Chapter Nine
The Monday after Family Dinner finds Diana at the old Victorian that houses the law firm Tom and Jonathan Hobart started more than fifteen years ago.
She’s here to meet with Jonathan in the hope that he can provide insight into Tom’s past. She texted him last night, after spending the weekend looking out for strange cars and agonizing over Tom’s secrecy and her children’s grief.
Duncan’s outpouring on the basketball court keeps coming back to her: He gets fuzzier in my mind.
Sometimes, I can’t remember him on my own.
Like he’s only a story someone told me, not a real person.
She can’t let this letter be the way Duncan remembers Tom.
She needs answers for him—and for herself, too.
Diana surveys the building through her car window.
Tom and Jonathan spent a year renovating this space, transforming it from a private residence into a quirky office building.
They knocked down walls on the weekends and refinished the floors after spending the days writing briefs and meeting with clients.
Tom came home many nights with sawdust in his hair and nails in his pockets.
Diana and Jonathan’s wife, Lily, in an effort to see their husbands, if only to feed them, took turns bringing Chinese takeout or pizza, sitting together on the front steps as the two men worked inside.
They were there so often Duncan took his first steps in what is now the first-floor bathroom, all of them cheering the boy on as Diana knelt in front of him, arms outstretched.
The building, one town over from Alcott, is a fifteen-minute drive from her house, yet Diana hasn’t been by since the day Tom was diagnosed. Not that day, she corrects herself, clutching and unclutching her hands from the steering wheel. We never actually made it.
She and Tom expected to return to work after his doctor’s appointment.
He had a strategy session for an upcoming court appearance; she was to oversee a budget meeting at the library.
They made these plans because they were confident the news would be good, that the doctor would tell them his stomach pain and weight loss were stress-related, and that Tom only needed more sleep, vitamins, or maybe a vacation.
He’d been tired and out of sorts for months but attributed it to the demands of his job, canceling the multiple medical appointments Diana scheduled for him until she decided the only way to get Tom to the doctor’s was to take him there herself.
On the drive to the appointment, they discussed where they’d go on that much-needed vacation: someplace warm with palm trees, frozen pineapple cocktails with mini paper umbrellas, and water clear enough for snorkeling.
The doctor stunned them, though Tom would later say he knew all along the news would be bad, by delivering the worst of the worst-case scenarios, the one that spiraled them from confidence into chaos.
The news that Tom had advanced pancreatic cancer made the blood pound in Diana’s head. “He’s only forty-nine,” she said to the doctor, as if Tom were too young for bad news. “He’ll be fifty in June.”
She watched the doctor’s mouth move, his eyes downcast behind wire-framed glasses, but his words were jumbled and wrong.
All she could make out was the irregular inhale and exhale of her lungs, the rhythm too fast and the air too shallow.
She felt she was falling down through icy, black water, all the sound muffled and distant.
She focused on the doctor, scribbling what he said in her notebook; the next day, she would read what she wrote and none of it would make sense.
They left his office armed with a “You have cancer—what next?” brochure and a follow-up appointment to discuss options, the few available.
She didn’t remember whether she and Tom spoke to one another in the slow elevator ride down to the harshly lit, claustrophobic hospital garage, or how they remembered where they’d parked their car.
The shock blurred her memory of that visit. What was clear was what came after.
Instead of driving to their respective offices, they went to a hole-in-the-wall bar in Cambridge, a place they hadn’t visited since before the kids were born.
She remembered the silence of that car ride, the words fleeing from them as if terrified by what would be said.
Tom steered the car through the congested streets, never glancing over to her.
When Diana realized where he was headed, she texted her parents to get the kids from school and sent emails to their colleagues.
Change in plans, she wrote to Camille. I need a personal day.
Tom found them a parking spot in front of the bar. Corralling quarters from the center console, Diana filled the parking meter to its maximum allotment. The irony of buying time wasn’t lost on her.
In the bar, with its gray walls covered with black-and-white photos of the city before gentrification, they sat on two sticky, red vinyl stools and drank to forget.
