Chapter 45
Forty-Five
Victor
I sign the lease for the studio space on Monday and Jason decides to tell Kelsey about us the next time she comes to his house to make dinner together, a monthly ritual they’ve had more or less since she moved out for college.
Which doesn’t go quite as well as either of us expected.
Kelsey and Adrienne arrive together, which I gather is unusual from how Jason greets them at the door.
Kelsey unwinds the scarf around her neck and goes to hang it on one of the line of hooks on the wall just inside the front door.
She hesitates before she hangs it up and I can see the set in her shoulders as she notices the extra outerwear hanging on the hooks next to Jason’s overcoat and winter parka.
My winter coat, since we had a cold snap earlier this week, a lighter jacket now that the weather has warmed up a little, the red beanie that I wear often enough she surely recognizes it.
Her head tips down and I know she’s clocked a few extra pairs of shoes that weren’t here the last time she was. My running shoes, a pair of winter boots, and the casual kicks I usually wear when the weather’s not shitty.
When she turns around, her eyes sweep the room.
And fuck, there’s my Michigan hoodie draped over the banister, which I’d meant to take upstairs.
In other words, while I haven’t officially moved in yet, there’s enough of my stuff scattered around the house to indicate that I’ve spent more than a few nights here.
Kelsey finally looks between me, wearing casual pants and my scuffed leather house slippers that I obviously didn’t walk here in, and Jason, who’s hanging up Adrienne’s coat and seems not to have realized yet that the cat is out of the bag.
When he turns toward her and approaches for a hug, he halts comically with one leg outstretched, then slowly sets his foot down.
“Hi, sweetie,” he says. He looks calm, but he must be as ready to jump out of his skin as I am.
Kelsey’s chin lifts. “Dad. Is this it? The big announcement that you and Daddy are together?”
The tips of Jason’s ears turn an adorable pink. “Um, I guess so?”
Kelsey glares at him like she hasn’t since she was a sullen teenager.
After a moment, she turns on her heel. “I need a minute,” she tosses over her shoulder without looking at the rest of us.
She heads straight for the bottle of wine Jason opened just before they arrived to breathe, grabs a wineglass from the cabinet, and pours herself a sizable glug.
She takes two sips, fills the glass about two-thirds of the way, and stalks to the door to the deck.
Barnaby lurches up when he hears the door open, and winds his way around Jason and past me, his tags jingling and nails clicking on the floor as he crosses the kitchen. Kelsey holds the door open for him—I guess his company is acceptable—then it slams shut behind them.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jason breathes.
“She’ll come around.” Adrienne pats him on the shoulder. “There’s some shit happening at work that she’s dealing with right now.”
Kelsey settles into a chair on the deck, her back to the window, and Barnaby sidles up next to her and rests his chin on her knee.
Jason pinches the bridge of his nose. “I think I need something stronger than wine.”
“I’ll make it,” Adrienne says, then turns to me. “Manhattan, Victor?”
“Sure.”
She seems as familiar with Jason’s kitchen as Kelsey is and for the moment, there’s only the sounds of Adrienne bustling around in there.
The clink of glassware set on the countertop, the pop of a cork-lined cap pulled off the whiskey bottle, the rasp of liquid and ice stirred together in the metal cocktail shaker.
Jason drops onto the sofa while she finishes mixing the drinks and I plop down next to him. Not too close. I don’t want to make Kelsey any more uncomfortable than she already is. Assuming she decides to come back inside.
Adrienne returns with three lowball glasses balanced against each other between her hands. She sets the trio down on the coffee table together, then places each on a coaster for us, and settles in an armchair with her drink in hand.
“So,” she says, after a little silence. She tips her glass in Jason’s direction. “I hear congratulations are in order?”
“Doesn’t seem like Kelsey thinks it’s something to congratulate,” Jason mutters darkly.
He’s not having second thoughts, is he? He swore he wouldn’t resent me for causing him to leave Saint Sebastian’s but we didn’t even talk about the possibility of Kelsey not being okay with this. With us.
I push my fingers into my hair and massage my scalp, trying to keep my shit together. Kelsey’s disapproval would change everything.
“I meant about the job,” Adrienne says.
I look up at Adrienne. She’s leaning back in her chair, sipping her cocktail like this is just another family dinner. Then at Jason, who looks startled.
“Oh, right. Yeah, thanks. I’m excited about it. I think. It’s a huge change.”
“You’ll be great. It’s just a different venue than you’re used to, that’s all.”
Jason turns to me and clarifies, “I got a job offer from Silas’s producer. Vocal arranger for his musical.”
“That’s wonderful!” I remember Silas panicking in Costa Rica when he learned that the original vocal arranger for his show became unavailable.
“It’s not just a different venue,” Jason says.
“It’s a whole different genre of music. I mean, James Cohen said he wanted me because of my experience arranging early sacred music, a lot of which is polyphonic, and there are sections in Silas’s musical that are meant to evoke the ancient Greek-style chorus in the original Oedipus Rex, but with more harmonic diversity. ”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I love how passionate he is about music.
“But it’s a Broadway musical and I don’t know anything about creating music that will be popular with that audience.”
“I think you’ll be surprised at what Broadway audiences are interested in,” Adrienne says.
