The Nearest Heart

Dale Calloway arrives the way Dale Calloway does everything: directly, on time, and with a firm opinion about where to park. The opinion turns out to be wrong — the street outside the house is more complicated than it looked on the map — and by the time he gets sorted, Susan is already at the green door with her hand out to Juliet, who has opened it, and the particular sequence of events that constitutes the Calloway family arriving is underway.

Emmy watches from the hallway, wondering if she should have been the one to open the door. Would her parents care? Why should she care?

She has been running a background calculation about this specific moment for three weeks: Juliet and her parents in the same space, in the house, for several days. She has imagined it going various ways. In several of the imagined versions something goes wrong — not dramatically, Emmy's imagination isn't prone to drama — but quietly, the way things go wrong when people love each other and want things to work and that wanting becomes its own kind of pressure.

Obviously Juliet had met Emmy's parents before, on several "drive-by" moments (as Julian), and on four real occasions: Emmy's graduation, a very small bridal shower, their wedding day (Dale and Susan sat in the back at the ceremony and then went to dinner with the group), and then a surprise visit on Emmy's birthday for an hour or so. At none of those events had anything gone wrong, even quietly, but there also wasn't much exposure. Juliet had been pleasant and warm (by analytical Juliet standards), and conversation flowed naturally. But this was going to be different. This was the long haul. This was them staying in our space. This was… the first real time together.

Returning to the present, what actually happens is that Susan takes Juliet's hand, looks at her, and says: "There you are." As if she'd been expecting her specifically and has simply been waiting for the meeting to be properly arranged. Juliet's expression does something small and specific that Emmy files immediately: the particular quality of someone receiving something they didn't know they needed.

"Susan," Juliet says. "It's very good to meet you properly at the door to our home, and to invite you in to stay."

"It absolutely is," Susan says, and comes in.

Dale appears from around the car with two bags and the expression of a man who has resolved the parking situation and moved on. Dale once drove into a major city, found on-street parking for free, used a discount fare on the public transportation to travel far and wide, and found his car back in the same place he left it when he returned. He also avoided paying any tolls to get there or home. This was one of the most rewarding and satisfying days of his life. Here, parking in Crestfield, while not optimal, would not ruin his day. He does not dwell on resolved situations. He looks at the house — the same assessment he gives most structures — then at Juliet, still in the doorway.

"Juliet," he says.

"Dale," she says, "Welcome to our home."

They regard each other with the particular straightforwardness of two direct people meeting for the first time under circumstances that require them to be fine with each other. Then Dale nods — the nod that means something has been registered and logged — and comes inside, with the bags.

#

The house with four people in it has a different quality than the house with two. This house has rarely seen four souls at one time. Julian lived here with David and Marie. Then with just Gerald. Now with just Emmy. On rare occasions, the house hosts Rob and Priya simultaneously, and even then it seems unsure of how to handle that many people. Emmy notices this from the kitchen doorway that first evening: her parents moving through the living room with the comfortable ease of guests who have been given permission to be comfortable. Susan has found the shelf with the photographs and is giving it the complete attention she gives things she finds genuinely interesting. Dale has found the sofa and is in it with the specific occupation of a man who has been in the car for three hours and has decided this is where he will be for a while. Emmy and Juliet don't watch a lot of television, but they do listen to music, and Dale is satisfied with the lo-fi tunes playing in the background to keep the mood cozy. He is in a distinctively feminine space, but he isn't uncomfortable.

Juliet is making the coffee.

Not the full Chemex ceremony — it is evening, and Juliet has adjusted — but she makes it correctly and completely, and the process requires the Chemex, and the Chemex requires explanation. Dale provides the opening.

"That's a lot of equipment for coffee," he says, from the sofa.

"It's one piece of equipment," Juliet says.

"There's also the kettle."

"The kettle is separate."

"Right." Dale settles back with the expression of a man filing something under processes I don't understand yet. A beat. "What's wrong with a machine?"