Getting drunk in the middle of the day was their way of avoiding Tom’s diagnosis.
Months, the doctor had said; maybe four, possibly six.
They asked for nachos and chicken wings, but the food sat uneaten in front of them.
Blue cheese dressing for the wings pooled in an unappetizing clump as sunlight made its way through the half-open shades.
Diana ordered tequila shots, her alcohol of choice when she was twenty-two with free time to waste on sleeping late, shopping for shoes she didn’t need, and clubbing with girlfriends whose names she couldn’t recall.
She and Tom licked salt off their hands and threw back the sharp liquor.
She dulled the tequila’s burn by sucking on chunks of tart limes.
Another shot followed and another. As Diana settled into the fog of intoxication, the booze filling her with a hazy, fictitious warmth, Tom ordered Manhattans, bitter and medicinal, a cocktail she always thought of as sophisticated but now made her sad.
“The hot water heater needs to be replaced,” Tom said into the mirror behind the bar. He didn’t look at her as he spoke, focusing instead on their reflections. “The roof needs to be checked, too. It could be time to replace it.”
Diana didn’t reply. What was there to say?
“I’ll make a list. Of what I typically do.
Like mow the lawn, put in the storm windows, clean out the gutters.
I can teach you and Duncan.” Tom’s voice broke on Duncan’s name, and he finished off his Manhattan in a swift, angry swallow.
He gestured to the bartender for another, and Diana waited for him to continue.
She knew there was more he wanted to say.
She hoped there was enough time to hear all of it.
“Passwords,” he said, after a prolonged silence. His shoulders were so tense they pulled up into his neck. She wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of what would happen if she did. Maybe he needed that pressure to keep himself together for a little while longer.
“We need to update passwords, to make sure you can get into all the accounts, including the ones that are my own.” He looked at her. His eyes were red and sunk into his face.
He looks like he’s dying, she thought.
“You’ll need access to stupid stuff like frequent flyer miles and our Costco account. Important things, too.” Tom’s clammy hand grabbed hers. “I’ll take care of what I can—before. You’ll need—”
“I understand,” Diana said. “We’ll work it all out.”
The bartender placed a Manhattan in front of Tom and left to assist another customer.
“There’s more,” Tom said, releasing Diana to roll the drink between his hands.
“When I was younger . . .” He paused to clear his throat.
“When I was younger, I made mistakes. Bad ones that I’ve never told you about. I should have told. You deserve to—”
Diana placed her hand on his forearm. “All that matters is today and tomorrow and the days we have together.” She leaned her forehead against his and let his warm breath slide over her skin. “I love you. I think I’ve loved you from the first moment we met.”
“I love you, too,” Tom said, sighing.
A Guinness, dark and creamy, sat in front of her when Andrea and Evan arrived, responding to a drunken text Diana had sent when Tom was in the men’s room.
When they pushed open the heavy outer door, the sun had already set and the after-work crowd occupied the bar, orbiting around Diana and Tom the way a planet circles around a dying star.
The other patrons seemed aware something was happening to them, an undoing of a kind, and they stayed as far away as possible, the unwritten code of all those who end up in a place like this, on a day like this.
One look at Andrea’s anguished face, and Diana collapsed into her arms. Evan paid their tab and half carried them to his car.
Andrea followed in their minivan, the back seat filled with booster seats, basketball sneakers, and half-eaten snacks.
Tom didn’t say a word during the trip home, through the windy one-way streets and the end-of-day traffic.
As Diana wept, he held her and gazed out the window.
At their front door, he waved off Andrea and Evan and helped Diana to bed, where she passed out, her clothes in a pile on the floor.
The next day, Tom returned to the office to clean out his desk and pass his client files to Jonathan. He was done with work, a decision he’d made so quickly Diana almost hadn’t believed him. When she offered to accompany him to the office, he declined her help. “This is mine to do,” he said.
“And now here I am,” she says apprehensively, looking up at the building.
She realizes then that Tom wanted to open up about his past that day in the bar. He tried to tell her the truth, but she hadn’t let him say the words.