Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

Not the sort of conversation Owen had with colleagues at the office.

He picked up the cloth and wiped it again over the reflective center of the tray. Owen and his sister were so alike.

Everyone said that. From the clipped tone of their voice, their gestures, right down into the byways of thought, the way they considered before speaking, said only what was needed. That she too had been attracted to Ben made perfect sense. Hillary crossed the room and stood with her hands on Owen’s shoulders. He could feel the warmth of her palms through his cotton blazer. Unusual, this: the two of them touching.

“It’ll be curious, won’t it?” she said. “To see him so briefly after all this time.”

“Yes.”

Twenty-five years ago he and Hillary had moved into this house together. They’d thought of it as a temporary arrangement. Hillary was doing her student teaching; he’d just started with the firm and had yet to settle on a place. It seemed like the beginning of something.

“I suppose his wife couldn’t come because of the children.”

Her thumbs rested against his collar. She was the only person who knew of his preference for men, now that Saul and the others were gone. She’d never judged him, never raised an eyebrow.

“Interesting he should get in touch after such a gap,” Owen said.

She removed her hands from his shoulders. “It strikes you as odd, does it?”

“A bit.”

“I think it’s thoughtful of him,” she said.

“Indeed.”

In the front hall, the doorbell rang.

“Goodness,” Hillary said, “he’s awfully early.”

He listened to her footsteps as she left the room, listened as they stopped in front of the hall mirror.

“I’ve been with a man once myself,” Ben had said on the night Owen finally spoke to him of his feelings. Like a prayer answered, those words were. Was it such a crime he’d fallen in love?

A few more steps and then the turning of the latch.

“Oh,” he heard his sister say. “Mrs. Giles. Hello.”

Owen closed his eyes, relieved for the moment. Her son lived in Australia; she’d been widowed the year before. After that she’d begun stopping by on the weekends, first with the excuse of borrowing a cup of something but later just for the company.

“You’re doing all right in the heat, are you?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re managing,” Hillary said.

Owen joined them in the hall. He could tell from the look on his sister’s face she was trying to steel her courage to say they had company on the way.

“Hello there, Owen,” Mrs. Giles said. “Saw your firm in the paper today.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, something about the law courts. There’s always news of the courts. So much of it on the telly now. Old Rumpole.”

“Right,” he said.

“Well… I was just on my way by… but you’re occupied, I’m sure.”

“No, no,” Hillary said, glancing at Owen. “Someone’s coming later… but I was just putting a kettle on.”

“Really, you don’t have to,” Mrs. Giles said.

“Not at all.”

THEY SAT IN the front room, Hillary glancing now and again at her watch. A production of Les Miserables had reached Perth, and Peter Giles had a leading role.

“Amazing story, don’t you think?” Mrs. Giles said, sipping her tea. The air in the room was close and Owen could feel sweat soaking the back of his shirt.

“Peter plays opposite an Australian girl. Can’t quite imagine it done in that accent, but there we are. I sense he’s fond of her, though he doesn’t admit it in his letters.”

By the portrait of their parents over the mantel, a fly buzzed.

Owen sat motionless on the couch, staring over Mrs. Giles’s shoulder.

His sister had always been an early riser. Up at five-thirty or six for breakfast and to prepare for class. At seven-thirty she’d leave the house in time for morning assembly. As a partner, he never had to be at the firm until well after nine. He read the Financial Times with his coffee and looked over whatever had come in the post. There had been no elaborate operation, no fretting over things. A circumstance had presented itself. The letters from Ben arrived. He took them up to his room. That’s all there was to it.

“More tea?”

“No, thank you,” Owen said.

The local council had decided on a one-way system for the town center and Mrs. Giles believed it would only make things worse. “They’ve done it down in Winchester. My sister says it’s a terrible mess.”

“Right,” Owen said.

They had kissed only once, in the small hours of an August night, on the sofa in Ben’s flat, light from the streetlamps coming through the high windows. Earlier, strolling back over the bridge from Battersea, Owen had told him the story of him and Hillary being sent to look for their mother: walking out across the fields to a wood where she sometimes went in the mornings; the rain starting up and soaking them before they arrived under the canopy of oaks, and looked up to see their mother’s slender frame wrapped in her beige overcoat, her face lifeless, her body turning in the wind. And he’d told Ben how his sister—twelve years old—had taken him in her arms right then and there, sheltering his eyes from the awful sight, and whispered in his ear, “We will survive this, we will survive this.” A story he’d never told anyone before. And when he and Ben had finished another bottle of wine, reclining there on the sofa, they’d hugged, and then they’d kissed, their hands running through each other’s hair.

“I can’t do this,” Ben had whispered as Owen rested his head against Ben’s chest.

“Smells wonderful, whatever it is you’re cooking,” Mrs. Giles said. Hillary nodded.

For that moment before Ben had spoken, as he lay in his arms, Owen had believed in the fantasy of love as the creator, your life clay in its hands.

“I should check the food. Owen, why don’t you show Mrs.

Giles a bit of the garden. She hasn’t seen the delphiniums, I’m sure.”

“Of course,” he said, looking into his sister’s taut smile.

“I suspect I’ve mistreated my garden,” Mrs. Giles said as the two of them reached the bottom of the lawn. “John it was who had the green thumb. I’m just a bungler really.”

The skin of her hands was mottled and soft looking. The gold ring she still wore hung rather loosely on her finger.

“I think Ben and I might have a weekend away,” Hillary had said one evening in the front room as they watched the evening news. The two of them had only met a few weeks before. An accident really, Hillary in the city on an errand, coming to drop something by for Owen, deciding at the last minute to join them for dinner. When the office phoned the restaurant in the middle of the meal, Owen had to leave the two of them alone.

A weekend at the cottage on Lake Windermere is what they had.

Owen had always thought of himself as a rational person, capable of perspective. As a school boy, he’d read Othello.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on. What paltry aid literature turned out to be when the feelings were yours and not others’.

“Funny, I miss him in the most peculiar ways,” Mrs. Giles said. “We’d always kept the chutney over the stove, and as we only ever had it in the evenings, he’d be there to fetch it.

Ridiculous to use a stepladder for the chutney, if you think about it. Does just as well on the counter.”

“Yes,” Owen said.

They stared together into the blue flowers.

“I expect it won’t be long before I join him,” she said.

“No, you’re in fine shape, surely.”

“Doesn’t upset me—the idea. It used to, but not anymore.