Chapter IX #2
He holds up a hand. “Stop questioning this. I want to spend time with you, and I also like being a come-with guy. Just accept it.”
“A ‘come-with’ guy?”
“The Seinfeld pilot.” I look at him blankly. “Jesus, Lili. And you call yourself a New Yorker?”
Then he waves away my credit card and drops his on the table.
“I’ll let Gracie know our plans changed, but I can’t show up empty-handed,” he says. “Any good bakeries in the neighborhood?”
“You see? It was a good thing I got the extra lox,” my mom says.
She nudges the plate of salmon across the table toward Reid. He’s already eaten a bagel and a half, like a champ. Now he declines the fish but astutely asks for another scoop of coleslaw.
We’re sitting at my parents’ sun-drenched kitchen table, beside the curved bay windows that overlook Riverside Park and the sparkling gray-green Hudson beyond.
It’s a gorgeous early summer day, and my mother has cracked open the window.
A sense of satisfaction settles over me, that special click of putting everything in its right place.
Not only did we set up my parents’ electric, credit card, maintenance, and mortgage payments this morning, but we also collected all their login information (which previously my father had scrawled on loose Post-it notes), wrote it out on a single piece of notebook paper, and took a photo of that piece of paper for when it inevitably gets misplaced.
Reid was game throughout this ordeal, though once or twice I noticed him moving to reach for the mouse when my dad stumbled through a step before tethering his patience and calmly walking him through the explanation one more time.
And he laughed genuinely at all my father’s jokes, including the one about the first Jewish president’s inauguration that I personally have heard a minimum of four hundred times.
My father rolls this one out first, but only to people he’s trying to impress: “See that man at the podium?” the president-elect’s mother whispers to the man sitting next to her. “His brother is a doctor.”
While we holed ourselves up in my father’s study—the “computer room,” as he still calls it—my mother plied us with coffee and cookies before breaking out her overzealous deli run.
She even pulled out a bottle of champagne, which has been sitting in their fridge since their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2018.
I know this because I bought it for them.
Before we arrived, I texted my mom with the least-complicated explanation for the strapping gentleman joining me to help digitize their bills: Reid is an old friend from college, in town from Los Angeles with his daughter.
When we walked in, I noticed my mother do the thing she’s always done when confronted with a good-looking man: straighten her posture and gently touch her fingers to her hair, a Jean Seberg–esque pixie cut she’s maintained for the past thirty-five years, once butter-blond and now an elegant dove gray.
Then Reid presented to her the box of black-and-white cookies he picked up on the way, and she’s been his shadow since.
“Leave the kid alone,” my dad says now. In a show of solidarity, he pulls the plate of lox toward him, away from Reid. My mom playfully slaps at his hand.
Reid laughs. “Believe me, I appreciate this. LA has some great delis, but the bagels don’t come close.”
“It’s the water,” my mom intones, as if she has come to this conclusion herself, after years of rigorous experimentation. “It’s no good out there.”
Her eyes narrow, studying Reid intently, generally the precursor to a probing question.
I want to swoop in with something, anything, to get the attention off him—Emme is learning how to make crochet sushi figurines!
—but my mom has decades of practice in the art of extracting information. She cuts in faster than I do.
“So you have a daughter.” She innocently busies herself with topping up our glasses.
“I do.” Pride radiates even from those two words. “Gracie. She’s going into her senior year of high school.”
“Gracie’s two years older than Emme,” I add, reattempting to gain control over this conversation.
“She’s interested in NYU, so Emme is showing her around the neighborhood today.
I know they’re going to Washington Square Park, and I think she’s taking Gracie to that Thai restaurant on West Third Street?
Remember the one we went to after Emme’s dance recital a few years ago? ”
But my mom would never relinquish her agenda so easily.
“So it’s just you and your daughter here?”
Reid takes a long sip of his drink. He nods warmly. “Just me and Gracie, yes. Always just me and Gracie.”
My mom lifts an eyebrow. “Divorced?”
“Mom,” I warn. Under the table, I graze my hand against Reid’s leg, trying to communicate to him that he doesn’t have to answer this question.
Even though I desperately want to know.
“It’s OK.” Reid looks at me briefly, and there’s something like an apology in his eyes. Then he turns his gaze back to the table and grips his champagne glass with slightly too much force. “Widower.”
The word is a stone, dropped in a bucket. It shatters the levity of the afternoon.
There’s a beat of silence. When he looks back up at my mother, his gracious smile is back in place. But I can see the effort it took for him to get there.
