Party Wall

The stain went on darker than the sample. Bettina stood at the far rail with the can in one hand and told us so before any of us could.

“Second coat where the boards meet,” she said. “Not the middle. The middle is already closed.”

Hollis nodded and kept moving. He and Corinne had the same stroke by then, long and even, starting at the house and working out. I watched his brush hit the board and hers follow right after, the same wet shine, and neither of them looked up to check.

I had the railing. Bettina had the railing too, which was the problem.

“You don’t need a post there,” I said. “The run is short. It holds.”

“It holds until someone leans on it at a party and it doesn’t.” She set the can down and took the tape measure off my belt without asking. “Three feet. Post.”

“We measured that in June.”

“We measured it wrong in June. You were busy winning.”

I laughed. She grinned, which she did with her whole face, and crouched to mark the board. Her knee cracked. She ignored it. I held the rail while she marked, and the wood was warm from the day, and her shoulder stayed against my shin the whole time she drew the line.

“You’re enjoying this,” I said.

“So are you.” She stood. “Hand me the brush. You’re flooding the joints.”

I handed it over. She was right about the joints. I let her have that and kept the argument about the post, because the argument was the good part. Across the deck Corinne dipped her brush, and Hollis dipped his, and the two of them went on without a word between them. Once she reached past him for the rag and he turned his hand so she could take it, and that was the whole exchange.

The sun dropped behind the alley roofs. The stain stopped looking wet and started looking finished. Bettina walked the length of the rail, tapped the new post with her knuckles, and said, “There.”

Hollis sat on the step and wiped his hands on his shirt. “That’s the last of it.”

“Don’t say that where the house can hear you,” Corinne said. She was smiling. There was stain on her wrist, a clean line where the cuff had been.

We left the brushes in a jar of water on our side. The borrowed ladder still leaned against our wall. Nobody moved it. Bettina said tomorrow, and nobody argued, which was how I knew we were done.

We ate on the deck because the deck was the point. Corn off the grill, butter in a bowl, lemonade in the pitcher Bettina had carried over from their kitchen. The boards smelled like the stain and like the char on the cobs. My legs ached in a plain way. Corinne sat beside me with her bare feet on the new wood, and Hollis sat across from her, and Bettina took the end where she could see all of us.

Hollis stood up with his glass. Lemonade. He cleared his throat like he had notes.

“I wrote something,” he said.

“Oh no,” Bettina said, fond.

“To the work,” he said. “To the year. To the post Rafael didn’t want, which is already the best post on the block. To Corinne, who laid more tile than I did and will deny it. To Bettina, who directed us, and was right, and knows it. To Rafael, who argued anyway, which kept the rest of us awake.” He looked at his glass, then at us, and the rest of the speech fell apart in his mouth. “To dinner. I’m done. That was worse than I thought.”

Corinne laughed. Not the polite kind. She put her hand over her mouth and laughed until she had to set her corn down, and Hollis went red and sat, pleased with himself for having failed.

I watched her. The laugh went through her shoulders. She looked at Hollis like he had handed her something she wanted, and then she looked at me, still laughing, and I didn’t look away fast enough.

Across the table, Bettina was watching me watch her.

She didn’t smile. She drank her lemonade and let me see that she had seen it, and then she passed the butter to Hollis as if the moment were a plate and she was done with it for now.

“Eat,” she said. “Before it gets cold and I have to hear about it.”

We ate. We talked about the stain, about the alley light that would hit the deck in the morning, about whose turn it was to return the ladder. Hollis told a story about a job in Federal Hill where the owner had asked him to match a tile that didn’t exist, and Corinne supplied the ending he kept forgetting, and Bettina argued with me about load paths one more time, for no reason except that the evening still had room in it.

When they went in, Bettina touched the rail once, the way you touch a thing you built to make sure it’s still there. Hollis lifted a hand. The door on their side shut. The deck was ours and theirs and finished.

In our kitchen the light was the one over the sink. Corinne washed her wrist. The stain line stayed. I put the lemonade pitcher in the fridge and stood there with the door open longer than I needed to.

“Close that,” she said.

I closed it.

