Face-Up

Mindy Carpenter packed the way she did everything when she was trying not to think about it - quickly, with the particular efficiency of someone who has made a decision and doesn't want to give themselves time to unmake it.

The apartment was the Dallas apartment, not the Marfa apartment, which meant it smelled like the coffee shop two floors below and the window faced the alley and the light was never good before noon. She'd been here since Friday night. She'd told Frida she needed the weekend in Dallas. Frida had nodded in the way Frida nodded things she wasn't going to push on, which was one of the things Mindy appreciated about Frida and one of the things that occasionally made her feel, obscurely, that she was getting away with something.

The phone was in her hand.

This was the thing: for two weeks it had been face-down on desks, face-down in her bag, face-down on the nightstand. The face-down was the tell, the thing Chloe had clocked and Casandra had noted and neither of them had said a word about, because the alliance they had was built on the principle that some things were seen and filed and not extracted. But Mindy knew they'd seen it. She'd seen them see it. She just hadn't been ready to stop turning it face-down.

This morning she was holding it face-up.

The thing on it was not dramatic, from the outside. A name. A place. A conversation she'd been not-having for eight months and had now, this Sunday, decided to drive to. The bag was by the door. The car was in the garage. She was wearing the jeans and the soft henley she wore when she was being nobody's creative director, just a person who needed to go somewhere and was going.

She set the phone on the kitchen counter, face-up, and looked at it for a moment. Then she picked it up and put it in her jacket pocket.

There was a kind of feeling - not bravery, which was for things you were afraid of, and Mindy was not exactly afraid of this, more tired of not-going - where the not-doing of a thing finally costs more than the doing. She'd reached that place sometime in the last week, in one of those late shifts at the monitor where the frame either told the truth or it didn't and she was the one who had to decide. The frame didn't lie. Mindy had been lying, or at least not saying the truth, for eight months, and the not-saying had started to show up in her work in ways only she could see, in a tightness that wasn't the client's fault.

She picked up the bag. She locked the apartment. She did not turn the radio on in the car because the drive was only forty minutes and forty minutes was about the right length for a silence that had been waiting this long.

She drove toward the thing instead of away from it. The city unrolled in the Sunday morning sun, quiet at this hour, indifferent the way only cities can be indifferent, which is completely. The phone was in her jacket pocket, face-up, the way it would stay from now on.

It was not resolved. She knew that. It would not be resolved today. But she was voyaging now, which was different from sitting still, and sitting still had run its course.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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