40
My mother serves margaritas before dinner, and I only have half of one. They are that deadly kind of margarita that tastes so sweet that it leaves you wanting tortilla chips and another margarita. I’ve learned this lesson, so I switch to water. Jack, as it turns out, has not learned this lesson.
Jack has a strict two-drink maximum, but he has three margaritas that I see, maybe more. “These are delicious,” he says at first. “These are delicith,” he says later. Jack rests his hand on my shoulder as Gramps grills my dad about his art sales.
“So how’s the art world? You still making those big swirly things?” Gramps has never understood my dad’s work and can double over laughing when he talks about how people were conned into paying good money for it. This has never bothered my dad a bit.
“Not lately,” he says. “People want straight lines and earth tones, they tell me. It’s taking me some time to connect to that.” He looks out at the view his swirly paintings paid for. I feel myself soften as I watch him. For a long time I felt like his dry spell was an appropriate punishment. But looking at the earnest way he searches the horizon for an idea, I miss seeing him thrive. “Takes time,” he says.
“Must be nice,” Jack says.
“It is nice,” Hugh says, measured. “Doing something you love. You must feel that way about being a doctor.”
“I guess. But digging skin cancer out of goddamn sun worshippers all day, I wouldn’t do it for free.”
This feels overly negative for a sunset barbecue. I say, “Well, I like my job.”
“Bossing people around?” Travis says. “It’s like they invented a whole industry for you.” I laugh, remembering all of the summers I orchestrated adventures on the beach. A race to the jetty, the sandcastle contest. A million games of Capture the Flag. Of course, back then I just made up games because I wanted to play them. Now I organize people to keep them in line.
“Ah yes, Sam and her flash mob.” Jack gives me a sleepy smile, and I hope to God he’s not going to say any more about this. “I’m going in,” he says, and kisses the side of my head.
I should go with him and make sure he gets to bed okay. But the weather is perfect and Granny’s made pesto.
By eleven o’clock Travis and Hugh have gone home, and everyone is in bed. I try to read Wetlands of Westerleigh and find myself reading the same sex scene six times. I can’t understand where the body parts are in relationship to each other. He has both hands on the back of her neck and is pulling her hips toward him. How many hands does this guy have? I realize I am missing the point and should go with the feel of the whole thing. I wonder whether if I read this to Jack he’d think it was funny or if he’d just say, “Someone should have caught that.”
When I think of Jack with his perfectly shaved face and aqua blue eyes, I wonder at the improbability of the two of us ending up together. Sometimes I follow this train of thought in the middle of the night, watching him sleep the sleep of a man who’s worked a full day and exercised twice. For sure we are together because of Jess Landry, a secretary at Human Corps. The office threw her a baby shower on a Monday in the conference room. They’d over-catered and I was mildly broke, so I wrapped up two extra sandwiches and left them in the shared refrigerator for my Tuesday and Wednesday lunches, which is why I showed up at my Thursday haircut with thirty extra dollars for the extravagant blowout. Which (I’m positive) is the only reason Jack ever for one second considered me to be a person he might date when I got into that cab.
The million times I’ve traced back what brought Wyatt and me together, I get as far as my dad’s painting Current and making all that money so he could buy this house. If Current was actually inspired by that old sky-blue VW Bug, then I guess it was the moment he bought that car. Something as tiny as a Bug or Jess Landry’s fertilized egg could change the course of a person’s life. Or something as huge as a shift in the weather pattern that heats up the East Coast enough to make a boy fill the water bottles at the house with the ice-cold water. I am overwhelmed thinking of all the factors beyond my control that have conspired to change the course of my life. I really hope they’ll let me keep my job.