Juliet considers this with the seriousness she brings to direct questions. "Nothing is wrong with a machine. A machine produces consistent results within its programmed parameters. The Chemex produces the result you give it — which depends on the water temperature, the grind, the ratio, the pour, and the attention you bring to the process. Consistent is not the same as precise."

Dale is quiet for a moment. It's a lot to take in. Juliet is a lot to take in. "Right," he says again. Emmy, watching from the doorway, sees the expression of a man receiving information he has no immediate use for and is not sure where to file.

Remembering himself, and his manners, he adds "I'm sure it will be delicious", and Juliet smiles at him.

Dinner is the roast, which was always going to be the roast, and the table at four has a different quality than the table at two or three — fuller, louder by small increments, the particular warmth of a family sharing a meal in a house that does not quite know what to make of having them just yet. Susan asks Juliet about the degree. Juliet explains philosophy in the way she has learned to explain it to people who have not spent the last two years thinking about it — which is to say with patience and a kind of translation — and Susan listens with the quality of someone who is actually interested and not performing interest. Emmy watches this from across the table and feels something settle in her chest. Her wife is excellent at everything she does. Emmy may have many worries about this visit, but Juliet ever doing anything remotely approaching embarrassing is not one of them.

Somewhere in the middle of the roast, Dale tries football. Not the actual sport at the moment, but it is a play of some kind.

It isn't precisely a question — more an assumption, the kind that men of Dale's specific formation make without quite deciding to: that sport is a shared language, a default territory, the thing you talk about when you want to talk to someone and don't know where to start. He mentions a recent game. He describes something that happened in it. He looks at Juliet.

"I don't follow it," Juliet says. "I'm sorry — is that a problem?"

"No," Dale says, in the tone of a man for whom this is slightly a problem, not because he has anything against people who don't follow football, but because the map he'd prepared for this conversation has just had its primary road removed. Time to try a detour. "Not at all. Do you watch any sport?"

"No."

"Right." Dale processes this. He reaches for yet another route. "Your parents were from here? Crestfield?"

"Yes."

"Your dad ever take you to games?"

A brief pause. Juliet navigates questions about her parents with the care she always brings to them. "He wasn't particularly interested in sports," she says. "He was more interested in music. We went to concerts sometimes."

"What kind?"

"Various. He liked jazz."

Dale, who does not like jazz, finds himself holding a map with no roads on it at all. Not a single place to even park. He nods in the way of a man reassessing. Emmy is careful about the quality of her expression. This was one of the areas she worried about. Dad liked to find common ground. Juliet likes to bring people from their places to hers, philosophically. Dad doesn't like to travel. Juliet doesn't see it as travel, but as common ground. Dad disagrees. Mom is unbothered in the least.

After dinner, in the living room: Dale tries again, with cars. There is some discussion of the drive up and the freeway and the particular stretch near Crestfield, and Dale mentions something about the car and whether Emmy and Juliet have a car and what kind, and Juliet says they don't have one currently, are planning on getting one, and for now when they need transport they generally walk or take the train. Dale receives this information. His expression is the expression of a man learning the topography of a new country one data point at a time. He is not hostile. He has simply never met anyone quite like Juliet and has no existing category to put her in, and he is going to need to build one from scratch, which is taking time. This is not an uncommon place for Juliet to be with new people, and she's used to giving them a lot of time for categorization and understanding. Susan and Emmy watch and wonder where this categorization will lead.

"She's something," he finally says to Emmy, quietly, when Juliet has gone to the kitchen for water. He says it with genuine bemused warmth, which is the best version of Dale saying something he hasn't quite worked out.

"She is," Emmy says, while subtly touching the sapphire pendant around her neck.

#

The next morning: Emmy downstairs first, Juliet at the Chemex, Susan appearing from the second bedroom with the specific ease of someone who slept well in a house that received her correctly. The Hartwell-Calloway house is hospitable, as it has been for over a century. Dale appears somewhat later. He accepts his coffee and does not ask further questions about the Chemex. This is progress. Given the speed he drinks it and asks for a second cup, it's good progress.

