Page 39 of August
Myra left her half-eaten apple on the counter and walked with her phone, still in her hand for some reason, toward the front door. When she looked through the peephole, her eyes got big because she saw Elisa standing there. She couldn’tnotopen the door. Elisa knew she was home. Myra supposed that if she was asked later, she could always say that she had been in the shower or something and hadn’t heard the doorbell, but she needed to be mature. Rolling her eyes at herself, she pulled open the door.
“Hey,” she spoke. “I was just about to come over to your place.”
“Can I come in?” Elisa asked.
“Uh… Yeah,” she replied, realizing only then that Elisa hadn’t ever been inside her house.
She moved aside, letting Elisa walk in past her, and closed the door behind her.
“Want the tour or something?”
“It’s like mine a little, isn’t it?” Elisa said, looking around.
“Yeah, pretty much. I just don’t have the upstairs.”
“I wouldn’t have needed it either, but I wanted the kids to have their own rooms for breaks and stuff,” Elisa added.
And they were small-talking their way through thisawkwardness, which seemed to sum up how they were with each other when things got awkward, with neither of them knowing what to do about it.
“Are you thirsty?” she asked.
“No,” Elisa replied.
“Okay. Want that tour?”
“No.” Elisa shook her head and smiled at her. “Why did you run inside your house?”
“I didn’t run,” Myra argued. “I walked.”
“Can we sit?”
“Sure,” she said and motioned for Elisa to head into the living room, where she had a worn, brown leather sofa.
“You didn’t say hi. You saw me, and I saw you. I thought you’d say hi or something, at least,” Elisa noted.
“I had to change my shirt,” she replied, which was partly true.
When Elisa sat down on the sofa that Myra had found a couple of years earlier, falling in love with its softness, she joined her there, but at the other end of it, turning toward her. It reminded her a little of the previous night at Elisa’s house, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
“Okay, that’s not the whole truth,” she decided to admit a moment later.
“What’s thewholetruth?”
“I saw you kiss that woman, so I ran inside my house. Ididhave mustard on my shirt, though.”
“Gwen?”
“Huh?”
“You saw Gwen kiss me?”
“Was Gwen the one in the car with you?”
“Yes.”
“Then, yes.”
Elisa laughed and replied, “She kissed me on the cheek. She’s my sister-in-law, Myra. Well, my ex-sister-in-law now. She’s just a friend.”
