wrong. He’d never hurt her.
The thought is interrupted by the sound of a phone, and he feels his body tense, realizing it’s his phone, ringing from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. Christopher stops what he was saying—What the hell was he saying?—and Sam reaches into his pocket, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I usually remember to turn this thing off.” He sees the 1–800 number, another credit card company, before silencing the phone and returning it to his pocket. He allows Christopher a few moments to finish what he was saying and then shifts a little in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time,” he says.