33. Jeremiah
JEREMIAH
Dax brings coffee and sets the cup with the wet sleeve on my side of the desk.
If one has leaked on the walk over, that one is mine. He says I’m too busy working to notice. Usually I take his before he can get the lid off.
Today I leave both cups where they are.
“Suri’s furious,” he says.
“I’m not surprised.”
“She’s withdrawn Candace’s invitations. Now she wants to know why I won’t delete the video.”
“So do I.”
“You told me Zelda hit her. You stood there and made her apologize. I believed you.”
“I know. I was wrong.”
“Well, Suri’s looking at me as if I helped Candace plan the whole thing.”
He looks at me over his cup, waiting. I know my part in this conversation. I’m supposed to tell him she’s being unfair.
“Then tell her why you sent it. And stop letting people watch it.”
He sits in the chair by the window. It is the chair he helped me carry up here before I could afford decent furniture. One arm still has the mark from the stair rail. I have meant to replace it for years and never quite wanted to.
“I came to see you, Jeremiah.”
“Then see me.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and takes a drink.
I want to apologize for the way I said that. He was here before the plant, before Zelda, before anybody knew whether I would make this business work. I could tell him I am tired. He would understand tired.
“I heard Zelda gave as good as she got,” he says.
“Candace questioned whether Otto is my son.”
“I heard.”
“Then don’t describe it as an argument they both started.”
Dax leans back. “You make yourself the only villain in the whole thing. Everyone knows Zelda was unhappy before Christmas. You’ve never told them what it was like for you.”
I look at the coffee. Zelda made rice the night she told me about the voice note. I had kissed her wrist before she asked me to sit down.
“She was unhappy,” I say.
“Exactly. Candace didn’t invent that.”
“I didn’t say she did.”
He shifts forward. “Then tell me. What was Zelda saying before all this? There must have been more than people heard at the party.”
The sentence is there, ready. Sometimes I wish I’d never married him. It still hurts to remember her saying she meant it.
If I give it to Dax, he will look at me differently. He will say that would hurt any man. For a minute I can almost feel the comfort of having somebody ask what it cost me to hear it.
He pulls his chair closer to the desk. I’ve let the silence go on long enough for him to think I’m going to tell him.
“I’m not giving you any more.”
“I’m your friend.”
“You’re asking me for something you can use against my wife.”
“I’m asking for your side.”
“You’ve had it. For months you had more of it than she did.”
He sets down the cup. “That’s a convenient way to shut me up.”
“There are things she has told me because she’s beginning to trust me again. You won’t hear them from me.”
He looks at me for a long time.
“So I’m out.”
I want to say no. I want him to leave that chair and stand beside me the way he used to, before every conversation became a choice about Zelda.
“If this is what you want to talk about, yes.”
He stands.
“We have a table at the concert next Saturday. I had a place for you.”
I had forgotten the concert. We bought the tickets months ago, and I’d sent him three songs he needed to hear before we went. For a moment I want that evening so badly I can’t answer.
He waits with his hand on the back of the chair.
“Give it to somebody else.”
“Suri’s already making it difficult enough.”
“She asked you to stop keeping that video available.”
“It’s a record of what you said that night. I didn’t make any of it up.”
“It shows Zelda apologizing for something she didn’t do.”
“Because you told her to.”
My face burns. He was there. He heard how I spoke to her, and there is no version of that night in which I get to deny it.
“Yes. And you know that now. Anyone watching just the video doesn’t.”
He presses the lid onto his cup, working his thumb around the rim.
“It reached Zelda’s work,” I say. “You know that.”
“I didn’t send it there.”
“Who did you send it to outside the group?”
He looks toward the door. I have asked him this before. In January he said he didn’t keep a list.
“A few people who know you.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought they ought to see what you were putting up with.”
I sit back. There it is. My wife apologizing because I wouldn’t take her home until she did, passed from phone to phone so people could feel sorry for me.
“I was backing you up,” he says.
“Then tell those same people you were wrong.”
“You’ve already told everyone.”
“You sent it to people I don’t even know about.”
He pulls the cup toward him. A little coffee spills through the opening in the lid.
“You can’t hold me responsible for what people do with their phones.”
“I’m holding you responsible for yours.”
He picks up his coffee. Mine stays on the desk.
“You used to be able to talk to me.”
“I still am. Take it down.”
He goes without answering.
I sit for a while with the untouched cup. Then I open the group chat and find my correction beneath the video. It is still there, months up the thread, easy to miss when someone sends only the clip.
I add a new message. The recording reached Zelda’s employer without the correction. I ask anyone who shared it to send the correction to the same people, and everyone to stop forwarding her false apology as an account of what happened.
I send the same request to the people I know received it from our circle. I cannot take a copy out of somebody else’s phone. I can stop behaving as if Dax’s refusal is a difference of opinion we will laugh about later.
Suri replies first. She has asked him again. She will speak to him at home too.
I close the chat.
At three, my manager sends me a photograph of the old chair in the break room finally giving way. Nobody was in it. Someone has laid a flower on the seat.
I open the messge thread I have with Dax before I think.
He would know which chair. He sat in it the night we stayed late moving boxes and ordered food so bad we still talked about it years afterward.
My thumb waits above the photograph.
I go back to the message from my manager and ask whether everybody had a good laugh. She sends a row of faces. I smile, but it is not the laugh I had wanted.
At four I go to Zelda’s to take over from Hedy while Zelda finishes work. He complains through a diaper change and falls asleep just as I have developed an argument explaining why the red bird is superior to the blue one.
When Zelda comes home, I am walking slowly between the window and the sofa.
“Don’t tell him I’m back,” she whispers.
“He has sources.”
She smiles and takes off her shoes. There is a mark on her wrist from carrying her bag. I want to tell her Dax has been cruel. I want her to put her arms around me and know I didn’t betray her.
She starts to tell me about a girl who would only look at books about machines. Then she stops.
“You look tired. Later?”
She has saved the story for someone.
I want to be that someone. More than anything else in the world.
I just want to be that someone for her.
“Tell me now.”
The girl had rejected every book with a face on the machine. Her father kept offering talking trains. Zelda finally found a photograph of an enormous digger, and the girl told her that was a machine with nothing silly going on.
“Was she satisfied?” I ask.
“She asked whether we had a bigger one.”
My laugh wakes Otto. He looks annoyed, and Zelda laughs too.
While she is laughing, I want to be nowhere else.
She asks whether I will stay for supper. I say yes, then settle onto the sofa with our son while she tells me what else the girl said about the excavator.