After The Reception

The last car door shut a little after ten.

Ivy stood in the front hall with a stack of condolence cards she had not read and listened to the engine pull down the drive. Nathan’s sister had taken the mother. Someone had taken the flowers that were already dropping. The rented chairs were still in the living room, two of them knocked crooked, as if the people who had sat in them had gotten up too fast.

Upstairs would have been the sensible choice, which was probably why she avoided it.

She went to the kitchen instead, because her mouth was dry and the tap in the powder room had been dripping since noon and she could not stand the sound of it for one more hour.

Rowan was at the sink as though he had been assigned the wreckage and intended to finish it.

He had his back to her. White shirt, sleeves rolled past the elbows, the same way he used to roll them when he was twenty-three and the only person in her parents’ house who would do the dishes without being asked. The kitchen was a wreck of foil pans and wineglasses with lipstick on the rims. He was scraping leftover ham into a bag like it was a job he had taken on purpose.

She stopped in the doorway before the room could make any new demands of her.

He did not turn around. “There’s water in the pitcher,” he said. “The tap tastes like the pipes.”

His voice had dropped since she had last heard it. Not softer. Just lower, like he had learned not to spend it.

“I didn’t know you were still here,” she said.

“Someone had to be.” He shut the water off and wiped his hands on a towel that had already given up. Then he turned around.

Ten years. He had a cut on one knuckle that had healed wrong. A little gray at the temple that the overhead light made honest. He looked at her the way you look at a door you used to have a key for.

“Ivy.”

She had heard her name all day. Soft, careful, the widow version. He said it like it still belonged to a person.

“You cooked,” she said, because the other things were too large for a kitchen.

“I offered. Your mother-in-law said the cousins would bring trays. The cousins brought grocery-store cookies and three kinds of dip.” He tipped his head at the counter. “Somebody had to feed them or they would have stayed longer, talking about what a good man he was.”

Nathan’s name sat between them and did not get said.

Ivy crossed to the pitcher. The glass was cold. She poured and drank standing up, one hand still holding the cards she had forgotten to put down. Water ran down her wrist into the cuff of the black dress. She had bought the dress in a mall two towns over because she could not wear anything Nathan had ever seen her in, and now it itched where the tag should have been cut out.

Rowan watched her throat move. He looked away first.

“You don’t have to clean this,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you.”

He took a stack of plates to the counter and started scraping. “Because if I leave, you’ll do it in that dress until two in the morning, and tomorrow his mother will come back and find you doing it, and she’ll tell everyone how devoted you are.”

The cards bent in her hand.

“That isn’t kind,” she said.

“It isn’t untrue.”

She set the cards on the table, next to a casserole dish with a name in marker on the foil. Mrs. Pell. Bless her heart. The writing had smeared.

“How did you even—” She stopped. Started again. “Who called you?”

“Denise. Nathan’s sister. She remembered I used to cook. She did not remember anything else, or she decided not to.” He stacked a plate. “I almost said no.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He looked at her over the plates. “You know why.”

The refrigerator kicked on. Somewhere in the house a clock she had always hated kept time. Ivy put her palm on the table to have something solid. The wood was sticky with something sweet.

“I didn’t think you’d come into this house,” she said.

“I didn’t think you’d marry him.”

There it was. Not loud. He did not throw it. He set it down like another plate.

She could have told him the short version. Parents. Money. The way her father had said Rowan’s name like it was a mistake they could still correct. She had been twenty-two. Nathan had been the son of people who owned things. She had said yes in a church she did not believe in and then spent eight years learning the specific boredom of being correct.

She said, “I was young.”

“You were.” He rinsed a glass. “You’re not now.”

“Two weeks, Rowan.”

“I know how long it is. I read the notice.” He shut the tap harder than he needed to. “I stood in the back today. You didn’t see me.”

She had seen the back of a white shirt and told herself it was a cousin. She had seen his hands on a chafing dish and told herself a lot of men had hands like that.

“You shouldn’t have come to the service.”

“Probably not.”

She pulled out a chair and sat because her knees had started to argue. The dress rode up. She left it. There was no one left in the house to perform for except the man who had once put a ring on her in a parked car and then taken it back when her mother called.

He had cooked all afternoon in Nathan’s mother’s kitchen. He had heard the speeches. He had watched her accept hugs from people who had never liked her.

