Skiing with the boys over Christmas has been restorative.What the hell does that mean? While initially I did miss having another body in the house, even if it was mediocre company, what I have not missed in the slightest is Thomas’s constant wellness talk. Not. One. Bit.
I’m not sorry at all,I want to type back. It will be much easier to avoid Thomas at a wedding reception of three hundred people than an intimate rehearsal dinner party of thirty.
Since John and Andrew spent Thanksgiving with me, they couldn’t resist the guilty-conscience father proposition of a Christmas spent skiing in Switzerland. Attempting straight faces that bore sincerity, John and Andrew called Christmas in the Alps a cruel holiday conundrum of children of divorcing parents. I called it exactly what it was: Thomas bribing his sons to spend time with him and his British tart and theirtartlet. Exactly what the boys have displayed little interest in doing since Thomas’s newest family start-up relocated him to London.
In truth, just this once, I was fine to let John and Andrew go. Between Alice setting her wedding date for New Year’s Eve and my successful first phone conversation with Leslie, I planned to be in New York to meet the lespondents in person and be an at-the-ready wedding lackey for Quinn and Alice. If the boys had wanted to join me in the city, that would have been wonderful, but I was not flying cross-country to play house and happy-holiday homemaker in an Airbnb. Joining Quinn and Alice on their Christmas Eve tradition of seeing the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center was enough Ho! Ho! holidaying for me this year. I was on a mission in New York to secure a job, be by Quinn’s side to marry Alice off, and get my first face-to-face with Thomas over with since the day I was half dressed but fully dumped at my dining room table. For the first time in years, I was busy with my own plans, and I was energized by what could be for me. So if the Kingman males chasing fresh snow meant they would not arrive in New York until late in the evening of Alice and Jack’s rehearsal dinner, I saw that as a bonus.
“Quinn, you focus on Alice. I’m good,” I insist as I shuffle down the hallway to the kitchen, steaming mug of coffee and the day’s Wordle in hand. Quinn has nervously been on my heels all morning with what she callshelpful advicefor my meeting in an hour with Elizabeth. I call it transference of anxious wedding energy since Alice has curtailed her mother’s input to three calls per day, maximum.
“Answer Elizabeth’s questions, but don’t overshare. Don’t fiddle with your bracelets; that will make you look nervous at best, anxiety riddled at worst. Sit up straight, and avoid leaning your elbows on the conference table. It’ll make you look aggressive,” Quinn continues to chirp in my ear.
“This isn’t a deposition, Quinn, it’s a conversation,” I remind my plus-one. Quinn has asked me to sit next to her at the church and thereception dinner. I’m the closest thing to a significant other she’s had since Charles’s passing.
“Do you want me to go with you to meet Elizabeth? Make sure you get there okay? You should leave about forty minutes ahead of time if you’re walking, twenty-five if you’re taking a cab. Maybe don’t walk. At our age, a light sweat in work clothes reads potential heart attack.”
“Quinn, I spent a summer in college walking from the Upper East Side to 30 Rockefeller Center; I remember how to do it. And I do think I’ll walk.” The past couple of days, I’ve enjoyed nothing more than running along the East River Greenway, throughout Central Park, and up and down the Hudson River on the West Side. It’s been revitalizing, taking in New York with a newfound energy and appreciation of my home city, with its diverse architectural landscape and world-class people-watching. I sent Maureen and Daphne videos of me zigging and zagging through competing foot traffic, showing them the sights as I pass by. I know Chap would appreciate my burgeoning running videos, but I am not yet ready to reengage with the Beaumont men. It has taken Porter thirty years to resurface; he can wait a few more days for me to unpack the meaning of his reappearance in Sacramento at the exact moment I’m putting forth a concerted effort to leave.
Porter has left me a series of voicemails and a few texts since our reunion over a week ago. Rather than my must-listen podcasts, I play the messages over and over again on my runs, savoring the timbre of his voice deepened with age. Only a hint of his heavy Southern drawl is left after multiple decades away from Manning, but it’s there. I study the inflection of every one of Porter’s chosen words because I know they have been exactly that, carefully chosen for me to consider.
In the first couple of messages, Porter succinctly asked me to call him back. After a few more, he says there are additional details he would like to share about his trajectory from an emotionally stunted twenty-two-year-old to where he is today. When I don’t return the calls, he takes to explaining himself over voicemail until he is cut off by the beep. Then he calls once more to pick up where he left off. Thethroughline of all his messages is that his greatest regret is that perhaps he underestimated his parents, but mostly his mom. That though it would have been difficult, she may have grown to accept and then love me as a daughter if she had been given a chance. Particularly in the later years when she was suffering significantly from MS.
According to Porter, the care she received from mostly White doctors and a particularly favored White nurse was nothing short of kind, devoted, and respectful. Apparently, her care team worked tirelessly to make Delsie’s last years, months, and days comfortable and consisting of as many of her beloved activities as she could manage. Delsie’s weekend nurse attended Sunday services with the Beaumonts, as it was too much for Olden to get Delsie in and out of the car and situated in the church pews on his own. The nurse believed a house of God is a house of God, and loudly sang hymns, swayed to the holy blues of the organ, and read from the Bible alongside Porter’s parents, the only White face among the congregation of Black ones. And Porter agonized and apologized repeatedly for not allowing me the chance to know Delsie and Olden. And Rose. The people who, besides me, loved him wholly and purely.