The morning has the particular texture of a shared household in its second day of being shared — slower, more populated, the small adjustments of four people finding the kitchen's rhythm. Susan asks where things are; Juliet tells her, and not in a guarded way. Emmy notes this: Juliet moving through the kitchen with the ease of someone who is entirely at home in it and is allowing someone else to be at home in it too. This is not a small thing. This is the house being offered.

Emmy takes her mug and her reading to the small back room. From the kitchen, she can hear Susan's voice and then Juliet's, the particular quality of two people in the early work of finding each other's grammar. She does not listen in. She is busy not listening in with some care. Pieces do float through, philosophy and baking, the profound and the mundane, her mother's sweet laugh at something her wife has said.

Outside, Dale is in the garden doing his structural survey of the fence — he has identified something that requires addressing, which Emmy has learned to recognize as his way of feeling useful in a new space. No car to work on, no football, but a fence - the man can work with a fence.

Later: Susan appears in the doorway of the back room with Emmy's mug refilled, apparently having decided that this required doing.

"Your coffee," she says, handing it over. She doesn't move to leave immediately. She looks at Emmy with the particular quality of a woman who has had twenty-two years to learn how her daughter receives information and calibrates accordingly.

"She's not what I expected," Susan says. "She's better. She loves you very specifically, Emmy. That's the thing." She hands over the mug. "I thought you should know I can see it from here."

She goes back to the kitchen.

Emmy sits with this. She sits with it for quite a bit longer than she means to. Then she goes back to her reading, which she will not retain a single word of, and finds she does not mind at all.

#

The back step happens on the second afternoon.

It is not dramatic in the build-up — they are going out to the garden, which has been offering itself as the June warmth holds. Dad had ideas about how it could be done, how the fence could be mended, how growth could be achieved purposefully and not haphazardly by nature.

Emmy goes first down the shallow step from the kitchen door to the garden path. The step has a worn edge she knows about and occasionally forgets about. She forgets about it now.

She doesn't fall. What happens is more specific than falling: her foot catches the worn edge at the moment she is already committed to the step, so that for a half-second she is neither on it nor recovered from it, simply briefly wrong in the world. Her weight not over the ball of her foot.

Dale is directly behind her on the step. His hand moves immediately — the specific automatic reach of a parent who has been catching things for twenty years and does not think about it first — and he is close. Very close. He misses by perhaps four inches.

Juliet is already in the garden, having come out ahead. She is turning back — Emmy still isn't sure whether she heard something or simply has the attentiveness that means she often turns at exactly the right moment — and she catches Emmy. One hand on her arm, one at her back. The particular stability of someone who does not fumble, despite not being well versed in football.

No injury. The three of them still. They catch their breath.

Emmy is between them: Dale on the step behind her, Juliet in front, both with their hands in the specific arrangement of people who have responded to the same thing from opposite directions. Over Emmy's shoulder, Dale and Juliet look at each other across her.

It is a brief look. It contains a complete sentence.

"Oh, God," Emmy says, with the particular embarrassment of someone who has tripped in front of their parents. "It's the step. I always forget the step."

"That wants fixing," Dale says. He looks at the step with the professional regard of a man identifying a problem. He does not look at Juliet again. He does not need to.

"It does," Juliet says, and lets go of Emmy's arm with the ease of someone who catches things without making an occasion of it.

They go into the garden.

#

The garden that evening: Emmy in a chair, Juliet across from her, Susan and Dale at various distances doing various things. Dale has found the fence again and is doing something practical to it that Emmy has decided not to ask about. Susan is in the other garden chair talking to Juliet about something Emmy cannot quite hear — something that makes Juliet tilt her head the way she tilts it when she is genuinely interested rather than politely performing interest. Emmy watches them from across the garden and thinks about what it means to love specific people.

At some point Susan goes in for something and Dale follows her, and the garden is briefly just the two of them.

Juliet puts her hand on Emmy's arm. She looks at her with the quality of someone who has been watching Emmy manage something all day and wants to give her a specific piece of information.

"Your father is trying," she says, quietly.

"I know," Emmy says.