She dried her hands and didn’t put the towel down. “I’ve been noticing something,” she said. “All summer. I kept thinking I’d get over it when the work was done.”

I leaned on the counter. The house was quiet on both sides of the wall. “You didn’t.”

“No.” She looked at the towel. “Hollis. The way he works next to me and doesn’t fill the air. And Bettina, when she laughs at you and you stand there letting her win half of it.” She met my eyes. “And you. Watching me watch him. I saw you tonight. She saw you too.”

“I know she did.”

“You’ve known longer than tonight.”

“Since the tile,” I said. “Maybe since the joists. I like arguing with her. That’s not nothing, and I kept calling it nothing.” I rubbed my thumb along the edge of the counter. “I want them. Both of them. I want you wanting them. I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like I was done with this.”

“You’re not done with this.”

“I’m not.”

She came around the counter and stood in front of me, close enough that I could see the stain she hadn’t got off. “I’m not either. I love you. I like our house. I like them next door. I don’t want to wreck the year because I noticed his hands.”

“Then we don’t wreck it,” I said. “We ask. Both of us. If they don’t want it, we eat dinner on the deck like we have been, and we live through the awkward week, and we keep the friendship if they’ll keep it.”

“And if one of us gets to the door and can’t.”

“Then that one says so, and we turn around. Either of us. No speech about it after.”

She nodded. We stood there. The clock over the stove clicked. I made coffee because neither of us was going to sleep, and we took it to the table and talked until the pot was gone and the street outside was empty.

We talked about the money we had put into two houses and the fact that a bad ending would sit in the wall between us. We talked about Hollis, who would never start this, and Bettina, who had been waiting for someone else to. Corinne said she wanted to kiss him and had wanted it since July, when he had steadied a board and forgotten to step back. I said I wanted Bettina’s mouth on mine and her laugh against my neck, and I wanted to see Corinne with him, and I wanted all of that without losing the woman across the table from me. She reached over and held my wrist while I said it. Her thumb stayed on the bone. I turned my hand and held hers back.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Evening. Before we lose our nerve and start painting something that doesn’t need paint.”

“Tomorrow.”

“And the ladder goes back either way.”

“Either way.”

We went to bed late. I lay awake and listened to her breathe and to the small sound of their fridge through the party wall, and I didn’t pretend anymore that the sound was only a fridge.

The next evening was cooler. We changed shirts. Corinne put her hair up and then took it down again. I carried nothing, because arriving with a pie would have made it a visit, and this wasn’t a visit. The ladder was still against our wall. We left it.

Their front step was one brick higher than ours. I knocked. Corinne stood at my shoulder, her arm against mine.

The door opened fast. Bettina had her keys in her hand and a jacket half on. She looked at us, and the keys stopped swinging.

“We were about to knock on yours,” she said.

Behind her, Hollis came out of the hall. He saw Corinne and went red to the ears, the same red as the speech, except he wasn’t smiling yet. He had a hand on the doorframe. He didn’t step back.

Bettina looked at the keys, then at me, then at Corinne. “Come in, or say it out here. I’m not guessing across a threshold.”

“Out here,” Corinne said. Her voice was steady. “We talked last night. All night. We want this. Both of you. With both of us. If you don’t, we go home and the ladder comes back tomorrow and we have dinner on Friday like always.”

Hollis let out a breath that might have been a laugh. “Friday was already the plan.”

“Hollis,” Bettina said, not sharp.

“I want it,” he said. He looked at Corinne when he said it, and then at me, so I would have it too. “I’ve wanted it. I wasn’t going to be the one.”

Bettina set the keys on the little table inside the door without looking. She stepped onto the brick. “Yes,” she said to me. “Before you ask it cleaner than that. Yes. I watched you last night on purpose.”

The street was quiet. A bus went past at the end of the block and kept going. Corinne turned to me. She put her hand on my face, thumb at my cheek, and I put my hand in her hair and held there. She kissed me. I kissed her back, and my other hand found her wrist, and her fingers closed around mine. It was our kiss, in front of them, and it was also the start of the other thing, and I felt both at once.

She drew back. Her hand stayed on my face a second longer. Then she turned to Hollis.

I still had her wrist when she turned. I let it go.