“Okay” is what Cate says, although this is not the response she was hoping for. The assault is the worst thing they have ever shared, but also the most significant. As circumstances arranged themselves, she rescued Neale, but if their positions had been switched, she knows Neale would’ve done the same for her. For Cate, saving Neale has eliminated whatever thin space was between them. Neale has had a different response. She has the look of someone at the end of her own private dock, looking seaward toward a fogged horizon. When she pulls back into herself, she is looking around what used to just be her kitchen. Cate tries to help. “You don’t have to stay here. You could move to a blander neighborhood. Or even just a frumpy one. West of Ashland. No one will think you’re a wimp if you get out of Dodge.”

“You know what I hate most? I hate that from here on this will be the centerpiece of our friendship. That we used to have a regular friendship and now we have this thing with weights all over, dangling from it.”

This is so not how Cate sees things. In the first place, she has never thought of their friendship as regular. She thinks of it as way big enough to accommodate what happened. Nothing in this conversation, though, is reinforcing these assumptions.

Neale is fixed on the matter of the house. “I don’t think I have what it would take to rehab someplace else, and I won’t get enough for this place to buy anything but another fixer-upper. I’d have to look at all those listings that say, ‘tons of potential.’ I wish that house all the best, but right now I don’t have whatever it would take to help it realize its destiny.”

Cate gets stuck in a long pause, then pulls her random, sorrowful thoughts into some sort of action. “What do you say we go get the magnesium whatever for the floor and pick up some Vietnamese sandwiches on the way back. You and Joe and I can eat spicy sandwiches here and start reclaiming your kitchen, the way trees take back abandoned parking lots.”

Neale disappears for a few minutes, then comes back with two bathroom rugs, drops them over the offending patch of floor. “All right. Rock and roll.” When they get to the door, she shouts up the stairs to Joe, “Don’t open the door for anyone!”

breathing room