Chapter 10 - A Room of Our Own
Two years after I tore open the headboard, I delivered a bed to Dante Montenegro.
Gordon came with the truck because he refused to let me treat finishing a major piece as an excuse to damage it on the stairs.
“You're emotionally attached,” he told me. “That makes you careless.”
“You've complained about that bed for three months.”
“Because I'm emotionally attached.”
I kissed his cheek and let him direct the delivery.
The frame was walnut. Clean lines. Good joints. A finish I had worked on until even Gordon stopped finding things to criticize.
I had designed it with his help and built it in the shop where I now managed restoration work and was gradually buying an interest through an arrangement we had negotiated properly.
I knew what the papers meant.
That mattered to me.
The bed was going into the townhouse Dante and I had chosen after we married.
We had wanted somewhere closer to my work, with light in the kitchen and enough room for people to visit without feeling admitted to a state occasion.
Bruno had opinions about the doors.
I had opinions about the windows.
Somehow, the house survived the discussion.
Our wedding had been small, by the river, with my mother walking carefully beside me and Lucia pretending she wasn't crying before the ceremony began.
Mrs. Bell cried openly and criticized the flowers with equal sincerity.
Nobody discussed alliances.
Dante asked whether I wanted to marry him. I said yes. We signed our own names and went to lunch with the people we loved.
It was enough.
Now he stood in the doorway of our bedroom watching the new frame come together.
“I'm being replaced,” he said.
“Your furniture is.”
“I thought I was still useful for carrying things.”
Gordon looked at him.
“You can carry the mattress.”
I laughed so hard I had to leave the room.
Later, after the truck departed and the house grew quiet, Dante ran his hand over the finished headboard.
“You made this.”
“With help.”
“It's beautiful.”
I stood beside him.
I had wondered whether finishing it would bring the old room back. The buzzing. The lights. The terrible moment my hands held proof of something I hadn't yet understood.
Some of the memory came.
It didn't take the room away from me.
There was sunlight on the floor. A crooked photograph on the dresser. My husband's hand resting beside mine on wood I had shaped myself.
This was a different day.
“Does it meet your requirements?” I asked.
“There are requirements?”
“You have strong opinions about beds.”
He looked at me.
Then he laughed.
He still saw Dr. Park when appropriate. Some nights were restless. Stress remained stress, even when nobody had arranged it maliciously.
But he slept.
He woke without searching for a sound he couldn't explain. He could be tired without being treated as unreliable. He could remember Anna without wondering who had borrowed her voice.
Once a year, we visited her grave with Lucia.
Love hadn't required me to erase the woman who had been there before me.
It had required both of us to make room for the people we actually were.
My mother came for dinner that evening. She brought a pie from a bakery and spent ten minutes explaining why she hadn't made it herself.
“You're allowed to buy pie,” I told her.
“It feels like cheating.”
“Then we'll be criminals together.”
Dante looked up from the plates.
I pointed at him.
“Not your department.”
He laughed and carried the pie to the table.
Lucia arrived with flowers. Bruno came later, officially to check a minor issue at the gate, unofficially because my mother had told him there would be enough food.
Mrs. Bell called halfway through dinner to ask whether Gordon had scratched the stairs.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Keep him supervised.”
I promised.
We ate too much. Argued about a movie. Listened while my mother described a man at her community exercise class who believed every instructor had something personal against his knees.
There were no emergency meetings.
No one needed to earn the right to stay at the table.
After everyone left, I found Dante in the bedroom examining the new frame again.
“You know,” he said, “I never sent you a bill for the old one.”
“I was hoping you'd forgotten.”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Very unfortunate.”
He put his arms around me.
“Best thing anyone ever broke in my house.”
I rested my forehead against his chest.
“You were terrifying that morning.”
“I know.”
“I'm glad you listened.”
His hand moved gently over my back.
“I'm glad you made me.”
I stepped away enough to look at him.
“I shouldn't have had to make you.”
He nodded immediately.
“You're right.”
That was still one of the things I loved most about our life: a difficult truth could be spoken without somebody having to lose the room.
We changed for bed.
A faint vibration traveled through the mattress just as I was reaching for my book.
For one sharp second, my whole body remembered.
Then a striped head emerged from beneath the blanket.
Pickle, the cat Mrs. Bell had persuaded us to adopt, stretched across Dante's chest and began purring with unreasonable confidence.
I stared at him.
Then I began to laugh.
Dante looked down at the animal occupying most of his breathing space.
“Another unauthorized installation.”
“This one came with paperwork.”
He scratched the cat behind one ear.
The purring grew louder.
I picked up my book, then put it down again when he asked about my day.
I told him about a difficult customer, a chair Gordon wanted to rescue from the trash, and the apprentice who had finally trusted herself to redo a mistake instead of hiding it.
He listened until his eyes began to close.
Nobody in the room was keeping him awake on purpose.
Nobody needed to.
May you like
There would be more stories in the morning.
I turned off the lamp, settled beside my husband, and let the room grow quiet.
