“Really?” She sounded doubtful.
“I mean, yes. I hired an interior decorator. But she wasn’t a woman in the sense of ‘girlfriend’ or something like that.” He handed her the wine, and they drank without clinking glasses. He hoped that wasn’t a bad sign.
“Before we eat,” she said tentatively, “I’d like to go upstairs, if that’s okay.”
“Of course,” he said. “You know where it is.”
It was the reason he’d called her, sort of. He’d invited her to see their son’s bedroom. He’d told her, “I do it all the time. I sit with his things and think about him and remember him.” They’d left his room exactly the way it was all those years ago, with his sports and band posters, his video games, his clothes.
Now, he pictured Bethany going upstairs, creaking open their son’s door, and sitting quietly. He had no idea how long she would need. He drank his wine and waited, his heart spasming. If he tricked his mind, he could imagine that Bethany and their son were upstairs, that they were folding laundry and joking, that they’d come downstairs for dinner soon enough. He’d pour his son a glass of milk and ask him about school. Bethany would suggest that their son should audition for the school play. James would suggest the chess team.
He shook his head of the fantasy. He couldn’t live like that anymore.
When Bethany returned to the kitchen, her eyes were smudged and tinged with red, but she was smiling. She touched James’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.”
James nodded and watched as she sat across from him, fidgeting with her glass of wine. He wanted to ask her how it had gone, whether she had talked to their son up there, whether she had felt him. But it felt too personal, especially since he and Bethany were strangers now.
They ate. For a little while, they managed to talk about other things: Bethany’s work, James’s grief therapy sessions, and what they’d watched on television lately. They picked at their lasagna, neither one of them hungry enough to eat like normal.
And then, James finally found the strength to ask her about Sam.
“I’m sorry about how I acted the other day,” he said, scraping sauce from one of his lasagna noodles. “I was taken aback. But I really am happy you’ve found someone.”
Bethany raised her chin. “Thank you for saying that.”
James knew that he owed it to Elena and her mission to probe deeper into the Sam situation, to figure out how a guy like Sam—a guy who’d never had much money to begin with—could afford to move to Cranberry Cove.
“How’s life in Cranberry Cove?” he asked.
Bethany blushed. “It’s really a hot topic right now. Cranberry Cove.”
“I think it always was,” he said.
“Oh, but it’s beautiful to wake up there every day,” Bethany admitted. “We’re slowly decorating the house to our liking. The owners told us we could do whatever we wanted.”
“Ah! So you don’t own it?”
Bethany shook her head. “No. But Sam knows the owners somehow. He said he used to work with them. They moved to the city and aren’t coming back any time soon. We hope we can spend decades there.”
James recognized that his ex-wife was planning to live out the rest of her days with Sam. Whether or not they got marriedwould remain to be seen, of course. So many people were opting out of marriage these days, especially after initial divorces. He understood. The divorce had taken a lot out of him.But I’d still marry Elena if we got to that point, he thought, surprising himself.
“Sam’s retired these days, right?” James asked.
“He is. But he has several projects. He’s working on a novel, and he’s trying to read all the books of Proust before the end of next year,” Bethany said. “And like I said, we’re redoing a lot of the house. We stay busy.”
James nodded. He was growing increasingly exhausted, as though too much conversation with Bethany would squeeze him dry. What were the facts he could pass along to Elena? One, that Sam was friends with the owners of their newly rented Cranberry Cove home. Two, that said, the owners had moved to the city and probably weren’t coming back. Three, Sam never had to work another day in his life. But was any of that pertinent? It was clear Sam had done the Cranberry Cove folks a favor. But was there any proof of that anywhere?
James wasn’t sure if he was cut out for this. He certainly couldn’t commit fraud himself. Bizarrely, he had respect for people who could manipulate others, if only because they seemed to have a power over their own minds and the guilt they allowed themselves to feel. James felt guilty for absolutely everything. It was his nature.
When Bethany was halfway through her lasagna, she said it was time to go. James was relieved. Standing, he walked her to the front door and watched as she buttoned her coat. He imagined her driving to Cranberry Cove, striding through the door, and cuddling on the sofa with Sam. He imagined Sam asking about their son’s bedroom, about what had happened. But he stopped short of imagining what she might say about him. He didn’t want to know.
After Bethany disappeared into the inky night, James put on his coat and hurried to Elena’s house. Now that they were “dating,” they’d taken to popping into one another’s houses for last-minute glasses of wine or funny conversations, during which they both smiled continually. Nobody had ever made James float in the air the way Elena did, metaphorically speaking.
The front room of Elena and Carmen’s place was all lit up, the Christmas tree glowing in the center of the window. James popped to the door and knocked, banging the mostly full bottle of wine against his leg. He couldn’t wait for Elena to try it.
Elena opened the door with a soft smile and held him for a long time. He turned to butter in her arms. “How was it?” she asked, hanging up his coat.
“It was not easy,” he said.
