“I won’t be a prophet or a bitch,” said Katherine, giving something close to a laugh. “I will be warm and loving, and I will be completely uninterested in sex with either gender, and I will talk about cooking and knitting and Wednesday night church services. I will be whoever I need to be.”
She was not quite finished. Her hands flexed and unflexed.
“Bert loves her. I know he loves her. But I wonder if he knows her at all or if he just sees some Miranda-shaped space and fills it in however he wants. How is she supposed to know what she wants? You have to see it first, don’t you, to know you want it? She begged to go on this trip. Do you think he’s even asked her for her opinion?”
There, thought Lucia. This was the other thing that sometimes happened when the dam burst. She was back in the Gulf again, shell shards under her feet, and she looked out at the waves, too many to count. When a client overflowed, she watched the waves roll in. Sometimes the peaks were unmanageable. But often she could pick one that was coming at just the right angle. The perfect arc. She saw what was there, ebbing and flowing, but what she did in this moment also had a hint of Poseidon. She could sometimes control the waves. She could take a thought and shape it into something you could ride all the way to shore.
“That’s the ideal tone,” she said. “It’s important that she asked to go. And that he never asked her what she thought. You had an opportunity to add to her education, and you took it.”
“Got it,” said Katherine. It was a bonus for Lucia that this woman understood that you could be real and engineered at the same time.
III.
When she was the only one in the house, the buzzing oven timer sounded louder. Lucia added a scoop of food to Moxie’s bowl, then pulled out the Conway folder, since the trial would start in two days. She nested on her usual corner of the couch, and she stared at the first page of the deposition summary, but there was no concentrating.
She’d gone by the police station and looked at photos of middle-aged white men today, and she had recognized no one. Not the slightest spark of familiarity, although that failure was not what was distracting her, surely. The humming. She could not unhear the humming. The more she tried to block it out, the louder it got. She’d gone to the store to buy more foundation—Lancôme, porcelain—and she’d walked out with a multicolored bangle bracelet that had made her think of Rachel. It was the third gift she had bought the girl in the past months, all undelivered.
The house was so empty. It was louder without Evan in it.
He had been gone for the last two days to a conference in Chicago. She’d had another call at the office from Jake. Another yellow square left on her desk. Could the man not take a hint? Now that she was back in her home, she was mystified by the woman who had sipped a martini with a stranger in the middle of an indoor forest. She had spent a pleasant half hour with him and then she’d headed to her room, and who knew if he would have asked her for more than a drink? She hadn’t given him the chance. It must have taken some work on his part to find her work number—she didn’t recall giving him her last name—and she distrusted any man who made that sort of effort for a woman who had shown no interest.
She could not fathom why she had constructed shallow hotel scenarios. Everything she had ever wanted was in this house, or rather, it was most nights. Now the stove was the only thing talking to her, and the room was crowded with empty spaces. She should not have pushed Rachel away. She had made a mistake there, and she must have made a mistake with Evan, too, although she was not sure what it was. She thought, still, soul mates. She did not want them to drift any further away from each other, and yet she did not know how to change their trajectory. He would be home tonight, and she was euphoric at the thought of him, but she wondered if she would love him as clearly and sharply when he was sitting next to her.
The stove. Dear God, it was driving her crazy. She stalked to the kitchen and stared at the timer, at the fragile panel framing the clock mechanism.
She would fix this.
She would fix it right now. Things did not just fix themselves, did they?
The hammer, for once, was exactly where it was supposed to be. She yanked it loose from the junk drawer—the handle was wrapped in string and jammed inside a roll of duct tape. She did not recall ever buying a rubber band, and yet the drawer was clogged with them. A gentle tap, she thought. All she needed to do was to lightly tap the center of the clock face. It might knock the moving parts off track and stop the noise.
She lifted her grandmother’s ancient cast-iron skillet off the front burner, setting it aside. She could still see the old woman wielding it—cornbread batter sizzling in hot Crisco oil—her pale forearms roped with muscle and striped with oven burns. Even when her leg was gone, she’d stalked through the kitchen, never holding on to a counter, not an ounce of caution in her. (How had that woman produced Lucia’s mother?) She rejected electric mixers, beating
