The Tilt of Her Smile

Four years ago I walked into my own thirtieth birthday party early and caught my girlfriend with her hand down a man's shirt.

Let me back up. I'm Mara. I was thirty then, actually. The party was for my birthday, which felt like an extra insult. My girlfriend Renee had planned the whole thing. Caterer, string lights, a playlist she'd made me swear I'd love. I came back from the parking lot early because I'd forgotten the gift my sister brought, and there she was, in the kitchen of our own apartment, pressed against the counter by a guy named Derek.

I knew Derek. He was her coworker. He'd come to my birthday two years running.

Renee saw me first. Her face did this thing, this tilt, this awful half-smile, like she could talk her way out of anything. She'd used that smile on me for six years.

"Mara. Hey. This isn't..."

"Don't." I said it flat. I remember my voice sounded almost bored. "Don't finish that sentence. Whatever it is, don't."

Derek at least had the decency to step back and look at the floor. Renee didn't. That's the part I think about sometimes. She straightened her top and said, "You weren't supposed to be back yet."

That was her defense. Timing.

I put my sister's gift on the counter, picked up my keys off the hook by the door, and walked out through my own party. Thirty candles on a cake I never saw. People said my name as I went. I kept walking.

* * *

I moved to a coastal town three states away because it was the farthest cheap place on a map. I fix old books. It's quiet work, mostly alone, which suited me fine. Two years of quiet. I got very good at quiet.

My grandfather Walt lived up the coast, in the house with the sagging boathouse. He died last spring, seventy-six years old, stubborn to the end. His widow, my grandmother Vera, lives in a flat in the city and wanted nothing to do with the place, so he left it to me, the house and the boathouse and about four hundred dollars of back property tax I didn't know about. That's the kind of gift he'd give. Wonderful, with a catch attached.

The boathouse was the catch. It was rotting into the water. Every contractor who came out quoted me numbers that made me laugh, the bitter kind of laugh, and then leave.

Which brings me to the party.

My neighbor Doreen throws a backyard party every June. I go every year out of guilt. It's the social equivalent of flossing. You do it so you can say you did.

This year I was standing by the drink table holding a beer I wasn't drinking when I heard the screaming.

Not party screaming. Real screaming. A little kid, maybe three years old, red-faced, having the kind of meltdown where they've gone past words entirely. The mother was a young woman I didn't know, and she was at the end of her rope. You could see it. She was doing that hissing thing mothers do, "stop it, stop it, please stop," which never works, and the kid was arching her back like a caught fish.

And then this woman knelt down.

Short dark hair, olive skin, about my age, maybe a couple years older. Work boots. Shoulders like someone who hauls things for a living. She knelt right down in the grass at the kid's level and didn't touch her, just got close.

"Hey. Hey. Big feelings, huh!"

The kid screamed.

"Yep. I get it. Screaming is fair. There's a lot going on here."

I swear to you, the kid stopped mid-scream to glare at her. It was almost funny. The woman just nodded like they'd reached an understanding.

"You want to sit down and be mad, or stand up and be mad? Either one's fine. I'll wait."

The kid sat down in the grass. Still furious. But sitting. The woman sat down next to her, cross-legged, and looked out at the yard like it was all very interesting and nobody was melting down at all.

After a minute the kid leaned against her. The mother made a sound of pure relief and mouthed thank you, and the woman shrugged and said, "She's just having a day. Everybody has days. You want me to hold the fort while you get a drink? I'm great at forts."

She looked at the kid. "You want juice? I'm getting juice. Mine's got no juice in it at all. Terrible juice." She held up her beer.

The kid said something. I didn't catch it. The woman laughed, this big easy laugh, and got up, and the kid reached up for her hand like it was nothing, like they'd known each other for years.

I watched her pour apple juice with the concentration of a surgeon. She looked over. Caught me staring.

"You want one too?" she called. "I make no promises about quality!"

I held up my beer. "I'm fine."

"You're holding it like evidence," she said, and grinned, and went back to her juice.