Wyatt’s in the treehouse. He’s just started with a slow melody, and it reminds me of the ocean. I’m putting on sweatpants and a sweatshirt over my nightshirt and am walking out the back door before I’ve really thought it through. My mom is right: we need to get it all out in the open and then bury it safely. And with Jack on a once-in-a-lifetime bender, this may be my only chance. I make my way into the Popes’ yard and see his feet dangling over the side of the treehouse. I am up three rungs of the rope ladder when he stops playing.
“Sam?” he says, before I’m all the way up.
“Hi,” I say. “I heard you playing and I couldn’t sleep. I just wanted to . . .” My eyes focus in the dark and I take in the treehouse. The splintery floor has been swept clean. There’s a blue and green striped rug in the center and a futon folded up in the couch position on the left-hand wall. Next to it is a small table, like a TV tray, with a lit candle on it. To the right, there are three acoustic guitars mounted on the wall, next to a well-used broom. “I don’t understand.”
“Come on in,” Wyatt says, standing up, and we both start to laugh.
“Seriously, do you live here?”
“I do not. I mostly stay in the house.”
“Then why all this?”
“I don’t know. It’s my favorite place. I fixed it up a little. I didn’t want to leave it behind.” These words land heavy on my chest. He left me behind.
I sit down on the futon. It’s simple, and I can see how this can all be dismantled when he goes, but this space has been put together with a lot of care. I flash on Wyatt’s wanting to frame my drawing, wanting to keep it nice.
“Can we talk for a sec?”
“Sure.” He sits down next to me, but not close. You could fit a fully grown Labrador retriever between us.
“I know it was a long time ago, but I just wanted to say I’m really sorry we ended in such a bad way, at such a bad time.”
Wyatt seems surprised. “Me too,” he says.
“And I wish I’d been less hurt so I could have come back into your life. That had to be really hard with your family. And your career and everything.”
“It was,” he says. Then, “This is the best part of you. The part that just says what needs to be said.”
I don’t know why he’s being so calm when I’m feeling so nervous. “Now I forget what I needed to say.”
“You’re sorry we’re not friends?” Wyatt offers.
That’s not it, really. “It was hard for me. Losing you,” I say.
“Travis told Michael you were fine.”
“Travis knew I wasn’t fine.” I look directly at him and wonder if he can see on my face the remains of just how not fine I was.
“I didn’t know how to come back here,” he says. “Or how to reach out to you after I was so harsh. And then you were so harsh.” He looks down at his hands, presumably for a cheat sheet to get him through this moment. He finally looks up at me and says, “I remember exactly what it felt like when we were together, and it’s unbelievable to me that I could have shut you out like that. I was a mess, and I know it’s not an excuse, really, but I was eighteen.” He leans back on the couch like it’s perfectly normal for us to be having this conversation. All these years later. In his swept-clean treehouse. “Are you over it now?”
I let out a little laugh. “What a question. I’m getting married.” I stare at my hands, twisting my engagement ring. “I guess I’m ready to be over it. Everyone has moved on. You have a life with your music and fixing cars, a lounge singer.”
Wyatt laughs, “She’s not a lounge singer.”
“Whatever. I want her to be. She smells like smoke and her evening gowns are tired.”
“She sometimes smells like smoke, and we’re not really a couple.”
The humidity has made my hair unruly and I busy myself by braiding the chunk that has fallen in my face. I can feel Wyatt watching me.
“How are your parents?”
“They’re fine. Both remarried.”
“Michael?”
“Good. Sober.”
“Good. And you like your life?” I ask.
“I get to do things I love every day. The weather’s always nice.”
“Wow, that’s so Zen. Self-actualized.”
“Not really. What about you? Is your life what you wanted?”
I turn to face him, crossing my legs on the sofa. The space between us has shrunk. “Well, I’ve sort of screwed up my job. But I love living in the city. I get to see Gracie all the time, which is awesome.”
“Get a new job.”
“I’m probably going to get fired. Don’t tell my parents. They’d love it too much.”
“They’d love that you were getting fired?”
