Chapter Text
‘It wasn't made for love, the house.'
'Any place is made for love,' she protested.
'Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won't find love. We are incapable of such a thing.’
(
Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
-What have you got in your fucking hand?
-What have I got? I don’t know, fucking … love?
(3.09, “All the Bells Say”)
Gerri decides to refinish a dresser.
She hasn’t got anything better to do, and all of the sagely preachy podcasts her daughters have recommended seem to mention the importance of doing things with your hands.
She’s been tucked up in her vacation home in Southampton for a few weeks now, long enough that all this relaxation is starting to make her crazy. She misses her work like a limb, like her husband. No matter how thankful she is that she got out of Waystar when she did, she hadn’t been fully prepared for the existential uselessness. It isn’t worse than losing Baird, but it eats her up more. Her brain begs for stress, for problems. All her South of France retirement plans stay frozen. She’ll go when she’s ready, she tells herself. She just can’t figure out what ready is.
And so one day, soon after she and Roman start sleeping together, she goes to an antique shop and picks out a wobbly old dresser, deciding to transform it somehow. Paint it orange. Burn it in the backyard.
The antique shop does delivery. They leave it for her in the driveway. She’s home to meet the delivery man and hand him a tip. That in and of itself feels like mockery from the universe. She hasn’t been home to meet a delivery man in thirty years.
Roman comes out into the driveway in sweatpants and a puffy jacket, tossing a plum between his hands. He gives the old dresser a frown. Pokes it warily with one slippered foot.
“You’re fucking with me,” he says. “That thing? That? We’re supposed to touch it? I can– yep, I can feel the scabies radiating off it.”
“It’s got good bones,” Gerri says.
“Don’t get me wrong. Home Reno Gerri sounds hot. She can sand me down anytime in her little fucking overalls. But I’m not really made for hard labor.”
“Tough shit, cupcake. You’re helping me.”
“Just because I live in your house and eat your food and sleep in your bed doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”
“Yes it does.”
“Yes it does,” he agrees with a petulant sigh. “Bossy fucking bitch. Fine. Time to lose all my fingers in a freak sanding accident. Time to die from inhaling toxic paint fumes.”
“Do you even know what a sander is?”
“Fuck no. Do you?”
Gerri bites her lip. “I have a general idea,” she says at last.
“Ha!” Roman barks, tossing the plum at her. She catches it cleanly and throws it after him as he saunters away. (Apparently, to Roman, dressers move themselves.) The plum just misses him.
“Weak!” he calls to her. “So very weak.”
“Little fucker,” she grumbles.
She couldn’t cut him out completely, not after Logan’s funeral. Not after everything with Kendall. They’d texted for a while, met up for coffee a few times. He’d visited for a weekend, on an invitation she’d issued as a joke and hoped he’d take seriously. Since then, he’s stayed.
She keeps waiting for him to get sick of it. She and Baird bought the place back in the 90s, envisioning quaint family vacations that seldom happened and a retirement second honeymoon that never did, and next to anywhere Roman’s ever lived, it’s – well, at least a cottage, if not a hovel. Four bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms. Forgotten most of the time, and left untouched over the hectic past few years. He must feel like he’s in a zoo exhibit with slightly out-of-style throw pillows. But he sticks around, like he wants nothing more from life than spending winter in the Hamptons with the woman who wouldn’t hold him when his father died.
And maybe that’s true.
***
The worst thing is that it’s fun, actually. Life with Roman usually is, when it isn’t awful.
They look up dresser renovation videos on YouTube and drive impractically long distances to stores to buy supplies and look at paint colors. Roman wears a baseball cap with ironic aplomb and merrily greets all the employees. He thinks he’s making fun of them, or maybe himself, but Gerri suspects he might just be having a nice time.
“Get a load of all these simple souls,” he mutters to her in the glow of the paint swatches aisle. “They think we’re just like them.”
“We are,” she mutters back.
“Never,” Roman says. “No way. We’re far too hot and interesting. We smack of tragedy and impeccable breeding.”
“It’s a wonder you’re not more popular.” She points at the wall of paint swatches. “Now, which?”
He stares at them for a long time, his brow furrowed in what might be actual thought. It makes her remember him on the other side of her desk, trying to prove himself.
“I’m kind of feeling this one. A sort of pumpkin shit mahogany? Is that hot right now?”
She stares at his fingertip on the orange rectangle called Desert Mirage. Again, as always, she feels that illogical string tugging taut between them.
“Pumpkin shit mahogany it is,” she says.
“Aw, yes!” Roman high-fives a befuddled passing employee in an apron.
