Claudia shifted under the weight of his scrutiny, willing him to recognize her, telepathically broadcasting her name like a distress signal tuned to his receiver. Eventually she said, “Nick.”
Only then did the calm waters of his composure break. He stared. “Claude?”
She nodded.
“What? What are you doing here?”
A sudden tremor seized her throat, but she pushed the words out anyway. “Visiting Benji.” She felt like glass, like her skin had gone translucent as a jellyfish, exposing her essential spinelessness, her secrets. She’d come all this way, it occurred to her, and she wasn’t going to tell him why.
“I heard. How’s he doing?”
“Better. Better. Word gets around.”
“In a town of twenty-three people? Of course word gets around.”
He invited her inside, listening to a version of Benji’s recovery she’d broken into bullet points, and poured fresh water into the coffeepot.
“But enough about him,” Claudia said. “My God, Nick. How are you?”
“I’m getting divorced. In case you didn’t figure that out. I thought you were one of my wife’s lawyers.”
“I caught that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We aren’t.” He laughed in his easy, effortless way, as if Claudia was in on the joke.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Yeah. Let’s not.” He set her coffee on one of four plastic folding tables arranged in the center of the room to make a larger one. “Milk? Sugar?”
Claudia shook her head.
“So,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Of all the people I expected to see.”
“I know. Is this okay?”
“Sure. Yeah. You might have given a guy notice.” Nick winked. “But sure.”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t know I was coming here.”
“I believe it. I was in New York last week. I was this close to looking you up.” He pinched two inches between forefinger and thumb. “Okay. Maybe this close,” he added, doubling the space.
Claudia noticed his wedding ring. “How did you know I’m in New York?”
“How did you know I’m here?”
She clinked her coffee mug to his and took a sip.
They’d walked countless miles through deep, deeply intimate, conversational territory, having been confidants, confessors, striders with the same stride, up until the day they weren’t, so it felt exceedingly strange to skitter along the safe path of small talk — Claudia’s current commission for Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, Nick’s leaving a lucrative law practice to move back east and build things — when not far away, winding through the thorniest of thickets, ran the discussion they should have been having.
“And you don’t miss it?”
“The law? Going on seven years and not a single tear.”
“How could I not know you’ve been back for seven years? My mother—”
“How would she know?”
“In a town of twenty-three people.”
“Not all of them follow local real estate development.”
Casting a curious eye around the room, she surveyed the unfurled architectural plans spread out between them. If she looked interested enough, perhaps he wouldn’t notice she’d run out of things to say.
“Hey, those aren’t for show.”
“I–I—” she stuttered.
“Claudia. Relax. I’m kidding. You don’t need security clearance to be in here.”
In actuality, the plans hadn’t interested her, but now she felt obliged to give them more than their due. She stood to study them. “What is it?”
“Supermarket.”
“The one they’re building—” She pointed out the window, in the direction of the skeleton of steel and rebar she’d passed fifteen miles back, on the way into town.
“That’s the one.”
She’d gleaned enough about Amato & Sons on her previous night’s web search to know that the company had long ago traded house painting for larger construction and contracting jobs across the Capital Region. Nick stood at the helm of the development of countless subdivisions, a college dance theater in Schenectady, a glittering glass office park in Troy, and, most recently, a shopping plaza on the outskirts of Alluvia that housed a dry cleaner, a tanning salon, a Chinese restaurant, and a gargantuan, all-purpose supermarket.
“Wow.”
“Is that a good wow? Or a bad wow?”
“It’s a wow wow. This is enormous.”
“Forty thousand square feet.” Looking up from the drawings, he stood and took in the room with mock pride. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh?”
“He’s building forty-thousand-square-foot supermarkets, and his office looks like the inside of the Elks Lodge.”
She couldn’t disagree. The stained industrial carpet, the Stars and Stripes fastened to blond pressboard paneling, the dusty plastic spider plants struck her as the original set piece of sadness, but her mind at the moment was far away, on her parents’ porch, with the boy in the black hoodie.
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re a lousy liar, Claudia.”
Wrong. She silently corrected him. I’m an excellent liar.
“It’s okay. I’d tear it down tomorrow if I didn’t see my dad everywhere I look. For years he did all of his work out of our kitchen, so it was a big deal for him to have an office. A real office. Even if it is the ugliest place on earth.”
“It’s not the ugliest.”
“It’s close.” He laughed.
“And you’re preserving it in perpetuity.”
“Carrying the torch of unsightliness.”
“Generation to generation.”
“Father to son.”
Her laughter fell dead, as if he’d pulled out a gun and fired it. Claudia opened her mouth to say — what? What could she possibly say? But Nick raised his hand in beneficent appeal. “My bad. I told myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. Which, I’m sure, is exactly why I found a way to bring it up. Pesky unconscious.”
Claudia smiled uncertainly. She was aware of her hands, hanging heavily, stupidly at her sides. She suddenly felt the need for them to have something to do.
“Do you have kids?” Nick paused. “Other kids?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
She cleared her throat and, twisting her engagement ring around so that the diamond dug into her palm, said, “How can you not hate me?”
“Who said I don’t?” He stepped up and hugged her before she could respond, laughing mischievously, and held her close. “Don’t get me wrong. I did. For a long, long time. But who wants to carry that around for a lifetime? We were babies.”
When he let her go, she stayed close for a moment, waiting, as if he might reach out again. He breathed deeply then stepped away.
“I drove past this on the way into town,” she said, returning to the table, the plans.
“You said.”
“So much for Herrick’s,” she answered, aware that the little mom-and-pop venture where she and Nick used to buy paper bags full of Swedish Fish had closed long before the Amatos graduated from house painting. She espoused a theory of the world that would always favor Herrick’s, the two-thousand-square-foot family-owned general store over the refrigerated, cheaply built goliath twenty times its size. In fact, it was precisely these “cathedrals of gluttony,” as she’d called them in an article she’d soon inflict on a roomful of Barnard urban studies majors, that illustrated all that was wrong with Americans’ sense of public space: 1) it was endless, 2) it was theirs for the taking, 3) anything and everything — rape of the land, depletion of natural resources, turning the planet into an unlivable oven — was excusable in the name of convenience. Give her a green market any day! She was an ardent, if not bullying, supporter of sustainable farming and found herself in Union Square twice a week filling her reusable canvas totes with a premium of local bounty. Preferring to patronize the sort of small bodegas and specialty shops that, shining like neighborhood beacons, made Jane Jacobs wax poetic, Claudia shared that vision of a well-functioning city and dreamed of designing dense, vital, suburban developments, with plenty of parks and pedestrian-friendly streets, that would lure the zeitgeist away from its isolating and egotistical fascination with the two-car garage and single-family home. She imagined building her own Winter Park or Seaside — though in no place as tacky or politically inept as Florida — and in this way hoped to make her mark by helping human beings make a smaller, less sprawling one.