Chapter Twenty-Eight
Present
From outside the restaurant, my cheek nearly skimming the building’s rough facade, I peek through the picture window to the right of the door and spot Chap waiting for me next to the host’s stand, which is festooned with classy Christmas tinsel.
Hands in his pressed-pants pockets, Chap has his suit jacket buttoned, and I blow out a small breath of relief that I am not overdressed, potentially looking like his mother rather than his date.
Even in the nippy thirty-eight degrees, my insides heat up at the absolute worst moment.
Whether it’s from nerves or tanking hormones or both, I take off my long wool evening jacket and stand in the biting air with my arms outstretched to cool myself in all the places I might begin to sweat and leave a stain.
After a two-minute cold plunge, I feel my internal temp return to normal and hope a rosy flush is dappling my cheeks.
Glowing is attractive, glistening is not.
Opening the door, I chirp, “Hi, Chap,” with a casualness I do not feel.
“Whoa, Callie. You look unreal,” Chap admires, appearing surprised by my shape-shifting from sweaty, heaving runner to a woman who wears heels and her hair down. “I mean, you always do,” my date backtracks, realizing that his compliment may have been served with a side of insult.
“Aw. That’s nice of you to say,” I respond to his lie and place my hand on my dinner companion’s forearm as he reaches to take my coat.
Chap looks down at my hand on his arm, and I quickly pull it away.
Was that too forward? Too presumptive about what this dinner is?
“Are you having a good birthday?” I ask to swing our first minute together from breezy to awkward to back on neutral footing for both of us.
“I am,” Chap says, as he hands my jacket to the college student manning the coat check. “And it’s about to get better.” I blush, my mind spinning, wondering if Chap is referring to the meal, our shared conversation ahead, or the possibility of what may follow.
“Come with me.” Chap puts his elbow out for me to take.
Very old-school charm of him, but I can’t stop myself from asking, “Shouldn’t we wait for the host to seat us?”
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Chap replies, but I detect a waver in his voice. I appreciate him revealing, even if unintentionally, that there is a small part of him that is as nervous about this evening as I am.
Walking with Chap to our table, I catch a quick glimpse of myself in the oversize gilded mirror hanging on the wall.
My thick chestnut hair looks perfectly polished, compliments of three hours and $380 spent in the salon yesterday.
The profile of my breasts looks perky, as if here is where my boobs have always been.
I need to remember to thank Lisa for insisting I wear the lifting and minimizing contraption she helped wrestle me into.
My lipstick is a tad heavy, so I roll my lips together to try to take the velvety reddish-brown sheen down a notch.
I took a nap this afternoon to ensure I don’t yawn in Chap’s face at 8:58 p.m., my body anticipating its usual 9:30 p.m. bedtime.
With the investment of time and preparation for this date, I do feel like I’m bringing not only the best A-game for my age, but I daresay I’m also feeling ten years younger these days.
I take a tiny but joyful skip alongside Chap, relishing the sense that a few heads are turning my way as I stride through the dining room to our table, which seems to be romantically tucked into the farthest corner of the restaurant.
When we reach our two-top, one of the seats facing us is already occupied. Chap clears his throat and, with the certainty of a detective who has cracked his career case, reveals, “Callie Kingman, I believe you know my uncle, Porter Beaumont.”
My right arm falls out of the crook of Chap’s elbow, and my quilted black chain purse drops to the floor with several clinks and a thud.
The man at our table rises slowly. I look at Chap, who smiles sheepishly but doesn’t make any gesture to indicate what I’m supposed to do next.
Running away, sitting down, and fainting, among others, are all viable possibilities.
“Hello, Cal-lee,” Porter drawls.
The sound of my name coming out of this man’s mouth after three decades is so achingly familiar, it hurts. My eyelids close, and I will my pounding heart to slow, slow, slow down just enough to allow my brain to possibly grasp this impossible moment.
“You look beautiful.”
I reopen my eyes and guardedly turn my head from Porter to Chap and back to Porter.
Do I look beautiful to Porter after thirty years of living?
Just minutes ago, I felt like I was representing middle-aged women everywhere pretty well, but I certainly am no longer my twenty-two-year-old self Porter could not get enough of a lifetime ago.
“Do you want to sit down?” Chap whispers in my ear, my body frozen in inaction.
I don’t know. Do I?
Chap moves to pull out the empty chair, and Porter steps in. “Let me do that, son.”
“Wait, are you actually his son, not his nephew?” are my first words.
All this time, I thought Chap was flirting with me on text and at running club, showing genuine interest in me.
I thought I was beginning an affair with a man who turns out to be the son of the love of my long-ago life.
Like a thwack to my fog-filled head, of course, I should have known there was something else at play.
What would a young man like Chap want with an older woman like me?
I was no Demi Moore, and even she and Ashton Kutcher couldn’t make it work.
Grasping what a joke I’ve made of myself in front of Chap, Lisa, Quinn, and the Heart and Sole Running Club, my pounding heart drops into the pit of my stomach like a lead ball hitting concrete.