“They don’t know,” she said.

He left the silence open long enough that she had to decide whether to fill it.

“Nathan and I. We hadn’t been—two years. Separate rooms. Then separate everything except the address, and then not even that, except on paper. We never told them. His mother still introduces me as her daughter.” She laughed once, a dry sound. “I stood there today and let them talk about a marriage that ended before he got sick. I nodded. I held her hand.”

Rowan leaned on the counter. The muscles in his forearm stood out and then eased, as if he had told them to.

“Did he know you were coming?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did you hate him.”

“I didn’t think about him if I could help it.” He picked up a serving spoon, looked at it, put it down. “Today I thought about him the whole time. That’s new.”

Ivy took another drink she did not want. The pitcher left a ring on the table. She wiped it with the side of her hand and only spread it.

“You can go,” she said. “I’ll finish this.”

“I’m not going yet.”

“Rowan.”

“Say it again.”

She looked up. He was still leaning, but his mouth had changed. Not a smile. The thing under a smile.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are standing in this kitchen like you live here.”

“I don’t.” He dried his hands again, slower. “I have a place twenty minutes east. One bedroom. The stove is better than this one.”

She did not ask if anyone was in the one bedroom. The question sat on her tongue and dissolved.

He came around the counter. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that she could smell him under the onion and the dish soap: heat, and the outside air he had brought in when he carried trays from the car. He had always smelled like work. Nathan had smelled like the inside of a car that was always clean.

“Your hair’s coming down,” Rowan said.

She reached up. Half the pins had given out during the receiving line. A piece of it hung against her neck, damp. She pulled a pin and set it on the table next to Mrs. Pell’s casserole.

“Leave it,” he said.

“I look like I got dressed in a closet.”

“You look like you’ve been standing up for nine hours.”

She almost told him that she had cried in the bathroom at four o’clock, not because Nathan was dead, but because Denise had said he loved you so much and Ivy had not corrected her. The cry had been small and embarrassing. She had fixed her mouth and gone back out.

Rowan picked up the stack of cards, read the top one without opening it, and put them farther from the wet ring.

“Are you staying here tonight,” he asked.

“His mother wants the house to look lived in until they sort the will. I said I would sleep here a few nights. It was easier than arguing in front of the minister.”

“So yes.”

“So yes.”

He nodded like that was information he would use later.

“And you,” she said. “You drove twenty minutes to scrape ham into a bag.”

“I drove twenty minutes because Denise called and said his widow looked like she was going to fall down, and I am a fool.” He said it without decoration. “I have been a fool about you since you were twenty-one and you let me put my mouth on your throat in the stairwell of that library.”

The refrigerator hummed into the space between them; otherwise the kitchen went still.

Ivy’s pulse showed in her wrist where it lay on the table. She did not move her hand.

“That was a long time ago,” she said.

“It was a Tuesday. You had a paper due. You tasted like the coffee from the machine that never got cleaned.” He stopped. “I’m going to finish the glasses. Then I’m going to ask you if you want me to leave. You should decide before I ask.”

He turned back to the sink and gave the glasses more attention than they deserved.

She sat in the black dress with her hair coming down and watched his shoulders work. Somewhere in the walls, the old house kept making the small mechanical noises of a place indifferent to what had just happened inside it. The clock in the hall did the thing it always did at the quarter hour, a thin brass complaint.

She thought about the parked car. The ring that had been too simple for her mother. The way Rowan had looked when she told him she could not do it, that her father had already spoken to Nathan’s father, that she was sorry, that sorry was a useless word and she was going to use it anyway.

She had seen him at the wedding. She had spent the ceremony trying not to look at him anyway.

The last glass clicked into the rack.

Rowan dried his hands for the third time and turned around. He did not come closer.

“Do you want me to leave,” he said.

Ivy looked at the cards, the foil, the pin on the table, the wet ring. She looked at his mouth. She looked at the doorway that led to the rest of the house, where Nathan’s coats still hung because no one had been brave enough to take them down.

“Not yet,” she said.

He answered with one small nod, restrained enough to make the moment feel larger.

Whatever might have become a smile disappeared before it reached his mouth.

Outside, the drive was empty. Inside, the pitcher sweated onto the wood, and neither of them reached to wipe it.

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