The Roast of Us

The roastery smelled like burnt sugar and fresh beans when we walked in, and I stood there for a second just breathing it in, because Terry had told me about this place for years and I'd never actually seen it. Copper machines along the far wall, a long counter of dark wood, exposed brick that somebody had clearly paid a lot of money to make look old. Fairy lights strung along the ceiling beams even though it wasn't dark yet, just that gray coastal evening light that makes everything look slightly damp.

"Okay, this is nice," Wendell said beside me, shrugging off his jacket. "Better than I pictured."

"You pictured a shed with a roaster in it, be honest."

"I pictured a shed with a very good roaster in it."

He's thirty-seven, my husband, tall in a way that lets him get away with bad posture, and he was already scanning the room for faces he knew from university, that half-smile he gets when he's nervous. I'm thirty-six, I'm a therapist, and I know exactly what that half-smile means, which is one of the hazards of my job. You spend ten years learning to read people and then you can't stop doing it at parties.

Dora found us before we found the bar.

That's not a figure of speech, I mean it literally, she appeared from somewhere near the espresso machine and came across the floor like she was on casters, arms out, calling Wendell's name. She's the ex, Dora, dated him in college from when they were both twenty-one until twenty-three, and I have known about her for the entire fourteen years since they broke up, and I have never once had to think about her in three dimensions until tonight. In my head she was a paragraph. In person she was a woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit with an events planner's lanyard already around her neck, running her own reunion weekend, greeting forty people like a mayor.

"Wendell! Oh my god, look at you, you haven't changed at all, you've absolutely changed, come here." She hugged him, a real hug, both arms, and laughed at something he said that I couldn't hear. Then she turned to me and her face did this warm open thing that I instantly resented. "And you must be Akari. He talks about you constantly. I feel like I already know you."

"Nice to meet you," I said, and meant maybe sixty percent of it. "This is a beautiful space."

"Isn't it? I nearly cried when I got the booking. Terry's beans, this view, honestly." She touched Wendell's arm, just briefly, just the forearm, the way you'd touch someone you'd once shared a bed with for two years. "Okay, drink station's over there, name tags are a crime so I banned them, and if anyone asks, the tour of the roasting floor is tomorrow at eleven. Go, mingle, I have three more cars of people coming."

She glided off toward the door because another couple had come in, and I watched her do it, the greeting, the hug, the arm, the warm open face, a perfect copy of what she'd given us, and I realized she could do this forty times a night and make every person feel like the guest of honor. That's a skill. I respect skills. I still didn't like her.

"Drink?" Wendell asked.

"Whisky. Neat. Don't make a face."

"I wasn't making a face."

"You were making it internally."

We got our drinks and found a spot near the window where the light was going blue over the harbor, and Terry appeared out of the crowd like she always does, short, quick, forty pounds of espresso in her blood at all times. She met me six years ago in a continuing education course for couples therapy, we discovered we both hated the textbook, and she's been my closest friend since. She owns this place.

"You came," she said, hugging me one-armed. "You came to your husband's ex's event. I'm so proud and so fascinated."

"We came to a reunion. She's hosting. That's all this is."

"Mm. And how's that working for you, clinically speaking?"

"I'm having a whisky at five forty in the evening, what do you think."

Terry laughed and stole a sip of Wendell's beer, and Wendell said, "By the way, the elevator's broken, apparently it's been out for weeks, so if your room's upstairs you're doing stairs."

"You put us on the second floor?" I asked.

"Third floor, actually. Ocean side." He said it with the mild apologetic tone of a man reporting weather. "Dora said the good rooms are all up top. She said, and I quote, you have to climb the stairs to get to the good stuff." He laughed a little when he said it, remembering the joke, and I watched him laugh at his ex's joke and I drank some whisky about it.

"Convenient that she put you two at the top," Terry said, in the tone of a person adding a log.

"Terry," I said.

"What, it's an observation."

"It's bait and you know it."

Terry grinned at me and went off to deal with a delivery, because Terry always has a delivery, and Wendell and I stood at the window while the room filled up behind us. Forty people, most of them strangers to me, classmates of his from a cohort I never belonged to. I know how that sounds. I like my own friends, my own life, my own practice in the city, and I came here anyway because he asked, and because I wanted to, mostly, and because there was a small mean part of me that wanted to see Dora up close and confirm she was nothing.

She was not nothing. That was the problem.

I drifted, whisky in hand, doing the social thing, and I ended up near the cupping table talking to a woman named Meg who did something in logistics and was very funny about her own divorce, and we were getting along fine when Dora appeared beside us with a tray of those little rice crackers Terry puts out, and a man I didn't know, gray at the temples, went up to her and said, "Dora, Dora, tell them about Barcelona, that summer you two did Barcelona."

He said it easily, the way you reference a story everyone in a group already knows, and I felt my whole body go still in the specific way I go still when a client says something that matters.

"Oh, god, Barcelona," Dora said, laughing, waving the cracker tray like she was swatting the memory away. "That was the summer Wendell and I, yes, okay, so, we were useless, we were twenty-two, we had no money, we slept in this apartment with a roof that leaked, and Wendell insisted he could fix the shower with a coat hanger."

"And I could," Wendell said, arriving from somewhere behind me with terrible timing, because of course he arrived then, of course.

"It took him four days."

"Three and a half."

"And the whole building flooded and the downstairs lady fed us paella for a week because she felt sorry for us." Dora had her hand on the gray-templed man's sleeve now, telling it, and everyone was laughing, and Wendell was laughing, and I was standing right there with my whisky and nobody noticed that I had never in my life heard about Barcelona.