I looked down at my beer. I had been holding it like evidence. Like I was planning to press charges against it.

* * *

The party wound down around ten. Doreen shooed people out the gate with leftovers. I was on the curb waiting for a cab when a voice said, "Evidence girl."

It was her. The juice woman. She had a bag over her shoulder and a toolbox in her hand, of all things.

"You're taking a cab?" she asked.

"That was the plan."

"Where? I'm going toward the water, the driver can drop you on the way."

The cab pulled up. I looked at her. She looked like the kind of person who'd already decided this was happening and was just being polite about the order of events.

"Fine," I said. "But I'm weird in cabs. Fair warning."

"Everyone's weird in cabs. It's a weird form of transportation."

We got in. She gave an address on Pilgrim Creek Road. I gave mine. The driver nodded and pulled out.

She stuck out her hand. "Jules."

"Mara."

"Mara. That's a good name. Solid. You could take a hit with a name like Mara."

"What's yours short for?"

"Julia, but if you call me that I'll know my mother is nearby and I'll panic."

I laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, for the first time in a while. It surprised both of us, I think. She looked pleased with herself.

"So what's in the toolbox?" I asked. "You bringing tools to parties now?"

"I came from a job. Someone's bilge pump died at the worst possible moment, which is the only moment bilge pumps die. Marine electrician." She said it like other people say firefighter. Like it was a good story. It kind of was.

The cab rattled along. She talked the whole way, not in an annoying way. In a way that filled space I didn't have to fill. About the boat she was renovating, an old wooden thing she was living on while she rebuilt it, which she admitted was insane. About the tide. About Doreen's potato salad, which she'd had three helpings of.

Then she asked about me, and I said I fix old books, and she stopped talking for the first time all ride.

"You fix books. Like, torn pages? Broken spines?"

"Broken spines. Water damage. Burn damage, sometimes."

"That's the coolest thing anyone at that party does. By a lot. Nobody else even comes close."

The cab stopped at my place. I paid, because she reached for her wallet and I said "don't, you bought potato salad, you've done your part."

And then she didn't get out of my way. She stood there on the curb with her toolbox, this warm open face, and said, "Look. I don't know if you drink coffee. But I've had a long day and I'd love a cup before the drive home, and your porch has good light. I noticed it from the street."

She'd noticed my porch. In the dark. I stood there with my keys in my hand, and my brain did the thing it does, the math it does. She's coming in. Then what. Then she stays. Then it's a thing. Then it's a thing that ends the way things end. Renee's half-smile floated up out of nowhere like a bad bubble in a level.

"Mara?" Jules said. Her face had gone careful. "Forget it, honestly. Bad idea. This was a nice..."

"No, it's..." My mouth ran ahead of my brain, which it does when I'm panicking. "It's late. I have an early morning. A client. Delivery. You should go."

I said it fast and flat and mean, meaner than she deserved, and I saw it land. To her credit she didn't argue. She nodded once, said, "Sure. Goodnight, Mara. It was nice to meet you," and walked back toward the cab, which was still idling at the curb. Smart woman. She'd kept her exit.

I stood on my porch and watched the taillights go and felt like the worst person alive.

She'd knelt in the grass for a stranger's kid. She'd poured juice like it mattered. And I'd slammed a door on her because four years ago a woman smiled at me with half her mouth.

I went inside. I didn't sleep much.

I woke up at six feeling like a sandbag. Rain on the windows. Good excuse to do nothing.

I did something. Worse.

I sat at my workbench with a mug of coffee and typed "how do you know if you're a lesbian" into a search bar like a person in a bad movie. Then I deleted it. Then I typed "am I too old to figure out sexuality" and hit enter before I could delete that one too.

The internet had its own views. The internet always has opinions. Forums. Quizzes. A quiz asked me to rate my comfort with the word "queer" on a scale of one to five, which is not a thing you can rate. It's not soup.

I read for two hours. Here's what I learned. Late bloomers are a whole category. People figure it out at thirty, at forty, at sixty-eight. People leave marriages. People don't leave marriages. There are words for things I didn't know had words, and every one of those words had a fight going on underneath it in the comments.