***
They do a puzzle that her daughters sent her as a happy retirement joke gift. Five hundred pieces, a picture of a garden, now that she can stop and smell the roses. (Ha ha.) When it’s done, they dump the pieces directly into the kitchen trash can. She likes that part best.
They catch up on movies, discovering that neither of them have the attention span for movies anymore, and scroll the internet for pointless hours. Roman likes to check TikTok for new joke edits of him crying at the funeral, because you can’t teach an old dog not to kick itself. Gerri listens to audiobooks while Roman tunes them out. They go for a lot of walks, and she forces herself to notice plants and birds and water while the voice in the back of her head asks, Who gives a shit?
On Thanksgiving she tries to teach him to cook, an undertaking made even more hellishly impossible by the fact that she hasn’t done it seriously in years. It ends in mutual screaming along to the cries of the smoke detector and irreparably charred cookware. They ignore each other for a sullen forty-five minutes and then make out furiously against the refrigerator. The still-smoking turkey breast goes into the trash with the puzzle pieces.
Meanwhile, the dresser comes along pretty nicely. When the opportunity’s actually there in front of him, Roman wants to try out the sander.
***
Neither of them can sleep for shit. She’s used to surviving on a few hours, and though she’d used to joke with Frank and Karolina and the others about longing for a more restful life, she hadn’t really meant it. She’d been so smug hanging around them at Logan’s funeral, like the cool kid trying to lure the others into smoking under the bleachers. Look how great it is, being free. Way better in theory, it turns out.
She still wakes up before five every morning, ready to go. Roman’s usually up too. They’ll turn on the TV: flip between news channels, watching the world go on without them, or get inconveniently mesmerized by bad infomercials. Roman always threatens to order the products.
When he’s not awake, she likes to stay in bed with him, even though they say you should get up when you can’t sleep.
***
“This isn’t enough, is it?” Roman asks her one night after they’ve spent an hour on the couch staring at an episode of NOVA about the perils of climate change. “Nothing’s ever gonna be enough. Nothing’s ever going to fill that …” He puts a hand to his chest, like an actor playing Hamlet.
She’s used to pepping him up. She can’t just now. She would kill a man for a good legal quagmire. An all-consuming PR disaster sounds better than chocolate cake.
“What’s the alternative?” she asks.
Roman mimes shooting himself in the head, complete with zestful sound effects, then grins.
She pretends to ponder it. “Check with me again in six months.”
“You know, I’m kinda looking forward to all this climate shit kicking into gear. The sooner the better. Point of no return? Fuck yeah; bring it on.”
“Finally,” Gerri agrees, “something interesting.”
“You and me, we’re gonna be fortifying our underground bunker penthouse. Shooting down any motherfuckers who try to break in and steal our supplies or swim in our pool.” Giving her those cartoon bedroom eyes of his, he adds, “You can eat me if you have to.”
She tilts her head, ingenue-ish. “I thought that went without saying.”
***
But of course, it’s all different for him. She misses the work. To him, it wasn’t work. It was his family. His whole world, instead of only most of it.
Once she would have tried to whip him into shape, but the thing is, she understands. When he spends hours in bed, staring at nothing, or disappears without a word to her first, she takes it in stride. He always comes back, and that’s enough. That’s plenty.
He talks to Connor on the phone sometimes, but never Shiv. Whenever they’re out in public and they spot a stocky, bearded old man at a distance, he brightens, like the world comes temporarily to life around him again. So glad to see a ghost.
“He was a fucking asshole,” he tells her one night, out of nowhere. “It wasn't right, how he treated us.”
She isn’t sure who ‘us’ is. The two of them? The kids? There are too many possible contenders. In any context, it’s true.
But she still catches him sometimes, playing old interviews on his phone, closing his eyes to the rumble of his father’s voice.
Logan must have seen what he had in Roman, towards the end. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have sent him to fire her, an act that had been pitifully territorial more than anything, she’s since decided. He’s mine, not yours. Don’t you forget it.
But Roman doesn’t know that, and Gerri doesn’t have the heart to tell him. Not after Kendall. Better to be the eternal fuck-up than beloved to a monster.
***
One morning she stays in bed with a headache and a cup of tea, and comes out in her pajamas at eleven to find that Roman’s painted the dresser. The color looks better than she’d imagined. He’s covered in orange smudges. She feels particularly smitten.
“Ta-da,” he says lamely, spreading his arms out.
“Mmhmm,” she says, to cover up the sudden lump in her throat. “It’s good.”
“You like?”
“I always told you we’d do great things together, didn’t I?” she jokes bitterly.
“Oh yeah,” he says, coming over and pulling her into a gangly hug. “We are killing it.”
He still doesn’t quite have the hang of it. It’s fine. She’s never been a hugger. She appreciates the effort.