One afternoon about a week after he’d arrived at the lake, Cal found himself at his sister’s gallery in town, holding a paperweight in his hand. He had no idea why he’d picked it up other than the fact that he was bored; he’d been waiting for fifteen minutes while Allie spoke to a prospective artist who was hoping the gallery would show her work. The young woman in question was in her early twenties, Cal guessed, and her long blond hair was braided, dirndl-style, into a crown on the top of her head, her slender arms adorned with rows of clanking silver bracelets. Add to that her outfit—a flowy skirt, a Central American–style poncho, and UGG boots—and she lent an odd yet appealing note to an otherwise staid Butternut afternoon. Cal hadn’t been listening to her pitch to Allie that carefully, but he gathered that her specialty was found object animal sculptures. It definitely was not his kind of thing, and judging from the expression of strained politeness on Allie’s face, it didn’t appear to be her kind of thing, either, but she hadn’t yet been able to convince her visitor of this. Now Cal held the azure paperweight up to his eyes and looked at the two of them through its blue swirls, then tilted it kaleidoscopically, so that they tilted with it. When he put it back down, Allie was frowning at him slightly. He shrugged.
He lingered, though, in this same corner, where Allie displayed the gallery’s hand-blown glass. There were some nice pieces here, and they had the added attraction, for him, of being the kind of thing Meghan hated. She would never have allowed any of them into their apartment. It was absolutely imperative to her that all lines be “clean lines,” that all surfaces be free of clutter. Clutter. Meghan could never say this word without a little shudder; it was something she believed she must be continually on guard against. If she gave even an inch to it—by, say, placing a framed family photograph on an end table, or a ceramic bowl on a shelf, or a clock on a mantelpiece—then it seemed she’d begin a slow but irreversible slide into hoarding, only to be discovered one future day buried under stacks of old newspapers and takeout food containers.
“Thank you so much for showing me your portfolio, Holly,” Cal heard Allie say. “Your sculptures are very intriguing, not to mention highly sustainable. Right now, though, I just don’t have the space to show them.”
“I understand,” Holly said cheerfully, snapping her portfolio shut and tucking it into the folds of her poncho. “But if you change your mind, let me know. Because honestly, I think the bottle cap prehistoric bird sculptures would look amazing in here. I got a ton of compliments on them at a craft fair last weekend.”
“I’m sure you did,” Allie said, ushering her toward the door. And as they passed him, Cal looked over—he’d been pretending to study an oil painting of pheasants taking flight in an autumnal setting—in time for Holly to grace him with a fetching smile. He smiled back at her reflexively. She was a picture of Bohemian prettiness, and he waited for something, anything, to register with him, but it didn’t, and then she was gone, out the door. With the exception of Meghan, he realized, he’d rarely thought about women lately. No, that wasn’t true. He had thought, at odd moments, about Billy. Billy from the wedding. Billy with the freckles. He had no idea why she’d stayed in his mind, but she had. He wondered now what had happened to her son, and whether she was at the library today.
Allie, who’d walked Holly out to a beat-up light blue Chevy pickup, came back into the gallery. “Sorry about that,” she said to Cal, walking over and giving him a hug. “I didn’t know you were stopping by. What a nice surprise.”
“I hope so,” he said. “Are you sure, though, that you don’t want just one of those bottle cap prehistoric bird sculptures?”
“Maybe one,” Allie mused. “But I’m going to have to pass on the woolly mammoth made out of deflated footballs.”
“Was there a picture of that in her portfolio?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now, that I would have liked to have seen,” Cal said.
“No, she’s sweet,” Allie said. “I think she should stick to her current occupation, though.”
“Which is?”
“Doggie day care.”
“Ahh,” Cal said. He watched as Allie went to straighten up the counter. “Do you have time to come to Pearl’s with me?” he asked, gesturing across the street at its red-and-white-striped awning.
“I’d love to, but I can’t close for more than five minutes. I can make us both a cup of herbal tea to have in back, though,” she said. She had a cubbyhole-sized office tucked behind the gallery.
“Got anything stronger than herbal tea?”
“Like coffee?”
“No, stronger than that.”
“At this time of day?” Allie frowned.
“Why not?”
“Cal, you’re not a drinker,” she reminded him, going to stick a “Back in Five Minutes” note on the outside of the gallery’s front door.
“That’s only because I haven’t had time to be a drinker before. I’m seriously considering it now.”
Allie came back over to him, her frown deepening.
“What?” Cal said.
“Nothing. But since when are you growing a beard?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m just not shaving every day. I’m on vacation. Besides, stubble is very in right now, or haven’t you noticed?”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” Allie said. “Caroline and Jax and I watch The Bachelorette. And trust me, there’s not a single clean-shaven contestant in sight on that show. How do they do that, though? How do they get their stubble just the right length?”
