Chapter 28: A Traveler's Goodbye Doesn't Get to Be Sad
Thursday. Early morning.
Bonnie was up before him — showered, dressed, moving around the apartment with quiet efficiency, pulling together the things that were hers. Andrew sat on the edge of the bed watching her and trying to remember the last time he'd seen her move at that pace without a reason behind it.
"Heading out?" he said.
"Can't stay cooped up forever." She said it lightly, the way she said most things. She was smiling, but there was something underneath it that she wasn't going to name and he wasn't going to push. "You knew I wasn't built for this."
He had known. From the beginning, really. Bonnie was motion — she needed open roads and new situations and the particular aliveness that came with not knowing what was next. A week in a Manhattan apartment with someone else's rules was about the limit of what she could absorb before the walls started closing in.
She had her reasons for staying as long as she had, and her reasons for going now, and most of them were things they'd never talked about directly. He understood enough of it to know the rest didn't need to be said.
Christie came out of the second bedroom with her bag already packed — the new clothes folded neatly inside, Andrew noticed. She stood in the doorway of the living room and looked at him with an expression that was doing a lot of work for a ten-year-old face.
She crossed the room and put her arms around him without saying anything first.
Andrew hugged her back. She was small and solid and she smelled like the lavender soap he kept by the bathroom sink.
"Thank you," she said, very quietly, into his shoulder.
He held on for another second before letting go. "Take care of yourself," he said. "And take care of her."
Christie nodded like she understood exactly what that meant and had already accepted the assignment.
Bonnie picked up her bag, then picked up Christie, settling her on one hip the way she'd done a hundred times. She stood there for a moment looking at Andrew with an expression he recognized — cataloguing him, storing it. Her free hand moved to her ear, touched the earring, dropped away.
Andrew opened his mouth. Closed it.
There was nothing useful to say that would make leaving better or staying possible. The best thing that could have happened here had already happened. They were leaving in better shape than they'd arrived, and that was the whole point.
He held the door.
Bonnie walked through it without looking back. Christie looked back once — a small, private look — and then they were in the hallway and then they were gone.
Andrew stood in the open doorway for a moment listening to their footsteps on the stairs. Then he closed the door and stood in the quiet of the apartment.
He gave himself about thirty seconds of that.
Then he went to the master bedroom door and pushed it open.
He'd been sleeping in the second bedroom his whole life — twenty-one years of living in the smaller room while the larger one belonged to Evan's particular brand of chaos.
After Evan died he'd had the whole apartment cleaned top to bottom, replaced the bedding, cleared out everything that needed clearing out, and then mostly avoided going in anyway. The memories attached to that room weren't exactly the kind that made you want to spend time in it voluntarily.
But Christie had cleaned it again before leaving. Thoroughly — the floors, the bathroom, the baseboards. The windows were cracked open and the morning air was moving through. It smelled like nothing, which was the right smell.
Andrew stood in the doorway and took stock of it.
It was a good room. Big windows, an en-suite bathroom, a small balcony off the far wall that Evan had apparently never once used. Andrew had always thought it faced the wrong direction for drying clothes, but it caught the morning light well.
He decided he was done with whatever the room had meant before. It was his apartment. That was his room.
He spent the entire morning moving — clothes, books, the few things that constituted his personal space — from the second bedroom to the first. He aired out the second bedroom after, hung the spare bedding over the balcony railing, and opened all the windows. Practical work. The kind that left you feeling like you'd actually done something.
By noon the apartment was quiet and reorganized and he was hungry but not particularly motivated to cook for one. He had Monica's gathering at three. He went out.
He walked without a specific destination, letting himself drift toward whatever looked interesting, which was one of the genuine pleasures of the city — the way you could let it make decisions for you on a slow afternoon.
He ended up outside the dessert place he'd stopped into a few weeks back. He looked at the window for a moment, then went in.
The Basque cheesecake was in the case. He ordered a slice, and a black tea, and two other things he'd been curious about from the menu. He found a seat when one opened up — the place was busy with the usual Thursday afternoon crowd, friends catching up over coffee, a few families with kids — and settled in.
He ate slowly, the way you eat when you're actually paying attention.
The cheesecake was very good. He worked through it methodically, noting the texture, the caramelization on the surface, the way the inside held its structure without being dense. The cream cheese ratio was doing something particular. The proportions were the part you couldn't reverse-engineer from taste alone — you could identify almost every ingredient, but the proportions were years of someone's trial and error, and you didn't get those by eating the result.
Still worth eating.
The other two desserts he tried more quickly, got what he needed from them, and finished his tea.
He'd been reluctant to spend money like this not so long ago. The math of it had always felt wrong — money going out in exchange for an experience that was over in twenty minutes. But his sense of that had shifted somewhere in the last few weeks. Partly the inheritance changing the immediate pressure. Partly something harder to name — a different relationship to being here, being present in a life that was actually his.
He'd spent a long time before treating everything as preparation for something else. It was possible to enjoy an afternoon. It was possible for a very good piece of cheesecake to just be a very good piece of cheesecake.
"Excuse me." A waitress appeared at his elbow, politely apologetic. "Would you mind sharing your table? We're pretty full, and you've got room—"
Andrew looked up from his tea. "Not at all," he said, and moved his jacket off the chair across from him.
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