Through Thick and Thin by Alison Pace Read Free Book Online

moment after that just to be with him, and she imagines that’s exactly what he means by ambivalent.
    “I don’t think,” she says, meeting his gaze, a gaze she thinks she’ll try to remember as steely, “I don’t think ambivalent is the exact best word.”
    And he doesn’t seem compelled to argue, or at least if he is compelled, he doesn’t. He only nods and he hails her a cab and they say goodbye really quickly like they’ll see each other two, three weeks from now, the next time work just happens to bring him up to New York. Saint Patrick’s Day maybe.
    It doesn’t take long at all to get home; it seems actually like it has taken a lot less time than it usually takes to get all the way up, from all the way down in Tribeca. Meredith nods at her doorman, heads up twelve floors in the nondescript elevator, to her nondescript floor. She turns the key in her door, and once she’s inside she smells her hair conditioner, Frederic Fekkai Technician Conditioner for Dry, Damaged, Color-Treated Hair. Her hair isn’t any of these, but she really likes the smell. And the smell, it has a way of lingering in her apartment after she’s washed her hair and she likes that, too. She’d washed her hair tonight, wanting to be sure it looked nice for Bouley, for Josh, right before she left.
    Before she even takes her coat off, she fishes her iPod out of her bag, and puts it in its Bose iPod dock. She hits Play, and the song she’s been listening to a lot lately, the Perishers’ “Trouble Sleeping,” starts to play.
    “I’m having trouble sleeping,” fills the room, and Meredith thinks how, lately, she really has. She listens to a line or two more, just standing there, still in her coat, her keys still in her hand, her eyes on her cuticles, until the line when the Perishers implore whomever it is they are singing to, to leave. She slowly takes off her coat and lays it over the back of her couch: purple velvet, sectional, from the 1960s she thinks, stunning.
    For a long time after Josh had left she’d recorded every rerun of The West Wing on the Bravo channel—they aired all the time—and she would watch an episode each night before she went to sleep and it was because she missed him, because she’d always felt that on his better days, Josh reminded her of Josh Lyman, White House deputy chief of staff. Not Bradley Whit-ford, the actor who played him, but actual Josh Lyman, as if he really existed, as if he were indeed an actual man. And for perhaps even longer, she thought that it wasn’t really going to happen this way, that really, it couldn’t and that in the end it would all work out. She’d move to Philadelphia, too, and they’d live in a townhouse, and she’d review restaurants there, because there were so many good restaurants in Philadelphia, some of the all-time great ones, even. Le Bec Fin so often popped into her mind.
    Meredith turns and heads into her room. She gets undressed in the dark, gets her pajamas from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, and brushes her teeth, quickly, unconscientiously, in the dark, too. She splashes water on her face, and feels a tiny twinge, because she knows she’s just asking for a breakout by not fully washing off her makeup, but she doesn’t want the light on, and she thinks maybe she’s just too tired. And she’s too aware right now that no matter how busy you are, no matter how completely you fill up every day, you can’t fill it all up. There’s always time left at the end of it to feel lonely.
    She pulls back her covers, and gets under them. She reminds herself that in the end, what actually happened was that The West Wing got canceled, and Le Bec Fin lost its fifth star.

five
    what would jennifer do?
    Stephanie is sitting in their office, on her side of their desk. “Our desk” is what they called it. And before that, when they first saw the white brick house on Linwood Avenue, with the beautiful front porch and the open downstairs, they’d referred