Chapter 14
Patrick
David pulls back up to the curb twenty minutes after he dropped her off. I get in without a word.
I kissed her.
On the street. In public. After telling myself for three weeks that I was done, that I had this contained, that I was a man with the self-discipline to build a company from nothing and raise a child alone and I could certainly manage not putting my hands on my assistant.
“I’m in deep shit,” I say out loud.
David does not react. He navigates the turn onto Sixty-Third and says, mildly, “Light rain expected tomorrow. I’ll have the car pulled around early.”
“That was not, yes, fine. Thank you, David.”
That kiss was not nothing. Every version of it was something, the slow start, the way she pulled me closer like she’d made a decision and was done reconsidering it, her hands fisted in my jacket, the sound she made.
I said things I had no business saying and I meant every word and that is the part I can’t argue my way out of.
I have been telling myself for weeks that this situation is impossible, that I come with too much weight, that anyone reasonable would see the full inventory and step back.
She knows about Erick. She knows about the distance I’ve been maintaining and exactly what it costs her to navigate it.
She sat across from my mother’s particular brand of elegant hostility and handed over the coffee with a level expression that I am still, sitting here in the dark of this car, reconstructing in detail.
And still said yes, when I asked if I could kiss her.
I should not be allowed to feel this.
I made a promise to myself the day I stood at her graveside with Erick asleep on my shoulder and the ground still soft. This was it. You gave the best of yourself to one person and you lost her, what is left of you belongs to your son. No more. You don’t get more.
That promise felt clean when I made it. It still feels correct. I still believe in the shape of it.
And I just kissed her on a public street and told her I think about her constantly.
I look at my own reflection in the window and have no good explanation for myself.
The apartment is quiet when I get in. Maria is on the couch with a book and the lamp on low. She looks up, reads something in my face, and asks nothing.
"Did he wake up after I left?"
"No. He's been sleeping fine." She sets the book down and stands. "I'm going to do the same. Good night."
"Good night."
I check on Erick. He is on his back with one arm thrown above his head the way he sleeps, completely abandoned to it, his breath slow and even.
I pull the door almost closed and go to the kitchen.
I pour a glass of water I don't drink and stand at the window and look at the street below and I cannot stop thinking about her.
Not the way I've been thinking about her for weeks, which was manageable, which was want contained in a recognizable shape.
This is different. This is the specific, inconvenient warmth of knowing something about a person that they don't hand out easily, understanding that they chose to hand it to you, and not knowing what the hell to do with that.
My phone buzzes.
(Alister): that was the shortest night out ever. but I'm glad I got to meet her. hope you're at least getting laid.
I stare at this message for a moment.
(Me): screw you, Alister.
(Alister): tomorrow. lunch. I'm coming to you. Max wants to see Erick.
Friday night becomes Saturday morning and I run six miles in the rain because my body needs to do something with all of this.
I run down along the park and back up, my lungs and legs are both burning by the time I get back to the house and I have not resolved a single thing except that I am significantly more tired.
I shower. I make coffee.
Alister shows up around midday with Max in a rain jacket and a takeout bag from the Italian place Erick likes.
Max is five, a year older than Erick, and has treated him like a little brother since they were both too young to have opinions about anything.
They disappear immediately in the direction of the toy situation in the living room and within ninety seconds we can hear them disagreeing loudly about a dinosaur.
Alister sets the bag on the counter. He has always operated on the assumption that food solves a significant percentage of the world's problems. It is a philosophy he developed somewhere around his divorce and has been refining for five years, alongside an equally committed search for wife number two.
We sit at the kitchen table. Alister opens containers. I drink my coffee and wait for it.
“So,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m opening pasta.” He serves himself without ceremony. “She’s something, by the way.”
“She’s my assistant.”
“She was your assistant when we arrived. By the time you sat down across from her she was something else and we both know it.” He points a fork at me with no particular aggression. “The look on your face when that guy sat down.”
“He wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
“You were across the room in about four steps.”
“It was the right thing to do.”
“I did not say it wasn’t.” He looks at me. “I’m saying I haven’t seen your face do that in my life.”
I don’t answer.
“Patrick.” He sets the fork down. Alister does not do this often, he conducts most serious conversations in motion, around food, over noise, as though stillness makes things heavier than he wants them to be.
