16. Oscar
Oscar
The council called Adam two days later. We got it. The town wanted Ruby's plan, the carousel at the center, all of it.
I heard it from Adam, not from the room, because I wasn't in the room, and that was the right way for it to happen. It was hers. I made a point of staying out of the way of the good news so that when it came, it came to her clean, with nobody's name on it but her own.
I kept thinking about her up there. The way she found her feet after the first minute and just went, talking about porches and paths and a hundred-year-old carousel like she'd been waiting twenty years to be asked.
She had been. I sat in that conference room watching my wife do the thing she was born to do, the thing I married her for, and I could not for the life of me account for the years I'd spent making it harder for her to do it.
That was the part I kept snagging on. Not one big decision I could point to.
If there'd been a day I chose this, a moment I could go back and undo, that would almost be easier.
There wasn't. It was a thousand small days.
A comment here, a room I walked out of ahead of her there, a project I didn't mention because I'd already decided how it would end.
I never sat down and decided to make her disappear.
I just did it a little at a time, for years, while telling myself I was working hard for the family.
I had always been proud of her. That was the strange thing, the thing that didn't square.
I used to tell people, in the early days, that I'd married the most talented person I'd ever met.
I meant it. I liked being her husband. I liked standing next to her and knowing everyone in the room was going to figure out sooner or later that she was the interesting one.
Somewhere that turned into me needing to be the interesting one, and I don't know when, and I don't know why, and I'd give a lot to have caught it while it was happening instead of twenty years down the line with her sleeping in our bed alone and me down the hall.
I wasn't going to fix that by feeling bad about it. Feeling bad was easy. Feeling bad was for me.
* * *
I called Jeremy that night.
"Hey, Dad. Everything okay?" He always asked that now when I called at night. I didn't love what it told me, that a call from me after dark meant something was probably wrong.
"Everything's fine. Your mother got the Ocean City project. Her design. She presented it herself."
"Wait, seriously?" I could hear him sit up. "Mom did the presentation? That's huge. She hasn't done anything like that since before I was born."
"She was good, Jer. She was better than good."
"I knew she still had it." He was grinning, I could hear it. "Is she around? Can I talk to her?"
"In a bit. I wanted to talk to you first."
He waited. He got that from her too, the knowing when to be quiet.
"I haven't always been good to your mother," I said.
"I think you've probably seen more of that than I'd like.
The way I talk to her sometimes. The way I don't listen.
" I made myself keep going. "I'm not telling you this so you'll tell me it's okay.
It's not. I'm telling you because you're going to be with somebody someday, if Libby's got any sense it'll be her, and I don't want you learning how to do it from watching me these last few years. "
The line was quiet a second.
"Dad." His voice had changed. "It's okay."
"It's not, but thank you for saying it."
"I mean it, though. You're doing something about it. That's more than a lot of people do." Then, careful, the way you step toward something: "Are you guys going to be all right?"
"I don't know," I said, because he was too old to lie to. "I hope so. That's on me now, and I'm going to work at it. I probably haven't always been the father you needed either. I'm going to work at that too."
"You've been a good dad," he said, quick, like it mattered to him that I heard it. "You have. You just—" He stopped.
"I just wasn't always good at the rest of it."
"Yeah."
"I know. I'm working on it."
We talked a while longer, easier stuff, his studio class, a professor he liked, Libby's family wanting to meet everyone at Thanksgiving.
Before we hung up he said, "Hey, Dad? Whatever you're planning.
Because I know you're planning something.
" He laughed. "Make it something she wants.
Not something you'd want to give her. There's a difference. "
My son. Twenty years old and he already understood the thing it took me forty-five to work out.
"I'm on it," I said.
* * *
I sat in the guest room after and thought about what she wanted.
Not what would look good. Not the kind of thing I was good at, something that Ruby actually wanted that had nothing to do with me. Jeremy was right about that, and so was Adam. The flowers and the dinner, those were fine, those were a start, but half of them were still for me.
I thought about what she actually wanted, the things she'd said out loud that I'd let go past me.
And it was right there. It had been right there for months, for years.
She told me in the limo the night of the Jubilee and I said mm-hm.
She told Jeremy, who told me, and I called it a you-and-your-mom thing.
She'd wanted it her whole life and I'd spent that whole life finding reasons it was somebody else's trip to take.
Fallingwater.
A house built out over a waterfall by the one architect she'd have crossed the country to stand inside of.
Five hours west. She'd been asking to go since before we were married, and every time it came up I'd made the same joke about the leak, and every time the joke landed a little flatter, and I never once heard myself say it.
I was going to take her. Not send her with Jeremy. Take her, myself, and stand in the rooms she'd been dreaming about and listen to her talk about the man who built them, and not check my phone, and not wonder how long we'd be, and not make a single joke about the water.
I got my laptop and started looking at the calendar. There was a stretch the following week, after the Ocean City paperwork cleared, when I could get us both free for a few days. I found the tour times. I found a place to stay nearby, an inn, nothing enormous, the kind of quiet she liked.
I didn't book it yet. I sat there with it all pulled up, and I understood that the trip wasn't the thing.
The trip was easy. The thing was every ordinary day after it, the Tuesdays Adam talked about, the years of them, where nobody was watching and there was nothing to prove and I had to keep choosing her anyway.
But the trip was where I'd start.
I booked it.