Page 63 of On His Mind

I walk. It’s Spring Break, but it’s still forty degrees out. The snow from the last dumping has gone to gray slush at the curb, and the whole town is sleeping. Every window on Ninth is dark. There’s nobody on any of these streets. I’ve got sixty-one dollars folded in my front pocket. Tonight I counted before I left.

The Hawthorne House is cold and black when I get in. I don’t turn the heat on. I go up in the dark. I put the money in the drawer. Four hundred and something now.

In the side pocket of my bag, there’s the puck.

I lie down on top of the covers with my boots off and my jacket still on because it’s forty-one degrees in this house. I look at the ceiling, and the phone is on the mattress next to me, face down.

I don’t check it.

And I don’t sleep.

Chapter 16

Penelope

Thedressislaidout on my bed before I’ve been in the house forty minutes. Gray silk, long sleeves. I didn’t bring it, I didn’t ask for it, and it fits, because she has my measurements. There’s a note on the pillow in her handwriting. The Harringtons at seven.

At seven I come down the stairs in the gray silk with my hair up, and my mother looks at me the way a foreman looks at a finished wall.

“You look stunning,” she says with a smile full of pride.

At dinner, I’m seated beside Charles Harrington’s son, who is twenty-six and does something with commercial real estate and is, to be fair to him, perfectly fine. He asks what I study. I tell him. He says his mother wanted to be an architect, and I saya great many people did, and he laughs as though I’m being charming.

Across the table, someone asks how the internship is going, and my mother answers. She answers all of it. The Chicago project. The two-year build. The position waiting the spring I graduate. She names the corner it’s going on. She gives them the square footage, which I don’t remember ever telling her. She is warm, self-deprecating in the right places, and she sayswetwice. I sit with my hands in my lap and let it happen, because interrupting my mother in front of the Harringtons is a thing that has never once occurred to me as a possibility.

Down the table, my father catches my eye. He gives me the look. The sorry one. The one that’s been crossing tables between us since I was nine years old, that says I know, darling. I see it. Isn’t she something?

Then he reaches for the bottle and refills his wine.

In the hall afterward, my mother touches my elbow and says, “You were lovely tonight.” She means it. She means it in a kind way.

“Thank you,” I say.

I always say thank you.

I text Percy on Thursday.

Me: I’ll be back tonight. The Calder is 53 feet tall, and there was a man eating a burrito under it.

Nothing for four hours.

Percy: Cool.

Cool.

I read that word an unreasonable number of times during my flight. Then I text him about the transom at Bellweather, a thing I noticed that I want to show him. Nothing until nine at night.

Percy:Yeah.

He can’t be serious.

Me:Are you okay?

Percy:Yeah.

I stop, because I have never pursued a person in my life, and I do not intend to start with a freshman hockey player who has decided, for reasons he hasn’t troubled himself to share, that I’m someone he’ll get back to.

Fine.