“I’m so sorry about—” She gestured toward the stain.
James looked down at his shoulder and shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be dealt with later. Arthur’s a genius with laundry. What that man can do with a little white vinegar and baking soda would shock even you.”
She’d sprayed Tide on James’s clothes their entire marriage and never once been praised for it. “The guest bathroom, I can’t remember, it’s—?”
“First door to your right.” He pointed. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Wine? I know it’s still early, but if an occasion ever called for it—”
“God, yes,” she said automatically. “Wait. Not right now. Thank you, though. Water, please. Sparkling, if you’ve got it.”
“Water?” He repeated it like she’d made her request using a different language, and started down the steps into the sunken living room. “All right. Sparkling water. Sure. Coming right up.”
“Wait a second.”
James turned around expectantly. “Yes?”
“Do you—do you have anything to—? I know I’m here without being invited, and I really don’t want to be rude, especially after you’ve been so kind to me, but—” She could feel her face heating. “To be honest, I’m a little—”
Clearly puzzled, he waited for her to complete her sentence.
“Hungry,” she finished.
His mouth opened in genuine astonishment.
Had Anne ever admitted so explicitly to James that she owned something as humiliating as an appetite? “I haven’t had lunch. It would be nice to have something to snack on. If you’ve got anything handy.”
“You’re—?”
“A hungry lesbian, James. Catch up.”
He laughed, a quiet, kind laugh, conspiratorial, as if they’d shared a private joke.
A pained, tight coil inside Anne—one that’d been corkscrewed tightly since the car ride home from Joshua Tree—loosened slightly.
“I think I can put something together for us.” James wasn’t winking at her, not quite, but the tone was close. “Fruit?”
“Don’t you dare start with me,” she warned, although the corners of her mouth were twitching a little. “We’re not there yet.”
But maybe they would be. Eventually.
In the bathroom down the hall, Anne took a moment to stare at herself in the enameled cast-iron mirror. Stared at her reddened eyes and her pale skin and her tousled hair, the same color as the wine she’d left on the kitchen counter back home.Most of the makeup she’d applied that morning was gone. She splashed a little cold water on her cheeks and pinched them for color.
“You’re a lesbian,” she told her reflection, and, incredibly, the woman in the mirror didn’t fall apart or change or shrink from the word. She just said it right back.
It terrifies you, doesn’t it?Sadie had asked her.
Sadie was right. That word did frighten Anne. It carried old and ingrained associations with women you weren’t supposed to be like. Women who were made fun of, sneered at, pitied. And although she knew that times had changed, a voice inside her still shrieked that lesbians were other people. Not her, not Anne. Someone had made a mistake. She wasn’t supposed to be one. She was supposed to be what she’d always tried so hard to be.
You’re not normal.Sadie, under a black sky in the night desert.And neither am I. We’re both so much better than that.
Fear, yes. But not just. Relief, too. Marrow-deep, shattering relief.
Because that one word,lesbian, had already given Anne a first gift: permission. No matter what happened next—what Sadie decided or didn’t—Anne didn’t have to try so hard anymore.
On her way to the living room, she passed a tall, broad bookcase, overflowing with stacks and stacks—Arthur’s doing, James wasn’t a reader—and several books lying face up on the shelf at eye level. A familiar cover immediately caught her eye.
Anne stopped short.
Close to the Feeling, the title read, over an illustration of one hand reaching toward another. Below that:Sadie Rosenthal.