“Didn’t you have to plan a second and third performance of that concert in Green-Wood Cemetery?”
Jason stares at me. “How did you know that?”
I shrug. “I couldn’t get a ticket to the first performance because it was sold out, and then the second performance sold out, and I finally set an alert on my phone for the very minute tickets for the third performance became available.”
Jason keeps staring at me, his mouth opening and closing like a confused goldfish, and Adrienne hides a smile behind her glass.
The door to the back deck opens and Barnaby noses his way through into the kitchen, followed by Kelsey. Her wine glass is empty and she’s got a scowl on her pretty face, but all she says is, “Ready to make dinner, Dad?”
The three of us exchange looks, then Jason stands. “Sure, sweetie.”
I go to rise, too, but Adrienne shakes her head slightly, and I sink back onto the sofa. We stay in the living room, sipping our cocktails, while Jason and Kelsey move around the kitchen, fetching things from the fridge and pantry, chopping, stirring, all the soothing sounds of family normalcy.
Which does seem to soothe Kelsey, because after a while, she says, “I’m not mad at you.
” There’s a baby grand piano in what would otherwise be a dining room between the kitchen and living room, but it’s all one big open space, so Adrienne and I can mostly see and hear them.
She tips her chin in our direction and says, a little louder, “Or you, Daddy.”
“Well,” Jason says, his head bent to the chicken he’s cutting up. “That’s good.”
“The grant funding my research might be canceled and the director and I have spent this week and last scrambling to find other options to fund my next field trip. It’s been a lot of surprises coming at me at once and I guess I just couldn’t take another one tonight.”
“We weren’t trying to surprise you, hon, or hide anything from you. We were literally going to tell you about us tonight.”
Kelsey sniffs and wipes her eyes on her shirtsleeve, a large chef’s knife in her hand. It’s hard to tell whether she’s crying because of her emotions or because of the onions she’s slicing. “So, tell me.”
I’m literally on the edge of my seat and I don’t know how much longer I can stay still.
“Well,” Jason starts. He stops, clears his throat, and goes to wash his hands at the sink. “Your father and I…” He trails off. He’s drying his hands on a towel now, and Kelsey’s moved on to chopping garlic. She’s not helping him out here.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Adrienne says under her breath.
I jump up from the sofa. When I reach the end of the kitchen island, I slap my hands on its surface and say, “Your dad and I are together. For real. For…good?”
I don’t mean that last bit to be a question, but this is still so new that I keep finding myself surprised by it.
“For good,” Jason says firmly. He rests his hand over one of mine and squeezes gently. “I’m resigning from my position at Saint Sebastian’s so there’s nothing standing in our way now.”
There’s a moment of tense silence while Kelsey finishes chopping the garlic.
She navigates around Jason to the sink, where she washes her hands and rinses the garlic juice off the knife.
After she returns to the other side of the island and starts picking cilantro leaves off their stems, she says, still without looking at either of us, “Okay, then.”
Jason and I exchange looks. That’s it? She’s okay with us now? Somehow it doesn’t feel like it.
“Kels,” I begin.
She drops the cilantro but doesn’t look up at us. “How long?”
“Until I resign?” Jason asks. “I’ve already given Father Gabriel my notice, and—”
“Not that,” Kelsey interrupts. “How long before—have you…?”
I’m not a hundred percent sure whether she’s asking how long we’ve felt like this about each other or how long Jason, her presumed-until-a month-ago straight stepfather has felt anything for another man, but she’s definitely asking if there was something between us before Costa Rica.
I open my mouth to say something, I’m not sure what yet, but Jason beats me to it.
“I loved your mom so much, sweetie. Nothing will ever change that. But after she died,” he swallows, and there’s a small catch in his voice. “I guess there was something else that I didn’t let myself feel for a long time.”
She starts plucking cilantro leaves again but she’s making a mess of it. “And Mom?” Her voice is quiet and she sounds more like the little girl she used to be than the grown woman she is. “Do you think she would be okay with this?”
“Well, if your mom were here, we definitely wouldn’t be doing this,” I say. That earns me a quiet chuckle from Kelsey. “But she was pretty perceptive and she knew us both pretty well. I think if she were looking down on us now, she’d mostly have some things to say about how long we took.”
Kelsey finally looks up at us and her eyes are wet, and this time, I don’t think it’s because of the onions.
“Oh, sweetie,” Jason says, but I get to her first. She drops the cilantro and turns into my hug. Jason wraps his arms around us from her other side and we sandwich our girl, grown as she is, between us.
She’s got her face squashed against my chest, Jason’s chin is on the top of her head, and my arms are long enough that I can enfold her and cup the back of Jason’s head with my hand.
Despite all our years of co-parenting and comforting Kelsey through various teenaged crises, we’ve never jointly hugged her like this.
But it’s time to stop dwelling on past mistakes and enjoy this moment and all the moments still to come.
“For what it’s worth,” Adrienne says. “I think your mom would have been right. They’re both idiots and it took them long enough.”
Kelsey giggles through the tears that are dampening my shirt.
“Come here, you,” Jason says. We pull apart just enough to make room to include Adrienne in our four-way embrace.
Moments like this one.