I closed the laptop.

Here's the part I haven't said out loud, to anyone, ever. Not to Vera, not to my therapist from three years ago, not to the notebook I keep in the drawer with the riso paper.

Renee wasn't the only one. There was Lea, in grad school, in Chicago, twenty-six years old and wearing a flannel she'd have burned if she knew what it started. We never called it anything. We'd drink cheap wine on her fire escape and she'd put her hand on my knee and I'd let it stay there and my whole brain would go quiet, this gorgeous hum, and then I'd go home and not text her for four days.

And before Lea there was a woman at my undergraduate library, a few years older than me, who shelved art books and smiled at me and I used to take the long route past the shelves just to feel whatever that was in my chest.

I told myself all of it was friendship. For twenty years I told myself that. I'm good at telling myself things. I repair books. I make broken objects look like nothing ever happened to them. Turns out I've been doing conservation work on my own interior too, and unlike the books, it wasn't holding.

Because consider this. When Jules asked for coffee, my brain didn't say "you don't even know her." My brain said "she's not for you." Like there was a category. Like someone had filed me at thirty and the folder was closed.

I made more coffee I didn't need.

At nine I called Vera. She answered on the first ring because she's seventy-two and still treats the telephone like it might be the president.

"Did you sleep?"

"Barely."

"Good. Sleep is overrated past a certain age, it's just rehearsal for the main event." A pause. "You met someone."

"I didn't meet anyone."

"You met someone. You have a voice. The one you got when you were twenty-three and that girl with the motorcycle..."

"There was no girl with a motorcycle!"

"There was absolutely a girl with a motorcycle, you told me about her at Thanksgiving and then denied it for a decade." Vera has this way of talking where every sentence ends with a sense of finality. "So. Her name."

"Vera."

"Her name, Mara."

"Jules," I said, because lying to Vera has never once worked. "She's an electrician. Marine systems. She was at the party."

"And you ruined it."

"How did you..."

"Because you always ruin it, dear. It's your one consistent talent. You ruin things preemptively so nobody else gets the chance to ruin them first." She let that sit. "Go see her. Apologize. Bring something. People forgive almost anything if you bring something."

"She doesn't want anything from me."

"Then bring nothing and say the words. The words are the something." A clatter on her end, the cat, probably. "Mara. I'm seventy-two. I buried your grandfather and I buried a version of myself I liked better, honestly. I don't have time for your third act to be this slow."

She hung up on me. She does that. It's her signature move.

* * *

I didn't go see Jules that day. I would like to say it was principle. It was cowardice with better lighting.

I went the next evening.

Pilgrim Creek Road ends at the water in a way that isn't scenic, exactly. It's functional. Working boats, a fuel dock, a line of houses on stilts that have stopped pretending they're cottages. Her boat was the third one out. I knew because she'd described it in the cab, "the ugly one with the good bones," and it was exactly that. Peeling green paint. Straight lines underneath.

She was on the roof. Not the boat roof. The actual roof of the boathouse beside it, the one with the tarp on it, prying up shingles in the last light.

I stood on the dock and watched her work for a minute before she saw me. She was good at it. Efficient. No wasted motion. When she finally noticed me she stopped, hammer resting on her thigh, and looked down, and her face did something complicated and then settled on neutral.

"Book girl," she said.

"Mara."

"Mara." She climbed down the ladder without hurrying. Stood in front of me. Tool belt. Forearms. I'm mentioning the forearms because it was a whole event, my pulse doing something embarrassing, and honesty costs nothing at this point. "You here to tell me to go to hell again? You should know I've already been once today, the fuel dock guy was in a mood."

"No. I'm here to say I was wrong. The other night. I was..." I gestured at nothing. "I do a thing. Where I close the door before it can close on me. It's not personal. It wasn't about you."

"Okay," she said. She wiped her hands on a rag. "Thanks for saying it."

"That's it? Okay?"