“You and Mommy were friends?” Grant asked. He knew the answer of course, but this was also part of what he needed, Patrick reasoned—reassurance. Wanting to hear old stories again and again and again, sifting through them for gleaming new details like a prospector panning for gold.
“We were. Good friends.” For a moment he resented them both, perhaps for the clarity of their grief. People understood the horror of losing a mother. They understood who Sara was to them. People didn’t know what she meant to Patrick. Or if they had, they had long ago forgotten. “Ironically, better friends before she shacked up with your dad. But that’s, you know, just the way of the world. You meet someone and you spend all your time with them and see less and less of your friends. Even if that someone is your friend’s brother, you simply can’t compete.” He still remembered the way Sara protested when he met Joe.
“I never see you anymore.”
“You see me. You see me right now!” Patrick exclaimed. It had been a year since they graduated and they were sharing an apartment in New York.
“Lucky me,” Sara said. “You must have run out of clean underwear.”
Their Chelsea apartment was too small for arguing, which was one thing that made their living together a success. He’d even bitched to Joe on their second date that the closet where he’d kept his clothes was too narrow and he had to bend his wire hangers forty-five degrees. Joe’s jealous reply: You have a closet? Joe, a native New Yorker, was the wrong audience for his complaint.
“Sara, I gave you the bedroom. I sleep on the couch. You can’t get mad if I want to go to Joe’s just to sleep in an actual bed.”
“So this is about furniture.”
“Yes. It’s about furniture. Hard. Wood. Furniture.”
Sara threw her moccasin at him just because.
“What was that for?”
“Lying to me.”
“What lie?” Patrick bent down to pick up the slipper. He ran his finger over the red and turquoise beads sewn across the vamp that made a tiny, glorious bird.
“Oh, please. You’re not going there to sleep.” She flashed him a devilish grin and ducked just as Patrick threw her moccasin back.
“I am!”
“You don’t look the least bit rested.”
Patrick glanced in the small mirror by the door. “Don’t say that. I have an audition.”
“For what?” Sara slipped the moccasin back on her foot.
“A play, a play. What else is there?” Patrick grabbed a script from on top of the TV. It was flipped open to his audition scene. “Run lines with me?”
“No.”
“Run lines with me!”
“No.”
“Meet him, then.”
“Huh?”
“Joe. Come out with us. Meet him. You’ll like him.”
“I never like anyone you date.” And that was true. Sara always thought Patrick sold himself short.
“Joe’s different.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He is!”
“How?”
Patrick took a step closer. He knew they were in danger of becoming codependent. That after five years of friendship he couldn’t live without her and she couldn’t live without him. If they didn’t do something about it soon, it would alter the rest of their lives. “He thinks I’m a pain in the ass, too.”
Patrick emerged from the memory and looked at Sara’s children, alarmed, as if they had teleported into his hot tub from another time. But when? Where? How had almost twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye? “Your mom and I used to live together. In New York.”
“Were you almotht our daddy?”
“What?” Patrick swung around to Grant, nearly spilling his drink himself this time. “No. Of course not.” He and Sara had once drunkenly made out in their dorm building lounge, but it ended with both of them reduced to fits of laughter. “This was a long time ago. We had a little apartment in New York, in Chelsea. A one-bedroom, but I slept on the couch. You could do that then, find something rent-controlled in Manhattan and make it work. Nowadays I don’t know where we would live. Queens or even New Jersey.” Patrick adjusted the tub’s jets so he didn’t have to talk over them. “Want to hear about it?”
“Yes. Was Mommy pretty?” Maisie asked.
“Oh, very. Fashionable, too. She worked at a magazine. I don’t remember which one; not Vogue, not Cosmo . . . Marie Claire. Is that the name of a magazine or was she the first lady of France? No matter, the pay was garbage but she got a lot of free stuff. I went to auditions during the day and waited tables at night in an obscure Greek restaurant, but I was never very good at it. First of all, the consonant clusters are all fucked—t’s and z’s together? C’mon. And I never really was a people person and that was reflected in my tips, which, fortunately, I pooled with the rest of the staff’s to split at the end of the night. They didn’t like me much because of that, bringing the pool average down—but it worked out better for me. I don’t know. I wasn’t cut out for it. One night I accidentally set a woman on fire. Your mom said I came home every night smelling of lamb.” Until he met Joe and stopped coming home at all.
“You set a woman on fire?” The look of disbelief on Maisie’s face was comical.
“Accidentally.”
“Accidentally?”
“Did she burn to a kwisp?” Grant’s eyes bulged with excitement.
“There was this dish that was served with an open flame and a woman was wearing too much hairspray, and, well . . . it was the 1990s. No one burned to a crisp. I doused her with house water.”
“What’s house water?” Maisie asked.
“It’s what they made us call tap water.” Maisie’s expression could best be described as confused. “Yeah, I thought it was bullshit, too.” Patrick had done enough performing to know when he was losing his audience; the looks on the kids’ faces only underscored what he could already feel.
