Avery looked at the paper bag. She thought of four days of bread. The two-dollar tips. *Tell the baker the crust was exceptional.*
"I'm not ready to like you back," she said. "I want to be honest. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to have a — a mother person in my life who asks things. I don't have the muscles."
"Muscles can be built," Vivian said. "Ellis tells me so. Constantly. He's a physical therapist; it's very tedious." She stood, tucking the bag under her arm. "And I'm not trying to be your mother person, Avery. You have a mother. I'm only a woman who owes you a better first impression. I'm patient. I waited three years and eleven home visits for my boys. I can buy a lot of rye."
"What about Harlan?"
Vivian paused. The question seemed to touch something tender.
"I'm sixty-six," she said, "and I'm still deciding about Harlan. He came to my door in April and apologized. He offered his yard for the party. He said yes to everything Paige asked for. He's been trying." She adjusted her cardigan. "But I sat alone at that table for forty minutes. Being sorry doesn't give those forty minutes back. Some things you forgive in a night. Some things you forgive one Sunday at a time, and you don't know which kind it is until you're in it."
She walked to her car — an old blue Volvo, very clean — and drove away without looking back. Avery sat on the bench until her break was over, flour drying on her arms like a second skin.
* * *
She brought the yellow dress back to Harlan's on a Sunday afternoon in July, washed and pressed and folded in tissue paper she had bought specifically for the purpose.
He was on the front porch in a lawn chair, in a different loud shirt — parrots this time — doing a crossword in pen. He looked at the tissue paper, then at her, and set the crossword down.
"You didn't have to bring it back," he said.
"It's your wife's."
"It's a dress." He took the bundle carefully anyway, the way you'd take a sleeping baby. He didn't unfold it. "She'd have liked that it got worn. She'd have liked that it got worn after somebody jumped in my pool in protest. That's exactly her sense of humor. She'd have been the one handing you the noodle."
Avery hesitated on the bottom step. "Can I ask you something?"
"You want to know why I stood Viv up."
"I — yes."
He was quiet a long time. Across the street a sprinkler ticked.
"I got to the restaurant," he said. "I want you to know that. I wasn't home in my slippers. I got in the car and drove there and parked, and I was walking to the door, and I caught myself in the window. In the reflection. I was wearing the tie Bev bought me for our thirtieth. Hadn't even thought about it. Just put it on because it was my good tie. And I saw myself in it, going to dinner with another woman, and I—" He stopped. His big hands smoothed the tissue paper. "I went back to the car. I sat there. Told myself five more minutes. Then ten. I sat in that parking lot for forty minutes, the whole time she was inside waiting, and then I texted her like a coward and drove home."
"You were *in the parking lot*."