When he puts the fork down it means he’s saying something he means. “Stop blaming yourself.”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
“We’re always having this conversation, you’re just usually refusing to acknowledge that we’re having it.
” He leans back in his chair. “It was an accident. A terrible, unfair, devastating accident that should not have happened. And you have been treating yourself like a man serving a sentence ever since, and I’m telling you, as someone who has known you since we were both idiots in college and has watched you carry this for three years, that it is not working. ”
“I’m fine.”
“You read Erick the same three books on rotation because you can’t retain new ones.
You haven’t been to the Hamptons house since Sarah died.
You had sex with a woman you clearly feel something real for and your first response was to tell her it couldn’t happen again.
” He tilts his head. “That’s not fine. That’s a man in a self-imposed holding pattern. ”
The kitchen is quiet except for the sound of the boys in the other room, some increasingly heated dispute about who owns which dinosaur.
“I can’t just go out with her,” I say. “She’s my assistant. The professional liability alone…”
“People meet at work all the time. It’s where you spend most of your waking hours. If you don’t meet someone at work you’re meeting them at a bar at eleven p.m. while someone else’s hand is around her wrist, which, coincidentally…”
“That’s not what happened.”
“That’s exactly what happened.” He says it without judgment. “And now you’re here eating pasta and punishing yourself for it.” He pauses. “Here’s the alternative, since you asked…”
“I didn’t ask.”
“The alternative: stay exactly where you are. Don’t pursue it.
Keep the distance. Do the responsible thing, whatever you’ve decided that is.
And then in five years you’re still here at this table and she’s with someone else who actually let himself want her, and you can explain to Erick why his dad decided that being sad was the correct long-term strategy. ”
I look at him.
He picks up the fork again.
“He needs to see you happy,” Alister says, quieter now.
“That’s not a small thing. Kids don’t grow up healthy inside grief that never moves.
He needs to see that it’s possible to lose someone and keep going.
That love doesn’t just cost things, it gives things too.
If you’re not okay, you can’t give him okay. I’ve told you this before.”
“I know.”
“You know and you ignore it.”
“I know and I haven’t found the path through it.”
He accepts this. Alister is not a cruel man, he’s direct, sometimes blunt, occasionally infuriating, but he has never pushed past what I can carry. He lets the silence sit for a moment and then says, more lightly, “Erick’s going to Sarah’s parents next weekend?”
“Yes. Friday evening, back Sunday.”
“And you’ll be here doing what, exactly?”
“Things I’ve been putting off. The Bergamo supplier contract needs…”
“Stop.” He looks at me with the weariness of someone who has heard this particular sentence in various forms for three years.
“Go to the Hamptons. Use the house. You haven’t been since before she died and it’s been sitting there and life is genuinely too short for a man with a beach house to spend his weekends reviewing supplier contracts in Upper West.”
“I’m not going to the Hamptons.”
“Take her.”
“We are not a thing, Alister.”
“Not yet.”
“Not at all.”
“Okay.” He serves himself more pasta. “So you’re going alone.”
“I’m not going at all.”
“You’re going.” He says it with the calm certainty he uses for things he considers already decided.
“You need to not be in that office for forty-eight hours. You need to be somewhere that doesn’t have her desk in it so you can think clearly about what you actually want, without the guilt telling you what you’re allowed to want. ”
From the living room Erick shouts something triumphant.
I look toward the sound of him.
“I know what I want,” I say.
Alister looks at me, quiet, waiting.
“That’s the problem,” I say.
He nods once. Doesn’t push it. Goes back to his food with the grace of a man who knows he’s made his point and has the patience to let it work.
We eat. The boys come back for cookies, the dinosaur dispute apparently settled or simply abandoned in favor of something more elaborate involving all the couch cushions and rules only they understand.
I watch Erick from across the table, that specific way I watch him when I think I’m being practical and I’m actually just being afraid. He laughs at something Max said, full and open and completely unselfconscious, his whole face in it, and it stops me the same way it always does.
He needs to see you happy.
I know Alister is right. I have always known Alister is right. The knowing is not the problem.
Later, after he’s gone and Erick is down for the evening, I sit on the kitchen counter in the quiet of the apartment and think about what she said on that sidewalk with her hands in my jacket and her chin tilted up.
Easy bores me.
The thought lingers long after the apartment goes dark.