“Mine too. They had some rough patches. My dad drank too much for a while.”
“Veterinarians like to party?”
“Long ago. When we were very young kids. I think money was a big issue for them back then. Not anymore, though. They have separate bedrooms, and they say it’s the secret to true happiness. My dad snores like a Cape buffalo.”
“I only think of guys thinking about marriage in the sense of trying to avoid it.”
He shook his head. “My one younger brother says that women think men are eight-celled creatures when it comes to love, but I always say, hey, who wrote most of those love songs? Men wrote most of those love songs.”
My heart kicked up speed, but even I wasn’t enough of a romantic to think he meant love in the context of him and me. He meantlovethe word, the way people sling it around, as in true love, a love letter, a love affair, a love story, a love interest, love is a many-splintered thing.
I don’t believe in putting off difficult things; I believe in doing them first (that is, I believed in doing them first until I had to interview the families of murder victims...). But I wanted to ask Sam for a postponement, for another day... even though I knew that this had to stop, if not end, right now.
Then he asked, “So why are you named Irene?”
“After the old song. The great old blues man Lead Bellysang it. And folk singers, like The Weavers. Everybody sang it. ‘Irene, good night, Irene, Irene, good night...’”
“Right,” he said. “Before my time.” He asked then, “Sisters and brothers?”
“One sister, Nell. Eleanor. Named after my mother’s mom, who was named for Eleanor Roosevelt. Who are you named for?”
“My grandfather on my mother’s side. Samuel Anthony Messina. It spells ‘Sam.’”
“Are your grandparents alive?”
“All four,” he said.
“Me too.”
“So you come from a line of hearty people.”
“Yes, my dad used to say that you could tell we Bigelow women, my sister and I, were of peasant stock by our sturdy hips, until my mother told him that if he ever said that again, it would be the last thing he ever said.”
“I like her.”
“I like her too. Do you like your mother?”
“I am crazy about her actually. She’s very funny. She has a very bad temper. She’s also my boss, the managing partner at Damiano, Chen, and Damiano.”
We settled down to sleep, as though we did this all the time instead of twice. I’m pretty sure he thought that I was already asleep when he wound one finger into the back of my newly washed hair and whispered, “Irene, good night, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreams.”
He had known all along.
Late next morning, we drank our coffee. He ate a piece of toast and I, suddenly self-conscious, didn’t. Soon, I would have to leave. I was packing up my backpack when Sam said, “One more night.” I knew that I should go, right then, while thingswere sweet as new snow, but who knew if this new connection could weather months of separation, not a wall placed between us for the trial, but, worse, if possible, a window. And if it didn’t, who knew when love would come again for me? I set the backpack down.
I agreed to leave first thing, before anyone else in the neighborhood was awake.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s practically night already, anyhow.”
It was not even two in the afternoon, but... who cared? Those last few doors within broke open with a force that made them shudder on their hinges, doors I feared I might not be able to force shut again, or if I did, I would always see this light shining around the edges. I wasn’t exactly thinking of names for our firstborn son, but I was so far gone that I almost wished I hadn’t tasted this thin slice of sublime couple-hood that would make the store brand seem so bland.
Everything that last day and night was lovely, at first. All the urgency of wild love too soon undertaken, too often denied, still pertained. For dinner, I cooked my one dish: my mother’s macaroni and cheese with the secret ingredient. Sam pronounced it delicious. We talked more. I told him about our feature story about cat people and dog people and how that preference extended even to the way people dressed, about how my father’s grandmother, an Irish immigrant, had four sisters, all of whom were or had been nuns, about how our only pet ever had been a parrot named Rosh Shoshana that spoke only Yiddish and which had to be given away when it nearly bit off the finger of one of those great-aunts. Sam told me about how much he hated dirty jokes, and he thought that Irish women were the most passionate and kind, how he’d once wanted to be a farmer. When it came to sports, he loved only college basketball because, for most of them, their championship season would be the great lyric passage of their whole lives. He didn’t think fiction was girlie. Oneof his brothers wanted to be a writer. He asked me how many books I thought I would write, where I would live if I could live anywhere, if I liked to fish.
It was lovely, yet it didn’t feel like a gift, as it should have. It was just a flight delay. We’d been outward bound, and, relieved as we were to turn back to each other, our brains continued to outpace our emotions. Things I had to write down or pick up kept skittering across my mind. My clothes felt old and soiled on my skin. Sam was already lost to me. He had gone deeply into his preparation, like an athlete concentrating on the race, a surgeon on the operation, an actor on the role.
“Can I ask a question?” I said to him finally.
“Sure.”