This is what he wanted to tell me about last night at dinner, I realize now.
I study Reid’s face through the lens of this new knowledge.
This is the cause of the emotion I noticed stalking the lightness behind his eyes.
This is the suffering Gracie scrambled to cover up.
This is why Reid wants to keep her so close.
I picture him again as a twenty-two-year-old—all his promise, his gameness, his carefully laid plans and good manners. I see Reid on the fire escape, the fairy lights dancing in his eyes. I want to keep him there.
“Oh, Reid.” I gently touch his elbow, and he offers me the smallest smile.
My mother’s hand flies to her heart. The gesture is old-fashioned, somehow, an open, unironic demonstration of her sympathy. “That’s just terrible,” she says. “I’m sorry, honey.”
“Thank you, Joan,” Reid says. “I am too.”
After that, I manage to finally redirect the conversation toward neutral ground, and my parents eagerly follow.
My dad tells a story about meeting Edie Sedgwick at a Factory party.
(“All I remember is she was wearing a pair of little boy’s overalls, with nothing underneath.
”) My mom brings out a Salvador Dalí statuette, a twisted Christ rendered in eighteen-karat gold, another of her collection’s crown jewels.
And then Reid trades a story about how, back in the sixties, his chronically late mother had just missed meeting Dalí at one of Frank Zappa’s parties in the Canyon.
(“That was the last time she was late for anything.”)
Eventually, after we finish up the champagne and clear the table, my father recruits Reid to help him fix his printer. “While I have a young person here,” he says. “This thing hasn’t worked since the Obama administration. The first one.”
Reid follows him. “At fifty-two, it’s nice to be called young.”
After they leave, I load the dishwasher while my mom handwashes the cabbage platters and good knives. (“Never put a wooden handle in the dishwasher,” I hear her refrain.)
We’re quiet for a while. I know it won’t last.
My mom hands me a dish towel and a platter. “Reid is a nice man.”
I can’t help but laugh at her opening gambit, and she does too.
“He is indeed,” I say.
“He’s a friend from college, you said? I don’t remember ever meeting him.”
“You didn’t. I didn’t know him well enough to introduce you.”
She drops a handful of knives onto my dish towel. “And you know him well enough now?”
I pause. It’s a good question, and one I’ve been grappling with since last night.
How well do I know Reid? How well did I ever know Reid?
We only spent a week together, though the depth of our connection never quite squared with the brevity of our .
. . whatever it was. And then there was another lifetime’s worth of elapsed years.
I think back to when I saw him first, on that hellishly hot day at Sin-é.
The way I felt intuitively that I’d encountered him before, that I knew all the tics and quirks and vulnerabilities that hid behind his cool exterior.
And I felt that way again when I saw him last night.
The distinct . . . Reid-ness of him was how I recognized him from a distance, across the deep, wide gulf of time.
I run the dish towel over a knife, then wrap it around the wooden handle and gently press the water from it.
“I know him as well as I possibly can,” I say. It’s the most honest answer I can give.
“You didn’t know his wife died. Don’t you think he should have told you sooner? And not in front of your parents?”
“It’s . . . complicated.” I take a deep breath. “I don’t know, Mom. You don’t get to our age without collecting some baggage.”
My mom puts her hand on mine and squeezes it. Her nails are painted the color of glossy candy apples, as they have been since at least 1985. The big things change, but the small things don’t. The small things, I think, are often the most meaningful.
“That man,” my mom says, “is in pain.”
My heart sinks. There’s something about my mom telling me what I already know that makes it even more real.
I know she’s right. And I know Emme was right last night, when she warned me to guard my heart.
Before now, I never would have second-guessed these warnings.
I never even would have gotten to a point in my feelings when I would have needed to be warned anyway.
I certainly didn’t with the handful of men I dated after James and I split.
But none of those men were Reid. There’s something about him that calls to something in me, a quiet hum of resonance I’d forgotten I could hear.
I like him. The admission to myself feels dangerous.
I like him enough that I’m actually considering poking my head out of the shell I retracted into after the divorce.
He’s only been back in my life for a matter of hours, but I can already feel myself changing shape, becoming a person who might take calculated risks again.
I open the drawer at my waist and slot the dried-off knives inside. From the office, I hear the labored chug of the printer, followed by the whoop of my dad’s laugh.
“I don’t know anyone who isn’t in pain,” I say. “But maybe we don’t have to let our pain rule us.”
My mom raises a brow in a way that means she’s seeing right through me. “I wish you really believed that, sweetheart.”