Chapter 8
Mason asks to meet somewhere neutral, which is new.
I read the message twice.
Six months ago he’d have said let’s talk and named a time or just showed up at my apartment.
The diner is half full. He’s early, in the back booth facing the door, and he stands up when he sees me. He’s lost weight in his face. He’s shaved. There’s a folder on the table in front of him, closed, with his hands flat on top of it.
“Thank you for coming.”
“You said neutral. This is aggressively neutral.”
“I thought about your apartment.” He waits until I’ve sat down before he does. “But I’ve been in your apartment twice now, and both times I made it about me. I didn’t want to do that to a room you have to live in.”
I look at him.
That’s a whole thought. That’s a thought a person has after somebody else says it to them first, probably in an office with tissues on a low table and then repeats out loud in a diner to see how it sounds.
“You’re seeing someone,” I say.
“Twice a week.” He turns his coffee cup a quarter turn. “Dr. Weiss. My mother found her, which is humiliating, but I’m going anyway.”
“Good. I mean that.”
“I know you do. That’s the thing about you.” He almost smiles. “You mean everything you say. I spent a lot of years assuming everybody was doing what I was doing, which was saying the version that got the best result.”
The waitress comes. I order tea I won’t drink. He orders nothing, then changes his mind and orders coffee.
When she’s gone he puts both hands flat on the folder again.
“I’ve made a list of things I’m not going to do today,” he says. “Can I say them? It’ll take a minute.”
“All right.”
“I’m not going to ask you to come back.” He says it evenly.
“I’m not going to tell you I’ve changed.
I’ve been telling you that for ages and it’s worth nothing.
Dr. Weiss says a person who’s actually changed doesn’t have to announce it.
I’m not going to bring up the baby to make you feel something. I’m not going to cry at you again.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m not going to ask if there’s someone else.”
Something moves across my face before I can stop it. I don’t know what it is. He watches it happen and looks down at the folder. Something in his jaw goes tight. He keeps going.
“That’s the list,” he says.
“That’s a good list.”
“It took me four sessions to write.”
The tea comes. I put both hands around it because it’s November and my hands are always cold now.
“So what’s the folder?”
“The house.” He slides it across. “I’m not selling it. I’m signing it to you.”
I don’t touch it.
“Mason.”
“It’s paid down to about a third, and I’ll keep making payments on it.” He’s talking fast now, the only time he has. “It’s a three-bedroom with a yard. You’re in a second-floor apartment with no elevator and you’re going to be carrying a car seat up them in April.”
I look at the folder on the formica between us.
“No,” I say.
“Natalie—”
“I’m not being proud. I want you to hear that, because you’ll go home and tell yourself I was being proud.” I push it back toward him. “I don’t want to raise her in that house. There’s a guest room in it that I never want to lay eyes on again.”
He closes his eyes.
“I hadn’t…” He stops. “No. Of course. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I know.”
“Then let me do the difference on something else. A place with an elevator. A ground floor. Or even a house.” He opens his hands. “I’ll pay support, obviously, that’s not what this is, this is on top of that. Let me do one thing that’s actually useful instead of standing around being sorry.”
And here’s the strange part.
That’s a good offer. That’s the first genuinely good offer he has made me since this began. It costs him something, asks me for nothing, and it isn’t shaped like a door back in.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “Properly. Not the way I say it to your mother.”
“Thank you.” His shoulders come down about an inch.
We sit for a second. The pie case goes around.
“Can I ask you something that isn’t on the list?” he says.
“You can ask.”
“Am I a bad man?”
I look up.
He’s looking at his cup. His ears have gone red, the way they used to before he had to give a presentation.
“That’s the thing I can’t get past,” he says.
“Not losing you. I mean, obviously losing you, but the thing that keeps me up at night… I always thought I was a decent person. That was the whole thing I was. And I did something that a decent person doesn’t do, to the person who deserved it least. Now I don’t know what I am. I can’t find the bottom of it.”
And there it is. The actual ask. Not come back. Not even forgive me.
Tell me I’m still who I thought I was.
I could do it. That’s what nobody tells you about being the wronged one. I could reach across this table and hand it to him and watch a man I loved for a decade get his breath back, and it would cost me nothing anyone could see, and I would be so good for doing it.
He’d feel better on the drive home. That’s the whole thing I’d be buying.
“I’m not going to answer that,” I say.
He nods at his cup, fast, twice.
“Right. No. That’s fair.”
“Mason, look at me.”
He does.
“I’m not refusing to be cruel. I’m refusing because it isn’t mine to say.
” I keep my voice easy. “You want me to be the judge because if I acquit you, you’re done, and you can stop.
That’s not how it works. You’re going to be a father to a girl who will ask you hard questions in about fourteen years.