“Beats me.” Cal shrugged. Meghan had always preferred that he shave once a day. Otherwise, she said his face was scratchy when they kissed, and then there was something else, too, that she’d tried to impress upon him, something about the exfoliating benefits of shaving. He cringed inwardly and vowed to banish words like exfoliate from his vocabulary.
“No, the stubble’s fine,” Allie said, leading him back to her office. “You’re just not looking like your usual crisp self.”
“That’s because I’m reveling in my bachelorhood,” he said of his uncombed hair, faded T-shirt, and old jeans. “It’s been very liberating. Dropping my clothes on the floor. Leaving my bed unmade. Not putting the cap on the toothpaste tube.”
“Wow, things sound like they’re really going to seed over there,” Allie teased, turning on an electric kettle on the counter in her office. “No cap on the toothpaste. What’s next? Hanging up a hand towel crookedly?”
“Laugh all you want,” Cal said, sitting down on a swivel chair. “You don’t know what I’ve escaped from.”
“Escaped from?” Allie raised an eyebrow. Cal knew she thought he was being uncharacteristically dramatic.
“No, it’s true. You have no idea what it was like, living with Meghan. She had all of these rules. You couldn’t wear shoes in our apartment because the carpeting was white. You couldn’t read the newspaper on our couch—also white. You couldn’t put a glass down on any surface without a coaster underneath it. I didn’t complain about the rules, for the most part. And I didn’t have any real trouble following them, either. I’m already pretty neat without someone constantly reminding me. But still, if I even slipped up a little . . .” He sighed. “Once I forgot the ‘absolutely no dirty dishes left in the sink’ rule. I’d made a cup of coffee, and I left the teaspoon in the sink. A few minutes later, I’m sitting at my desk, working on my computer, and Meghan comes in and waves a teaspoon in my face and says, in this weird little singsong voice, ‘Are you trying to drive me crazy?’”
“Jeez,” Allie said. “What if you’d left the coffee cup in the sink, too?”
Cal drew a finger across his neck.
Allie laughed, but then she turned serious. “Cal, can I ask you a question?” He nodded. “Do you . . . do you miss her, though? Ever?”
Cal shrugged. “Her, specifically? And not just our life together?”
“Yes, her, specifically.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I do, I think.”
“You think?”
He lifted his shoulders. No, he didn’t miss Meghan. Not after what she had done. But he hadn’t told Allie about that yet. His hurt was still too new, his anger at her dishonesty still too raw. As far as Allie knew, the reason for their divorce was “irreconcilable differences,” and if she wanted more information than that, she’d been careful not to press Cal for it. She was waiting for an answer, though, and since Cal knew it would seem wrong to her that there was nothing he missed about someone he’d been married to for five years, he told her something he thought was at least partly true.
“I miss . . . I miss the idea of her. The person I thought she was when I met her. I thought I knew how everything was going to turn out for us. And now, it’s like . . . when you read the book with the big twist at the end. You should have seen it coming, but you didn’t.”
“Cal,” Allie said. She’d been putting tea bags into teacups, but now she looked over at him, her face softened by a sadness that for some reason made her look even younger than usual. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
“I’ll survive.”
“Of course you will,” she said, pouring boiling water into the teacups. “I’ve never doubted that. In the meantime, though, if you need anything—anything at all—even just to talk, like now, please don’t hesitate to ask me. Okay?”
There was a silence that lasted a beat too long. And Cal, unused to the serious turn their conversation had taken, said lightly, “You know what I need, Allie? A day without lawyers.”
She handed him a cup of tea and sat down across from him. “Lawyers, as in, plural?”
He nodded and sipped his tea. “What is this?” he asked.
“It’s called Tension Tamer.”
He took another sip. He’d never liked herbal teas. “You wouldn’t rather just be tense?” he asked.
She ignored him. “How many divorce lawyers do you need, Cal?”
“One. But I don’t just need one for the divorce.”
She looked at him, puzzled.
“I need one for the business, too.”
“Are you . . . being sued?”
“No, although that is an occupational hazard. I need one because I’m selling my share of the firm.”
“What?” Allie said, and he saw that she was only slightly less shocked by this news than she had been by the news of his divorce. She set her teacup down, hard, on the little desk between them. “What are you talking about, Cal? It’s your firm. It has your name on it. It’s Franklin & Cooper.”
“Was Franklin & Cooper,” he said. Franklin was Guy Franklin, a friend of Cal’s from graduate school who was from a wealthy Seattle family. They’d started the firm together several years ago, and between Guy’s family’s money and connections, Cal’s drive and talent and, frankly, luck, they’d made a name for their firm in a relatively short time. “Now it’s going to be Franklin, Hoult & Washburn,” Cal explained to Allie.