“No. He’s my uncle,” Chap clarifies.
“Yes. He’s my son,” Porter corrects him, and Chap grins wide.
“Unc’ raised me from a baby,” Chap offers, to clear up my bewilderment.
“Rose’s son?” I ask them both.
Porter nods his head slowly. Off the football field, Porter always did everything slow and with exacting intention. Except disappear. That he did in haste.
“Callie, please sit down,” Porter insists. Chap picks my purse up off the floor and hangs it over the back of the empty chair as further encouragement to do as Porter has suggested.
I look at Chap, who has emitted a feeling of comfort and familiarity since the moment I almost ran him over in the crosswalk.
All these months past, I could never pinpoint why.
Taking him in anew, I clearly see it. The square jaw and the inescapable charm of his dancing eyes.
The way he put his hand on the small of my back to help push me along on a run when I grew tired and, in that single gesture, I understood that he was telling me that he got me, that he wasn’t going to leave me behind. It all felt very familiar for a reason.
Porter.
His jaw has softened with age, as has his chest, but Porter still stands solid in his being, content in his own company, the mountain of a man I loved with a thoroughness that suffused the most intense years of my life, and the greatest emotional pain I had endured.
When Thomas abandoned our family with his harsh words, it was hard, but down deep in the dark and empty times of those first few months, I knew, even if the path was unclear, that I had made it through heartbreak before and I would again.
When Porter disappeared without a trace, my heart felt like a raw open wound that would never heal.
Every day that followed was a monumental act of survival.
When I married, I wanted Thomas with me, but I didn’t need him to be.
I understood want and need to be two different actions.
When Porter disappeared on our graduation day, my devastation was rooted in need.
At twenty-two, I needed Porter Beaumont to breathe as much as I needed oxygen.
His disappearance knocked the wind out of me for the next two years as I stumbled through my graduate program at Columbia and my first year as a grunt working for CNN.
At that time, I was living in the apartment with Quinn and Charles, and the absence of our fourth was life-altering and agonizing for all of us, but for none more than me.
When I wasn’t studying or working, I was excavating memories from Princeton for clues that would explain Porter’s disappearance.
What I did wrong. What I could have done differently.
If I’d scared Porter off with the pressures of our future planning.
If all along I had been far more in love with him than he with me.
Watching Quinn and Charles seamlessly and devotedly move out of our college years and into the adult world side by side, a unit of love and trust and commitment, only intensified the investigation of my mind.
What had I missed, and what had been missing, between Porter and me?
I swivel my head back and forth between a younger and older version of nearly the same man and burst into tears, shocking all three of us and, I suspect, the entire restaurant.
Lightning fast, Chap grabs the napkin from my place setting and hands it to me.
The scene of a woman crying apparently terrifies him.
With true concern in his eyes but taking no action, Porter lets me be, familiar that my emotions need to clear the way for any more words to pass between us.
With a couple of long inhales, I gather all the sensations coursing through my body enough to manage sitting down in the chair pulled out for me so that the surrounding diners can return to their meals.
Porter steps back into his space and sits down as well.
Chap squeezes my shoulders, giving them a strong knead, willing me to relax into this evening. I believe his assured grip is telling me that this is exactly where the three of us are meant to be. I’m not so convinced.
“It is my birthday, and I still do gotta eat,” Chap announces to cut the tension at the table. He also still hasn’t let go of me, making sure I don’t cut and run. “You think I can order myself a prime rib to go, Unc’?”
“As long as the key word in that sentence is go, then yes, get yourself something to eat,” Porter instructs Chap without breaking eye contact with me.
“Good, because I already did while I was waiting on Callie up front.” Chap finally releases my shoulders and claps his hands together, congratulating himself on his scheming, his procured birthday delicacy, and most likely, on all fronts of this evening.
“Catch you two later.” And with that, Chap is off and it’s just me, Porter, and three lost decades.
“Can I interest you in a drink this evening?” Our waiter cheerily steps in, breaking the strain between Porter and me. This woman is not skilled in reading the intensity that is encompassing our table.
“A gimlet, please,” I order without hesitation. The right side of Porter’s mouth turns up in recognition. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I admit, as expressionless as I can muster.
“Nothing for me right now, thank you,” Porter adds.
“Leaving me to drink alone, I see.” The “leaving” dig is intentional.
With no Chap and a retreating server, the heavy atmosphere at our table returns.
For several seconds we look at one another as if we are in a playground staring contest. Finally, I open my mouth to speak, but then close it.
Porter tips his chin, urging me to go ahead.
There are a million directions I want to take this conversation.
The source of answers to the questions I tortured myself with post Porter’s disappearance is available less than two feet away.
Long-sealed wounds are seconds from being reopened.
Porter’s responses to all are this evening’s special when I was hoping it would be wild-caught Alaskan salmon.
Finally, I open my mouth again and determinedly ask the question Quinn and I have needed the answer to for Alice’s entire life: “Why didn’t you come to Charles’s funeral?”