Raveling by Peter Moore Smith

the churning of a million pistons.
    “You’ll get used to it.”
    “Have you ever lived in New York?”
    The tattooed waitress arrived at that moment with an enormous platter of food. “Here we go,” she said cheerily. It must have
     been sitting in the kitchen the whole time, Katherine thought, ready to serve the instant someone made the order.
    “Wow.”
    “You said you were starving.”
    My brother’s face, Katherine realized, was like mine, but larger and stronger. His eyes were as blue, she thought, as the
     earth from space. He had the face of a winner, our father hadalways said, the face of the next president. “I’m starving,” she said. “But—”
    “I went to Columbia.”
    “—this is insane.”
    “Brain-surgery school.”
    “A very good brain-surgery school,” Katherine acknowledged. Now she thought she shouldn’t have used the word
insane
.
    “You?” Eric began cutting into his ribs. They were reddish black, smeared with barbecue sauce.
    “NYU,” she said. “Psychology. Graduate school, too.”
    He nodded. “I’m attracted to you,” he said bluntly. “You should know that, you know, just in case.”
    Did she look shocked? “In case of—”
    “I don’t know.”
    Katherine laughed. “I’m recently divorced, sort of.”
    “Sort of?”
    “We weren’t really married.”
    He smiled slightly. “Not really?”
    “Living in sin.”
    “It’s completely over?”
    “Completely.”
    “How do you feel?”
    “I’m very—”
    “—fragile?”
    “
Unpredictable
.”
    In the clinic, the television was on, a blur of voices and faces. I sat in front of it on a squeaking vinyl couch. Quietly,
     somewhere behind me, a man was weeping. My mother had gone home.
    “I like that,” Eric said, smiling. “Unpredictability is a good quality.”
    Katherine chewed on a piece of her blackened chicken,gnawing on a sliver of the burnt, brittle skin. It tasted like wood. The sauce was way too spicy. “You’ve—you’ve never been
     married?”
    “Wanted to,” Eric said from behind a rib bone. “Went to medical school in Virginia. She wouldn’t come with me, though. She
     was like you.” He was chewing and swallowing rapidly, wolfing it down.
    I’ll tear out your carotid artery with my bare hands
.
    “Like me?”
    “A New Yorker.”
    “She couldn’t take the idea of living in Virginia just for a few years?”
    “Of living in Virginia with
me
,” he said, “for any length of time.”
    Katherine laughed. “And how did you like it?”
    Through a smile and a mouthful of coleslaw, my brother said, “She was right.”
    “That’s the only one?”
    “The only one what?”
    “The only girl you ever considered marrying?”
    “I’ve considered it with others,” Eric said. “She just happened to be the only one I ever asked.”
    “Is this getting too personal?”
    “Not at all. It’s my turn, though.”
    Katherine sat back. “Okay.”
    “Your ex-boyfriend’s name?”
    She looked around, as if he were in the room somewhere. “My ex-boyfriend’s name is Mark.” It sounded right, she thought.
Ex
.
    “What does he do?”
    “Lawyer. Corporate finance.”
    “How’d you meet?”
    “High school sweethearts, if you can believe it.”
    Eric leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I can believe it.”
    “We went to NYU together, too, and then he went to law school—”
    “Where?”
    “Fordham.”
    “And then?”
    “And then we moved in together.”
    “What was the problem?”
    Katherine refolded her napkin. “I didn’t love him, as it turned out.”
    “Oh.”
    She nodded. “It was painful…
is
painful.”
    “Did he love you?”
    “He says he did.”
    “Does he still?”
    “No.”
    They spent a few more moments chewing. Katherine liked the relaxed way Eric leaned over his plate. She liked the way he had
     rolled his shirtsleeves over his elbows, the way he licked his fingers and drank his beer directly from the green bottle.
    She said, “Me, too.”
    He was looking at