“You’re just . . . quitting?”
“I’m not quitting. I’m selling my shares in it. It’s not the same thing.”
This distinction, though, was lost on Allie. “Did you and Guy have some kind of falling out, too? Is this like . . . another kind of divorce for you?”
“No,” Cal said, taking offense. “Guy and I are still friends. Personally. Professionally, though, there have been some . . . philosophical disagreements between us.” When he and Guy had started out, they’d found their niche converting warehouses into office spaces for start-up companies, but for the last couple of years the firm had designed large office buildings in downtown Seattle, which was much more lucrative than lofts, but also much less interesting to Cal. But Guy was determined to keep designing them, and for the last year, especially, they’d had some conflicts over the direction the firm was taking. “This kind of thing happens all the time in this field, Allie. Architectural firms can be very fluid. One partner leaves. Another comes in. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal, Cal. You loved it. That building you designed . . .”
“It’s still there. I just don’t want to design any more of them. You should see the building the firm is putting up next. It looks like an electric razor. I mean, how many more ugly buildings does the world need?”
“No one’s saying you have to design ugly buildings. But there must be other things you want to design.”
He didn’t answer.
“Well, obviously, there was a reason you got into this field,” Allie prompted.
“Yes. There was. I wanted to build houses, I think. Places where people actually live.”
“So do that.”
“Maybe I will. Right now, though, I don’t want to do anything.”
“Uh-huh,” she said skeptically. “And how long do you think this will last? Your doing nothing?”
“A summer. Maybe longer.” Granted, this would be a new experience for him. He’d been working for as long as he could remember, through high school and college for his dad’s construction company, and in graduate school interning at architectural firms. Then, before he’d known it, he and Guy had been out on their own. The work, far from letting up, had only intensified.
“Cal,” Allie said, shaking her head. “You’re incapable of doing nothing.”
“Maybe in the past. But this time is different. I’ve made plans to do nothing. I’m developing a system for doing nothing. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to take that rubber raft I saw in the boathouse, tie it up to the end of the dock, get in it and just . . . lie there. All day. If I get hot, I’ll jump in the water. Thirsty? I’ll grab a beer. Bored? I’ll read a book.”
Allie rolled her eyes. “Cal, it’s not going to happen. You have the strongest work ethic of anyone I’ve ever known. Mom likes to tell people you started your first business at three. Your pet turtle feeding business.”
“That was not a success, as I recall.”
“No, but everything else you’ve done has been.” This was not technically true. His was not a perfect record. There’d been bids he’d lost, clients who’d left for other firms, projects that had come in behind schedule or overbudget. Overall, though, he had to admit his career had followed a steady upward trajectory. And no one, he knew, had been prouder of this than Allie, who was looking at him now with a gently quizzical expression on her face, as if he were a much-loved puzzle whose pieces had suddenly been scrambled in a newly bewildering way. And then she sighed, sipped her tea, tried to put an escaped strand of her hair back into the loose bun she favored while working, and finally smiled, a little wearily, at him.
“I just realized something, Cal,” she said. “You’re having a midlife crisis. A full-blown one. A divorce, a sports car, a job change, you name it. Only you’re having this crisis about ten years early. I’ve got to hand it to you, though. You really are precocious, aren’t you? Mom always said so. By the way, have you told her about this, Cal? Her and Dad?”
“No.”
“Not any of it?” She meant the divorce, too.
“Nope. They think I’m here just to get some rest. I’m not that worried, though. I think they can handle my getting divorced. They never liked Meghan, did they?”
Allie raised her shoulders noncommittally. She was loyal to the core, Cal thought. If her parents had told her this in confidence, she would never repeat it. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “They won’t like the part about you leaving the firm, though. They’re so proud of you, Cal. They had that feature from Seattle Magazine blown up and framed. It’s hanging on their living room wall. What was it called? ‘Forty under Forty’?”
“Those lists don’t mean anything,” Cal said. “Except that you have a good publicist or you’re photogenic, or, preferably, both.”
“What about that award you got?” Allie pressed, but Cal didn’t want to talk about that, either. “You’re going back to it, though, aren’t you?” she asked. “Architecture? I mean, you can work for another firm, right? Or start your own?”
“Sure,” he said, more to end the conversation than because he actually believed it.
Allie chewed her lip, something she did when she was worried, and stopped only because someone knocked on the gallery’s door. “I’ve got to reopen,” she said, standing up. “You’re welcome to stick around, though.”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to get going.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got a phone conference soon.”
“Lawyers?” Allie asked.
“Lawyers,” Cal agreed.