Maybe hearing something in my tone they’re not used to, they each lower their screens.
“You okay, Mom?” Henry asks. His hair’s getting a bit long, but when I asked him this morning if he wanted a haircut, he said no, he was thinking of growing it.
“I’ll survive. Though I’m thinking we should probably rethink this whole World Wide Web thing.”
“Paparazzi suck.”
“They do. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about you guys. Tell me about your days. Leave nothing out. Not even the subtext.”
“What?”
“The currents and undertows, I want to hear them all.”
Cassie frowns, but Henry complies, telling me a story of something that happened in history class and how the class smart aleck got the best of their young teacher. Cassie, who was in his class in his first year of teaching, and who I always suspected had a crush on him, comes to his defense, and Henry and Cassie are soon squabbling in the way only siblings can.
This might sound strange, but I like listening to them bicker. It’s all so innocent, so before, that I half expect Tom to walk into the room and ask them to keep it down because he’s trying to watch golf in his study. When he used to do that, they’d turn to abusing him, making fun of his golf-watching habits, and soon they’d be tossing a baseball around in the yard or pulling out the Monopoly board so we could have a “real family fight, I mean moment,” as Cassie often said.
But that’s not what happens. Instead, I hear my phone ding with a text, and I realize I haven’t checked my messages since lunch when I’d told my mother, probably more forcefully than I should have, to stop texting me. I let Cassie and Henry finish their argument, then tell them they can go back to their screens. They look surprised, but that doesn’t keep them from diving back in.
I retrieve my phone and open my texts. I disabled the function that floats a preview across my screen after Tom’s texts. I never wanted to be taken by surprise again. The universe laughs at me, it does.
I have more than a hundred texts I haven’t responded to. A cascade of WTF and you go, girl! from my friends and pseudofriends and anyone who has my cell number, apparently. But buried in there are two texts from someone I shouldn’t have been ignoring today.
Teo.
Call me, he says. And so I do.
• • •
Given how we ended up, it’s easy to think badly of Tom. To forget all his best characteristics, the things I loved about him. The things I vowed to remind the children of, no matter what happened. After he died, I’d even started keeping a list, one that time and bitterness could not erase.
He was funny, and he wasn’t showy about it. He’d just come up with the perfect hilarious summary of the conversation you were having at the exact right moment. And he’d take the joke one step further, like the best comedians, mining an ordinary situation for comedy gold.
He was generous, and again, he wasn’t showy about it. I thought I knew about most of his charitable work, but after he died, I received notes from people I’d never met who told me how Tom had come through for their organization, or even them personally, right when they needed it. Even as my restaurant folly sunk us into debt, he still found the money to help pay the heating bill of an old friend long out of work so he could stay another cold winter in a house he couldn’t afford but could not give up.
He didn’t blame others for his faults, his mistakes . . .
I had to leave off there because, no matter what, I didn’t want my children to know what their father also was. A liar, a cheater, a man who took his pleasure where he could find it rather than delay his own gratification. Not that I knew for certain that there had been others, but of course there could be. I didn’t ask when I had the chance, so I’m left to wonder. How many? When? And who was she, goddammit, who?
He didn’t deny it, though, when I finally confronted him in that New York hotel room, both of us still too drunk to have the conversation. He didn’t deny it, and he didn’t blame me, didn’t make excuses or bring up our dwindling sex life or do anything but apologize abjectly. He’d “fucked up,” and he was ashamed and mortified I had to find out at all, and especially that way. His hope had been that I thought it was a joke.
“A joke?”
He stepped toward where I was sitting on the edge of the bed and tried to take my hand.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Why?”
“There’s no excuse. No explanation.”
“There has to be.”
“Come on, Lil. Do you want to get into this? I made a terrible mistake, one I’ve regretted from the beginning.”
“The beginning? That means there was a middle. How long—? No, stop. I don’t want to know.”
“It wasn’t as bad as you think . . . Nothing actually happened.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Maybe if you let me tell you—”
“No, shut up. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t. How could you?”
His chin trembled, and this made me angrier. How dare he cry at his mistake?
“I wish I could take it back,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you stop? Why did it happen in the first place?”
“It was . . . The only thing I can say is that it felt like an addiction. And I don’t mean that as an excuse. It just felt like I couldn’t stop. Not even when I wanted to.”
“Do you love her?”
“No.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I don’t expect you to believe me, but . . . no. No, I don’t love her. I’m not in love with her.”
“You’re right.”
“I am?”
“I don’t believe you.”
Round and round and