Five years together, five since we met at that co-working space, two married, and I know about his knee surgery and his dread of his mother's calls and the way he cries at documentaries about whales, and I did not know that he once spent a summer in a leaking apartment in Barcelona with the woman now holding the cracker tray.

"Akari, have you been?" Dora asked, turning to me warmly, including me, because she's good at that.

"I haven't, actually," I said, level, pleasant, professional. "Sounds like quite a summer."

"It was nothing," Wendell said quickly, and then, catching the word, "I mean, it was just, we were broke and it rained a lot."

"It was magical," Dora said, and patted his arm again.

I finished my whisky and asked Terry, quietly, if there was another bottle of the good one behind the counter, and she looked at me and read the whole room in two seconds because she's known me six years, and she said, "Coming right up," and didn't ask a single question, which is why she's my best friend.

The reunion dinner went long and loud at the big table in the event space, forty people, toasts, a slideshow somebody had made that was mostly terrible photos of people now in their late thirties pretending to be younger. I sat across from Wendell and made conversation with a marine biologist and did not look at the head of the table where Dora presided, and I mostly succeeded.

By midnight the party had broken into small drifting groups, and one by one we climbed the stairs to bed.

We're staying in the apartments in the building across the street from the roastery. Third floor. Ocean side. Stairs, because the elevator has been broken for weeks, which I know because my husband told me twice.

I'll get to the elevator later. It matters later.

The next morning was for dress fitting, because Dora had decided the farewell dinner, the seated one with the printed menus, deserved a proper photograph, and she had hired someone to take pictures at golden hour down by the seawall, and so she had arranged for a tailor to come to the roastery with a rolling rack and a portable mirror and an alarming number of pins. I own one good dress. It's navy, it travels well, and it has survived three weddings and a conference, and I had planned to wear it and be done with it, but Dora had emailed everyone weeks ago with a color palette, soft coastal tones, she called them, and my navy was a rebellion I hadn't quite committed to.

So I stood on the little platform in my slip while the tailor, a quiet man named Osamu who said maybe forty words all morning, circled me with chalk, and Terry sat on a crate near the copper machines with a cortado she kept forgetting to drink, and Wendell stood by the window in his new jacket looking like a tall man being slowly pressed flat.

"That's good, that's actually good," Dora said, coming around the mirror to look at me, and she meant it, I could tell she meant it, which was somehow worse. "Akari, you have the shoulders for this neckline, do you know that? Most people don't. Most people drown in a neckline like this." She flicked the strap with one finger and smiled at me, warm and fast, and turned away before I could decide whether to be flattered. That's her whole method, I think. Warm and fast. A compliment before you've finished bracing for one. I've sat with enough clients to know the difference between someone being kind and someone managing a room, and Dora is both at once, generously, all day, and it makes you feel crazy for even noticing.

Wendell was having his own problem, which was his tie. He has worn a tie maybe six times in the five years I've known him, and each time it has looked like a man being hanged by his own clothing, and this morning was no different, and he was standing by the window fighting the knot with gray coastal light coming through the glass behind him when Dora crossed the room to him with the ease of a person crossing her own kitchen. "Oh, for god's sake, give me that," she said, and he gave it to her, of course, the way you hand something to someone who has done it before, and she reached up, because he's tall and she is not, and her hands went to his collar, and I watched her fix his tie in about nine seconds.

It was nothing. I want to start there, because the reasonable version of me, the version with ten years of clinical training and a license on the wall, knows it was nothing. A woman adjusted a tie. Her hands touched his collar. He looked down at her and said something I couldn't hear and she laughed and flicked the knot into place and patted his chest twice, twice, like you would pat a brother, or a client, or a coat rack, and then she was gone, back toward the kitchen with her lanyard swinging, calling out something about the seating chart. It was nothing. It lasted maybe eleven seconds. My smile froze at the fourth one and did not thaw until Terry appeared at my elbow and said, "Your cortado's cold, I'm making you a new one," which is friend code for come with me right now, and I went, because the alternative was standing on a platform in a slip with my face doing whatever my face was doing.

She didn't say anything about it at the counter, not directly. She just made the new cortado, slid it over, and said, "So, the elevator."

"What about the elevator," I said.

"It's been broken for weeks. I keep meaning to fix it and then not fixing it."

"Terry, it's your elevator."

"Right, but if I fix it, then it works, and then it's just an elevator." And I laughed, actually laughed, which is the other thing she's for, and the frozen feeling in my face let go by degrees while Osamu pinned the hem and Wendell, behind us, finally got his own tie crooked again.

The thing is, it wasn't the tie. I need to be accurate about this, because I'm a therapist and I make my living out of people lying to themselves in complicated ways, and I refuse to do it in an interesting direction. It was Barcelona. The tie was just the place where the pressure showed, the way knee pain shows up in your hip. Five years. Two of them married. Three of cohabitation before that, and then the wedding, small, at the harbor, his mother cried, my mother took photos of the food. And in all that time I have catalogued this man, I could write his intake summary from memory, presenting concerns, family history, coping mechanisms, the whale documentaries, and there is an entire summer, an entire person-shaped summer, that never came up. Not once. Not as an anecdote at a dinner party, not as a story when we couldn't sleep, nothing. And it wasn't hidden, that's the part that sat wrong with me all night and into the morning. He told it publicly, easily, with her, like it was common property. He just never told me.

So when the fitting was over and the rack was wheeled away and Dora swept off to deal with a florist crisis, I found Wendell in the storage room behind the