There was no mention of Robert. And no mention, conspicuously, of the lake house. Months later, in a semi-apologetic text, it was confirmed that we wouldn’t be gathering there in June. But we have managed to get together with Julia twice this year: first at a Houston’s off the 405 in Irvine, roughly equidistant between San Diego and our house, and the second time, also in Orange County oddly enough, for a long, hot, glazed-over day at Disneyland with the kids.
We should acknowledge that Robert ended up not being as bad as we thought he would be. The meeting up at Houston’s had been his idea, according to Julia, and as we drove south we couldn’t decide whether this choice was considerate on his part, our drive being moderately shorter than theirs, or whether it implied a sort of finicky exactness, an insistence on making everything “fair” instead of just sucking it up and driving to South Pasadena as Julia had most likely wanted. But maybe Robert’s plan suggested depths of sensitivity that we hadn’t expected, allowing him to intuit that we weren’t yet ready to have him hanging out at our house, his very presence polluting the home in which Sunny had cooked countless pots of dal and relinquished so many hands of hearts. And the fact is, we were not ready, not at all. Which was nice of him to pick up on. Then again, if he’d really been sensitive, he would have suggested the Houston’s that was less than three miles away from us.
Once we all got settled in the leather booth, it became clear that Robert knew the menu extremely well; without even needing to look at it, he ordered the spinach dip and cheese bread and grilled artichokes for the table. When we asked for margaritas, we learned that he was sober. “Three years and eight months,” he said with simple happiness. It was hard to reconcile this large, ruddy person with the radiologist we’d imagined, the bloodless Lothario who had destroyed our friends’ marriage. As much effort as we had put into hating him over the past many months, regularly enraged by the thought of him, our insides roiling at the sound of his name, Robert was, we had to admit, probably beside the point. We protested a little when he reached for the check, but eventually gave in and said thank you. He and Julia had been careful to leave a few inches of space between them throughout dinner, and as we watched them cross the parking lot, we saw her take his hand and kiss it.
The more recent trip to Disneyland was, on the whole, less successful. Julia had talked Coco into trying a weeklong marine biology camp on Catalina Island, and apparently her reward for surviving it was a weekend at the “Happiest Place on Earth”: the proximity of all this to San Diego was not lost on us. But it had been such a long time since the kids had seen each other. We didn’t want to take the high road at the expense of Henry, who’d been lobbying to do the Jedi Training Academy for a while now, and despite our discomfort with Julia’s self-interested itinerary, and some queasiness with respect to the Disney empire, there was no graceful way to avoid going. And we should say up front that the bulk of the blame for what happened at the end of the day falls squarely on us.
The real problem was the lack of Sunny, of course—we hadn’t sufficiently prepared Henry for the shock of this—we’d mentioned it plenty of times on the drive to Anaheim, but the reality of Sunny not being with us was a different thing altogether. Without Sunny around, the full extent of our children’s incompatibility was free to reveal itself: Coco wanting to do nothing but get her autograph book signed and have her photo taken with princess reenactors, Henry gloomy and lagging behind, unable to recover from the brief high of being a Jedi trainee, which had required us to register as soon as the park opened and then lasted all of twenty minutes. Their only shared inclination was to ask wistfully for “mementos” while stopping to examine the merchandise at gift shops. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in the rides; both of them were unsatisfied with