Whether you’re a decent man is what you do between now and then. Not what I tell you now.”
He’s very still.
“That’s more or less what Dr. Weiss says.”
“Then Dr. Weiss is worth the money.”
He laughs. It’s real. It’s terrible. It’s over fast.
“Okay,” he says.
We finish. He pays for tea I didn’t drink. Out in the lot he stops by my car and doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t try, just puts his hands in his coat pockets.
“Twenty-second,” he says. “The appointment. That’s the one with the anatomy scan?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there at nine-forty,” he says. “I won’t come in unless you say so at the door. I’ll sit in the lot if that’s better. I just want to be on the property.”
“You can come in.”
He nods. He doesn’t thank me for it, which is somehow the most decent thing he’s done all afternoon.
I drive home and I feel absolutely fine, which I’d been braced against.
Danny is supposed to come at six to look at the radiator.
At five-forty it starts sleeting. At ten past six I’m standing at the window with a cold mug, watching the parking lot turn into a skating rink. I catch myself checking the road at the end of it.
Which I notice. And put away.
His truck comes in at six-twenty. He’s got his coat over his head crossing the lot, and by the time he’s up the sixteen steps he’s soaked through the shoulders.
“It’s the end of the world out there.”
“You could have called it.”
“It’s a radiator in November.” He toes his boots off in the doorway. “You’d have been cold.”
He gets the cover off and does something to the valve with a wrench. There’s a knocking sound, then a hiss. Then heat starts coming into a room that hasn’t been properly warm all day.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. It was full of air.” He sits back on his heels. “It’ll do it again in a year. I’ll show you how, so you don’t have to wait on me.”
So you don’t have to wait on me.
He says it without any weight at all. He’s already reaching for the wrench.
And I hear myself say, “What if I don’t mind waiting on you?”
The room goes very quiet except for the radiator ticking.
Danny stays exactly where he is, on his heels on my floor, with the wrench in his hand. He doesn’t look up right away. When he does, his face has that thing in it I’ve seen twice now and watched him put away both times.
He doesn’t put it away.
“Natalie.”
“I know.” My hands have found each other. “I know. I’m twenty-one weeks pregnant with another man’s baby, my divorce isn’t final, and I sat in a diner with my husband this afternoon. I know exactly what I’m holding out. It’s the worst offer anybody’s ever made you.”
“That’s not it.” He stops. Starts again. “Can I say something and you let me finish it?”
“Yes.”
He stands up. He puts the wrench on the windowsill. He takes a second. I watch a man who fixes things try to find the words for the thing he can’t fix.
“I’ve been in love with you since we were nineteen,” he says.
The radiator ticks.
“I didn’t say it then because you were twenty and going places, and I was working at my dad’s shop.
By the time I had anything to offer anybody, you were engaged.
” He says it plainly, no grievance in it at all.
“I went to Portland because I couldn’t watch it.
Came back because that’s a stupid reason to live somewhere.
And then I stood at your wedding, and I meant every good thing I wished you.
I want you to know that. I hoped he’d be good to you.
I wanted that more than I wanted the other thing. ”
I can’t say anything.
“When Josh called me and told me what he’d done, I had about four seconds where part of me was…” He shakes his head, hard, once, like something’s on it. “I’m not proud of that. Four seconds. And then I thought about you standing in that office, and I have not had one of those seconds since.”
Outside the sleet is going sideways under the parking lot light.
“So here’s my answer,” he says. “It’s not the worst offer anybody’s made me. It’s the best one. But I’m not going to take it tonight.”
I look up fast.
“You’ve had one afternoon with your husband, one house offered to you, and a bad month,” he says. “And I’ve waited a long time. I can wait until you’re not deciding this in the same week.”
My throat is doing something. “I’m not confused.”
“I believe you.” That easy again. “Then it’ll still be true in the spring.”
“The spring.”
“After she comes. When you know what your life actually looks like instead of what you’re bracing for.
” He picks up the wrench off the sill. “And if it isn’t true then, Natalie, I’ll be there however you need me to be anyway.
That’s the part I need you to hear. There’s no version of this where you lose me by saying no. ”
And that’s the thing.
That’s the whole thing.
I have never in my life been offered something I didn’t have to hold onto with both hands.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay.” He heads for the door, stops, turns around. “For the record, though.”
“For the record?”
“I’d have said yes.” He’s got his coat over his arm, his hair’s still wet, and he looks about nineteen. “In case you go to bed tonight wondering. I’d have said yes so fast it would have embarrassed us both.”
Then he goes out into the sleet.
I stand at the window in a warm apartment and watch his taillights go down the road. She rolls over, low and slow, like somebody turning in their sleep.
“I know,” I tell her. “Spring.”