“I know,” Emily said.
“Are you going to go back?” Denise asked. “To it. The other craft. I am not offering to manage your life. God forbid. I manage a portfolio of clinics and it has made me unbearable in restaurants, as you have observed. I ask because he will ask me in the car, and I would like to have heard your answer rather than inventing one that flatters my sense of narrative.”
Emily was quiet long enough that a person who did not understand quiet might have thought she was refusing. She watched a child outside trying to tie a shoe on the sidewalk, the loops collapsing, the child’s patience astonishing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have written three applications in three years and deleted them. Not because I can’t do the work. Because I am afraid of wanting a thing that can be taken away by a budget, and of leaving my father in order to want it, and of discovering that the part of me that liked the click of the latch has gotten used to not being asked for anything but coffee. Today was the first day in a long time that somebody asked in a voice I couldn’t file under politeness. He asked if I actually knew. I did. The knowing felt like a room I had locked from the inside and then blamed the lock.”
She had not planned to say the sentence about the lock. It was truer than she liked sentences to be while she was in uniform. She let it stand. Truth, once set on a table, did not go back into the pot.