"That matters."

Emmy looks at the kitchen window — the south-facing glass, the light in it, the garden doing its June things. "He hasn't found it yet."

"No," Juliet says. "But he will." She says it with the confidence of someone who has done the analysis and arrived at a result, and then Susan comes back with her drink and the moment closes, and Emmy carries what was said in it for the rest of the evening.

#

The night before the Calloways leave, something shifts in Dale.

It isn't visible in the way most things are visible. He doesn't make a speech, doesn't become sentimental, doesn't do any of the things that would require Emmy to decide how to receive them. It's smaller than all of that. That is Dale's way.

They are in the living room after dinner — Susan and Emmy talking about something, Juliet with a book she is not reading, Dale quieter than his baseline, which is already not loud — and at some point Dale and Juliet are both looking at the bookshelf.

It happened that way, neither of them pointing at it, both turned toward it in the natural drift of an evening. The hairbrush between the Wittgenstein and the developmental psychology. The specific arrangement that makes sense to people who know why it's there and no one else, which in this room means two of the four people present.

Dale looks at it for a moment. Then he looks at Juliet.

"Juliet," he says.

She puts the unread book down and looks at him. He is holding something, visibly, with the particular concentration of a man who has worked something out and has decided it is time to say it in the number of words it requires.

"We share common ground, Juliet."

The room does not change. The evening does not change. But something in it settles, very slightly, the way a house settles when something that has been slightly wrong has been corrected.

Juliet looks at him. In her expression Emmy can see both layers being registered: the literal truth of it — they do, Emmy is the common ground, family and love are the thing that actually matters — and the larger thing underneath, that he understands this, that he has arrived at it through the specific work of three and a half days of good-faith effort in a new country, and that the arriving is as important as where he's arrived.

"Yes," Juliet says.

One word. It carries both layers back.

Dale nods, the single nod that means a conclusion has been properly reached, and turns back to the room. Juliet looks across at Emmy. Emmy's face is doing several things at once, none of which she is bothering to manage.

Susan, who has been listening without appearing to, picks up her own book. "Right then," she says mildly, and turns a page.

#

The departure is the particular business of departures. Bags by the door. The checking of the second bedroom — Susan goes through it with the thoroughness of a guest who respects a space that housed her, but with the understanding that this won't be the last time they stay in it. If something is left, it will be retrieved at the next meeting. Dale's assessment of the parking situation, which resolves in his favor on the first attempt. Emmy hugged by her mother with the specific quality of a Susan hug, which communicates several things simultaneously without saying any of them.

Susan turns to Juliet. "Come and see us," she says. "When you can."

"We will," Juliet says, and Susan hugs her. Juliet receives the hug and returns it.

Dale extends his hand. It is not ceremony — he is not a ceremonial man — it is simply the mechanism available to him, and he is using it in the way he uses the tools he has. His handshake is brief and solid and it has the quality of something that means more than it looks like.

Then they are in the car, and the street is negotiated in Dale's favor, and then they are gone.

#

The house exhales.

Emmy stands in the kitchen and listens to the quiet. The Chemex is on the counter. The leprechaun is on the wall. Outside, the June garden — which has been watched and surveyed and sat in for three days — is simply itself again.

Juliet appears from the front hallway and comes to her side of the counter. She does not say anything for a moment.

"Well," Emmy says.

"Well," Juliet agrees.

Emmy looks out at the garden. Then, because it is true and because Juliet will find it exactly as funny as it is: "Dad fixed the back step."

He had gone out there the previous morning with something from the trunk of the car — some tool, some material, the contents of which he had not explained and Emmy had not asked about — and done what needed doing to the worn edge with the specific efficiency of a man who sees a problem and addresses it.

"I know," Juliet says. "I watched him do it." A beat. "From a window. So he wouldn't feel observed, judged, or challenged."

Emmy looks at her. Juliet's expression has the particular quality of someone who has done a kind thing without any intention of it being acknowledged.

"Same time next year?" Emmy asks.

"Earlier," Juliet says, and begins to make coffee.

* * *