Chapter 16

They came back from the coast on Monday evening with sand in their shoes and salt in their hair and the particular warm tiredness of people who had spent a weekend doing very little and somehow felt more restored by it than by any amount of sleep.

The drive back was quieter than the drive there. Freen had fallen asleep in the passenger seat of Becky’s car before they hit the main road, which Becky had clocked without comment and turned the music down to a level that Lookmhee suspected was lower than Becky would usually tolerate. TK had noticed this from the backseat. She had said nothing about it. She had simply looked out the window with the expression she wore when she was filing something important.

In Engfa’s car, Sonya had gone back to her manuscript and Lookmhee had gone back to her notebook, and they had driven in the comfortable quiet that had become their default, the kind of quiet that had its own language and its own warmth and required nothing from either of them except presence.

Lookmhee looked at the road going by and thought about I would have gone anywhere you were going and wrote nothing about it because some things were still too new to be written yet. She just held it, the way you held something fragile — carefully, with both hands, not squeezing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The sighing started on Tuesday.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that demanded attention or explanation. Just Engfa — who was, of all of them, the most observant and the most patient and the one who had been watching Lookmhee and Sonya the longest — beginning to sigh in the specific way she sighed when she had noticed something and was exercising considerable restraint about not saying it.

The first sigh was at breakfast.

Lookmhee had knocked on Engfa’s door at eight for their usual Friday breakfast — except it was Tuesday, not Friday, and she had knocked anyway because she was still in the post-road-trip glow and Engfa always had good tea and good company and this morning Lookmhee wanted both. Engfa had let her in without question, because that was Engfa, and put the kettle on.

They were sitting at the small kitchen table with their tea when Sonya knocked — two precise knocks, even and unhurried — and Engfa let her in too, because of course she did, and Sonya sat at the table with the particular ease she had developed in Engfa’s apartment over three years, the ease of someone who had been fed and listened to in this kitchen enough times to feel the specific safety of it.

It was nice. It was genuinely, simply nice — the three of them at the small table with their tea, the morning light coming in, the building quiet around them.

Then Lookmhee passed Sonya the sugar without being asked — because she had learned, at some point without marking when, that Sonya took one spoon in her tea and sometimes forgot to pick it up when she was thinking about something — and Sonya took it with a small nod and stirred it in and their hands didn’t touch but the movement was so easy, so practiced, so completely without thought, that it was somehow more intimate than if they had.

Engfa sighed.

Not loudly. Not in a way that required acknowledgment. Just a small, quiet, deeply felt exhale through the nose that communicated, to anyone paying attention, the full weight of someone watching two people be completely obvious while simultaneously being completely oblivious.

Lookmhee looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Engfa said. She drank her tea.

Sonya, who had been looking at her own cup, looked at Engfa briefly and then looked away. Something in her expression suggested she had a reasonably good idea of what the sigh was about and had chosen, strategically, not to engage with it.

✦ ✦ ✦

The second sigh was at dinner.

Wednesday evening, Becky’s apartment, the usual gathering. Everyone was there. Becky had made something ambitious that had turned out well, which she was very pleased about, and had been accepting compliments on it with the gracious modesty of someone who had expected this outcome.

The conversation had ranged, in the way it always did, across several topics simultaneously — Freen’s work, something Becky had read, a film TK recommended in four words that immediately made everyone want to see it, a building maintenance notice that Engfa brought up and Becky dismissed and Sonya said she would deal with, which she would, because Sonya dealt with things.

At some point Lookmhee had mentioned, offhand, something she had been thinking about for the bookstore’s upcoming reading event — a format she was considering, something slightly different from the usual — and Sonya had looked up from her plate and asked a question about it, a specific and useful question, the kind that cut straight to the thing Lookmhee had been circling around.

And Lookmhee had answered, and Sonya had considered it, and they had gone back and forth for a few exchanges — not a long conversation, just the quick, easy shorthand of two people who had been talking to each other long enough to skip the setup and go straight to the point — and at the end of it Lookmhee had said yes, exactly, that’s what I was trying to work out and Sonya had gone back to her food with the small satisfied expression she had when something had been resolved.

Engfa, across the table, sighed.

This one was slightly louder.

Freen looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Engfa said.

Becky looked at the table with the expression of someone physically restraining themselves from making a note.

TK looked at the ceiling.

Sonya cut a piece of her food with great precision and did not look up.

Lookmhee drank her water.

✦ ✦ ✦

The third sigh was on Friday.

Common Ground, in the morning. Sonya and Lookmhee’s usual Saturday — except it was Friday this week because Sonya had a work thing on Saturday, an authors’ lunch that she had mentioned with the specific tone she used for work obligations that were professionally important and personally draining.

Engfa had come in for a takeaway coffee and had seen them at their table — their table, the one they always sat at now, close enough to talk and comfortable enough to be quiet — and had stopped.

They had waved her over. She had sat with them for twenty minutes, her takeaway cup in hand, talking about nothing in particular the way they all did sometimes, easy and unhurried.

And then at some point Sonya had said something — a small observation about something Lookmhee had said the week before, something she had apparently been thinking about and was now connecting to something else — and it was just a comment, just a few sentences, but it was the kind of comment that told you someone had been paying attention to you in the deep, specific way that people rarely paid attention to each other, and Lookmhee had looked at her and for a moment neither of them said anything.

Engfa sighed.

This was the biggest sigh yet. Long, controlled, the sigh of someone who had been sighing for weeks and was running low on restraint.

Both of them looked at her.

Engfa looked back.

“Nothing,” she said pleasantly.

“That was a very large sigh for nothing,” Lookmhee said.

