The note was still stuck to the refrigerator where Phoebe had left it two nights ago, block letters on a torn corner of guitar-string packaging because she never seemed to have real paper on her when an idea hit: BOTANIC GARDEN some Saturday bring the good shoes, not the church ones.
Mike had read it probably a dozen times since, mostly without meaning to, the way you keep touching a bruise to confirm it’s still there.
It was, he’d decided, the single best thing currently attached to his refrigerator, and also completely unhelpful for what he was about to do, which required him to not be thinking about her at all for the next several minutes, a task he was already failing.
The landline sat on the counter beside the note, cord coiled the way it always coiled, patient in the way objects get when they know you’re stalling.
He’d made coffee he didn’t want.
He’d straightened a stack of sheet music that had already been straight.
He’d stood at the piano for four full minutes without sitting down, which wasn’t practicing, wasn’t anything, just a body finding an excuse to be somewhere that wasn’t the phone.
He picked up the receiver before he could invent a fifth excuse and dialed the number from memory, the way you dial a number you’ve called your whole life without ever wanting to.
It rang twice.
Bitsy answered on the third the way she always did never eager, never a beat sooner than propriety required.
“Hannigan residence.”
“It’s me.”
A pause, precisely calibrated, the kind that in person came with a very specific look at a very specific angle.
“Well.
There he is.
I’d nearly given up on Thursday.”
“I’m calling now.”
“You’re calling four days after Thursday, darling, which is a different thing entirely, but I won’t make a production of it.” A sound in the background ice against glass, unhurried.
“Sunday was lovely, by the way, since you didn’t ask.
The Whitfield girl came.
She’s every bit as charming as I promised, and she asked after you twice, which I found sweet, given you’d never actually met her.”
“I told you I wasn’t coming.”
“You told me nothing.
You let a voicemail go unanswered, which in my experience means either indifference or cowardice, and I’d like to think my son isn’t a coward.” Her voice stayed light throughout, conversational, the specific brightness that in his mother’s register meant the knife was already out and simply hadn’t been shown yet.
“So. Get faster updates on g.com.
Which was it.”
He felt the old shape of an answer rising the long version, the one that would explain the piano, the timing, the whole architecture of why a Sunday with a stranger named Whitfield had never once been a real possibility, laid out clean and reasonable and utterly beside the point.
He knew, the way he knew a phrase that wanted to run long before he’d played the first note of it, that the long version would cost him more than it bought him.
He kept it to one sentence instead.
“Neither.
I’m seeing someone.”
The silence on the other end lasted exactly as long as it took Bitsy Hannigan to recalculate an entire evening’s strategy.
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“How nice for you.” Three words, perfectly pleasant, each one landing with the exact weight of a compliment built to sound like one and function like something else entirely.
“Do I get a name, or is that also a Thursday you’re planning to miss.”
He’d rehearsed this part, if you could call four minutes at a silent piano rehearsal.
Keep it small.
Give her nothing to build a case with.
“She’s wonderful.
That’s most of what matters right now.”
“I’m sure she is.” A soft clink the glass again, set down, deliberate.
“You understand I only ask because I care, Michael.
Some girl from a coffee shop or wherever you spend your afternoons now I only want to know you’re not being taken advantage of.
Piano players attract a certain kind of person.
Opportunists, mostly.
It would be irresponsible of me not to ask.”
The urge to correct that to say her name, to say what she did, to build the whole case for why the assumption was insulting and wrong in six or seven specific ways he could enumerate without even trying rose fast and complete, a brief laid out in his head before he’d decided to write it.
He let it sit there unspoken.
Giving her the case meant giving her the material, and the material was exactly what she wanted.
“She’s not an opportunist,” he said.
“How mysterious.” Bitsy’s tone didn’t sharpen so much as it settled, cooling by exact and controlled degrees, the sound of a woman filing information rather than losing an argument.
“Well.
I won’t press.
You’ve always been stubborn about the things you’ve already decided, even the ones that don’t serve you.” A pause, and then, lighter again, dangerously so: “We don’t disapprove, darling.
We simply have a longer view than you do right now.
You’ll understand that eventually.
Most people do, once the interesting part wears off.”
“I should go.”
“Of course you should.
Give my best to whoever she is, whenever you’re finally ready to let us know.” A rustle she was already moving on to whatever came next in her evening, the call closing the way all her calls closed, without ever quite ending.
“Do call before Thursday next time, Michael.
I do so hate repeating myself.”
The line clicked dead before he could answer that.
He stood there a moment with the receiver still against his ear, the dial tone humming flat and total in the quiet kitchen, and then set it back in its cradle, carefully, the way you set down something you don’t trust yourself not to throw.
The note was still on the refrigerator.
Bring the good shoes, not the church ones.
He read it once more, on purpose this time, and let it do the work his mother’s voice hadn’t managed pull him back into a kitchen that was actually his, on an actual Tuesday, with an actual person waiting somewhere on the other side of a weekend that had nothing to do with Bryn Mawr or Whitfields or seating charts drawn up in his absence.
He didn’t call his mother back to argue the point further.
There wasn’t a further point to argue tonight.
What there was, instead, was a phone he needed to use for something better, and a number he dialed with none of the four minutes of stalling the first call had cost him.
Phoebe picked up on the second ring.
“Hey,” Mike said.
“You still have the good shoes?”