“Well, I think my dad can’t get used to the fact that I have such a ‘tight-ass job.’ His words. He’d love that I blew up my whole career by blurting out two words when my whole job is keeping employees in line.”
Wyatt laughs. “What were they, ‘tight-ass’?”
“ ‘Flash mob,’ ” I say, and cover my face with my hands.
“Oh God.”
“I was working with a client who was trying to get his team to work more cooperatively. There are exactly three right solutions to this problem in our company manual: send them to a ropes course, give them a series of puzzles to work through together, administer an enneagram test. I’ve recommended these things a hundred times, and I’m just sick of them.”
“So?”
“So I was sitting in this meeting and everything felt like an itchy sweater. I was having a hard time concentrating, and I couldn’t stick to the script. There had to be a more fun way to get people to work together. So I said ‘flash mob.’ ”
“ ‘Flash mob’? Seriously?” Wyatt’s smile is so big, like this is the best thing he’s ever heard.
“It just came out. ‘Flash mob.’ It was like a fart in an elevator, there was no taking it back and it sort of filled the space.” This has never been funny until right now. Seeing Wyatt laugh and hearing the words come out of my mouth, I feel laughter move all the way through my body. My shoulders are shaking and I have to wipe my eyes and nose on my sweatshirt sleeve.
“So,” says Wyatt when he’s caught some air. “They did it?”
“Yep. My boss was horrified, but she couldn’t disagree with the client, who loved the idea. And once I’d suggested it, it was my problem. I had to choreograph the whole thing, to ‘Dancing Queen.’ Which was also my suggestion, I have no idea why. And then they wanted gold pants. It was a total nightmare. I could have just sent them on a ropes course and watched.”
Wyatt is leaning back on the sofa, looking at me like I’m sixteen. He looks amused and delighted, and I can’t remember the last time I was amusing or delightful to anyone.
“Thirty people in the lobby dancing in gold pants. It’s like with two words I unwrote the firm’s entire mission statement. The client loved it, but of course my boss is out of her mind because I went so completely rogue and it cost us so much time.” My head is in my hands, and I’m not laughing anymore.
“You really never thought any of your ideas through to the end.”
“That hideous tree on my wall is a case in point.” I look up at him. “So, the not-so-funny part is that things aren’t looking good for me at work. There’s a chance I’m going to lose my job.”
“Seems worth it to me,” he says.
Hardly. If I could go back in time and snatch those two words back, I would. But just talking to Wyatt about it makes me feel better, and I briefly wonder if Dr. Judy would tell me that this is what addiction looks like. A quick euphoria after having the thing you’ve been craving. I start to feel like maybe it was the friendship that I was mourning all those years. There is not one person on earth I can open up to like I can to Wyatt.
The laughing has brought us closer together on the futon. I mentally measure the space between his thigh and my knee.
“Tell me about your girlfriend.”
“She’s seriously not my girlfriend. It’s more like a work arrangement.”
“You don’t even have a job.” I don’t like the way this sounds, so I study his face to see if it stung. It didn’t. He seems completely at peace, with himself and with me. He puts his hand on his thigh, and I resist the urge to touch it. It’s the same but not the same, and I wonder if the feel of it would still change my skin into something else. “But you have health insurance, right?”
Wyatt laughs a big laugh. “I do.”
“Good,” I say, and I can’t stop myself. I reach over and take his hand in mine. It’s not like I’m holding his hand but more like I’m examining it. I run my fingers over the back of it and then trace them over his palm. I know immediately that this was a horrible mistake, because I can feel my skin melting into his, exactly the way I remember it. I cannot take my hand away, but I am afraid. This thing, this childhood madness, left me so broken. It’s taken me a decade to create a life that feels safe. Touching Wyatt makes me afraid I’m going to rip the seams out of everything I’ve sewn.
He stops me by placing his other hand over mine. “Maybe you should go, Sam-I-am.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Do you like that song?”
“I do,” he says. “Now get out of here.”