Page 59 of On His Mind

I immediately know why she’s calling.

“Richard tells me you’re on the Chicago project. Two years. And a position waiting the spring you graduate.”

“Yes.”

“A junior architect at Whitmore before you’ve even graduated.” She laughs — warm, delighted, the warmest she’s been with me since I was a child. “Do you have any idea what people would do for that? Every dinner I go to, women ask me how my daughter did it.”

How my daughter did it.

“I know,” I say.

“And you didn’t want to go to that first dinner.” A pause I’m meant to fill. I don’t. “I told you it would be worth it. Didn’t I tell you?”

The sentence is right there on the tip of my tongue. It has been right there since December.

“You did,” I say. “Thank you, Mom.”

“Call me on Sunday.”

She hangs up.

I sit on the edge of my bed in my quiet apartment and hold the phone until the screen goes dark.

That night, Percy’s in the chair by the lamp with his tea going cold at his elbow and a book he took off my shelf without asking, because I told him to help himself.

I’m at my desk. I’ve been on the same drawing for two hours, and it isn’t for Whitmore.

At some point, he gets up and comes to stand behind my shoulder, which he has never done, and looks down at it for a while.

It’s a house. Low and long, sitting into a slope. There’s a courtyard through the middle so that no room in it is ever without two ways to see daylight, and a run of high windows on the north wall that would give flat, even, shadowless light all day.

“That’s the light thing,” he says. “From the hallway.”

“Clerestory.” I’m absurdly pleased. “Yes.”

He looks at it for a long time, hands behind his back.

“Who’s it for?”

“Nobody.”

He waits. And then I understand what he’s asking, which is not the question I have been answering my whole life. He wants to know who is going to live in it. What kind of person. Whose coat goes by the door.

“It’s not for anyone,” I say. “It’s a study.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just something random I’m working on.”

“Okay.” He says it easily and then goes back to the chair.

I sit with my pencil over the house I’ve been drawing, in one version or another, since I was sixteen. I’ve drawn a hundred of them. Wide yards, good bones, light coming in exactly where I put it, and I have never once imagined a single human being inside any of them. I’ve never drawn a chair pulled out from a table. I’ve never drawn a coat hung by a door. There’s an entire neighborhood in my sketchbook, and nobody lives in it. I put the pencil down.

“Do you want more tea?”

“Yeah,” he says.

I grab our mugs and make us another cup.