“I’m just breathing,” Engfa said. She picked up her takeaway cup. She looked at it. Then at both of them. Then at some point in the middle distance that was not either of their faces. “I’m just very aware,” she said carefully, “that the two of you are going to make me wait a very long time.”

A pause.

“For what?” Lookmhee said.

Engfa looked at her. The patient, warm, slightly exhausted look of someone who had been watching a slow-motion thing happen for months and was genuinely fond of all the parties involved while also being genuinely, quietly frustrated by the pace.

“Nothing,” she said again. And this time she said it like she meant it — like she was choosing, again, to wait. To let things go at their own pace. To not be the person who rushed them.

She stood. She put on her coat. She picked up her bag.

“I’ll see you both later,” she said. She looked at Sonya. Then at Lookmhee. “Please eat something other than banana bread.”

She left.

They sat in the aftermath of her departure for a moment.

“She sighs a lot,” Lookmhee said.

“She has been sighing since September,” Sonya said. She picked up her coffee. She was looking at the table with the expression that meant she knew exactly what was being communicated and was choosing, with full awareness, to let it exist without responding to it directly.

“Since September,” Lookmhee said. “That’s — when I moved in.”

“Yes,” Sonya said.

A pause.

“Are we frustrating her?” Lookmhee asked.

Sonya considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved. “Almost certainly,” she said.

Lookmhee looked at her. At the composed face and the coffee cup and the slight, almost imperceptible curve at the corner of her mouth that meant she found something funnier than she was letting on.

“Are you—” Lookmhee narrowed her eyes— “are you enjoying this?”

“I’m not enjoying anything,” Sonya said, in the tone that meant she was. “I’m simply observing that Engfa is a person of great emotional patience who has chosen, repeatedly, to exercise it on our behalf.”

“Our behalf,” Lookmhee said.

“Mm,” said Sonya. Who was now very deliberately not meeting her eyes.

Lookmhee put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand and looked at Sonya until Sonya looked back at her, which took about fifteen seconds.

When she did, the expression was the real one. The warm, unguarded one. The one with too much in it.

“Not yet,” Sonya said. Preemptively. Softly.

“I know,” Lookmhee said. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were thinking very loudly.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“You do it consistently.”

Lookmhee smiled. She looked at her notebook, which she hadn’t opened yet this morning. She looked at the table. She looked at the street outside the window where the morning was doing its autumn thing — pale and gold and slightly sharp.

“Engfa’s going to run out of sighs eventually,” she said.

“She has an extensive reserve,” Sonya said.

“What happens when she runs out?”

Sonya was quiet for a moment. She turned her coffee cup in her hands — a small, circular movement, once, twice. The thinking gesture. The one she did when she was working something out.

“She won’t have to,” Sonya said finally. Low. Certain. The way she said things when she meant them all the way down.

Lookmhee looked at her.

Sonya looked back.

The coffee shop moved around them — the noise, the morning crowd, the smell of espresso and warm pastry. Their table was its own small still point in the middle of it.

“Okay,” Lookmhee said softly.

“Okay,” Sonya said.

They sat there for another hour. Lookmhee wrote in her notebook. Sonya read through notes on her phone. The morning light moved across the table.
It was ordinary. It was, somehow, everything.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening Engfa came over to Lookmhee’s apartment with a container of soup — not because she’d been asked, not because Lookmhee was sick or sad, just because it was a Tuesday and Engfa sometimes brought soup on Tuesdays and that had become a thing without either of them deciding it was a thing.

Lookmhee heated it up. They sat on the floor with their bowls because the small table was covered in bookstore notes and neither of them moved the notes.

“The sighing,” Lookmhee said.

Engfa looked at her soup.

“I heard you,” Lookmhee said. “All three times. And at Common Ground this morning.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Engfa.”

A pause. Engfa was quiet for a moment in the particular way she was quiet when she was deciding how honest to be.

“I have been watching the two of you,” she said finally, “for five months. And I have watched you become — ” she paused, finding the right word, “— each other’s. In all the ways that matter. And it is very clear and it has been very clear for a long time and sometimes — ” she stopped.

“Sometimes?” Lookmhee said gently.

Engfa looked at her. “Sometimes I just want to knock on 4C and tell her to say it.”

Lookmhee was quiet for a moment.

“She’s getting there,” she said.

“I know she is.” Engfa looked at her soup. “I know. I’m just — I care about you. Both of you. And watching someone you care about be on the edge of something wonderful for months is—” she stopped again.

“Sigh-inducing,” Lookmhee said.

Engfa’s composure cracked, just slightly, into something that was almost a laugh. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly that.”

Lookmhee looked at her bowl. She thought about she won’t have to. About the certainty of it. About Sonya saying true things in the way she said true things — simply, without decoration, as if the truth was just a fact to be reported.

“She said something today,” Lookmhee said quietly. “That made me think it’s going to be soon.”

Engfa looked up.

“Really soon,” Lookmhee said.

Engfa was quiet for a moment. The apartment was warm around them. Through the wall, very faintly, the music from 4C.

Then Engfa nodded. Once, slowly. The nod of someone setting something down — a weight she had been carrying quietly, the particular weight of hoping for someone else’s happiness.

“Good,” she said.

They finished the soup. They talked about other things. Engfa left at nine with the empty container and the expression of someone who was, for the first time in a while, not holding her breath.

Lookmhee washed the bowls. She stood at the window and looked at the thin strip of park, silver in the evening, and listened to the music through the wall.

She opened her notebook.

She wrote: Engfa sighs because she loves us. I think that’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done without knowing they were doing it.

She closed the notebook.

She went to sleep with the music still faintly playing and the thought that soon was very close now, and getting closer, and that some things were worth every sigh that had ever been sighed on their behalf.

✦ ✦ ✦