My heart pumps through my thick wool-wicking turtleneck, a combination of my quickening pace and long-awaited relief that I wasn’t man repellant. That I hadn’t driven Porter away. He drove himself away. I am beginning to realize that there was little I could have done differently in our relationship. Our love was mutual, equal, and most important, real. It was just that I believed our connection could and would conquer all, whereas Porter saw our hurdles as insurmountable. His explanation, that our relationship failure was more a factor of where our vastly different worlds spun in the social fabric of ’90s America than it was about the two of us nestled behind Princeton’s ivy walls, stung.
With these revelations of the past and the prospects for my future, I feel even lighter than the number that had shown on Dr. Kwan’s scale. My stride flows and my arms pump with a determination and direction I have not felt in forever. I look forward to seeing John and Andrew, andthem seeing their mother in her strength in New York. I hope that at the wedding, I’ll be able to share with them that my writing has earned me a job offer, that I will be moving back to New York but forward with my life. I want the boys to be with me, maybe even start their professional lives here rather than California, but I don’t need them to be with me. I am evolving beyond a wife and a mother. I am becoming a woman who stands on her own.
Porter’s voicemail this morning is the only one I share with Quinn after my sunrise run. I want her to hear this one for its message, and because I want her off my back about my interview.
“Listen to this, Quinn.” She’s buttering our toast and holds up a finger to wait a minute so she can sit down next to me with our plates.
Callie, remember what I used to say to you: Better last than never. I still love you. I always have. I hope you can somehow love me again too.
“So do you think you can?” Quinn asks with a full mouth of sourdough I didn’t need to see.
If Quinn questions me one more time about being ready for my interview with Elizabeth, I swear I am going to give her a smack, and black eyes are not a good mother-of-the-bride look. “Do I think I can what?”
“Do you think you can be with Porter again? Are you still in love with him?” Quinn’s eyes register real concern. Or maybe it’s curiosity. I can’t tell.
I flick a stray crumb off my pajamas. “Do you think I am?”
“For my selfish sake, I want to say no. I want you to tell me that you have let go of Princeton and Porter and the past, and it’s all forward momentum from here. You’ve wanted to be back in New York for so long. I’ve wanted you back here for so long.” Quinn pushes her palms across her forehead like she’s trying to erase the thought that’s forming in her mind. “But if I’m being honest, I don’t think you have ever not been in love with Porter.”
“Please, Quinn. I was with Thomas for twenty-five years. Thomas and the boys and hell, even Sacramento, have been my life. I was with Thomas longer than I have been without him.”
“I know. I believe that you loved Thomas for many of those years, but I think you have always carried Porter in your heart. Like I have with Charles. And as much as I want you here, I have to admit something.” Quinn’s buttery fingers reach for mine, and her mouth turns down with a touch of sadness. “Unlike me, you could love like that again. And maybe that means it would be worth staying in California.”
“Lizzy Mason?” I ask loudly, confused, as a sixtyish, long-legged woman with a flawless salt-and-pepper bob strides toward me in black leather high-heeled boots and a matching leather dress. Pure chic greets me less than a minute after the receptionist on the eighteenth floor announced to Elizabeth Mason that her 11:00 a.m. was in the lobby.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Calliope Steele. I would recognize you anywhere!”
“You two know each other?” Quinn asks, a bit dumbfounded. This morning, Quinn had the courage to say out loud what has been clouding my judgment since the night at The Firehouse Restaurant and through the repetition of every one of Porter’s voicemails. Is fate intervening in the life I am trying to wrestle back for myself? Thirty years ago, I had a perfectly laid-out plan to become a journalist, live in New York, marry Porter, and vacation and raise our kids alongside Charles and Quinn’s. I expected to live my life with the loves of my life.
I held on to that vision tightly—too tightly, I now realize—because none of it came to be, and I dimmed my own light rather than embracing the unexpectedly beautiful life in front of me. When my constructed plan failed, I saw myself as a failure. But I wasn’t. I’d had more love in my life than most people ever experience. Romantic love, friendship love, and the unconditional love of my boys. Though long overdue, self-love was taking root too. I was now equally at home in California as I ever was in New York, even if admitting it felt like betraying myself. If the point of life is to love and be loved ... well, then, the only toss-up for me is geography.
In New York, I have Quinn and Alice, old friends to become reacquainted with and new professional possibilities to explore. In California, I have John and Andrew; and Lisa, Maureen, Daphne, Chap, and my mother. I could also have Porter. Again. The person I had always wanted to be with from the beginning. At least that’s the feeling I get from the almost two hours of voicemails Porter has left me. Since arriving in Sacramento, I was convinced I could pack up and move back to New York in less than twenty-four hours, leaving everything behind on the West Coast without a second thought. Now I’m not so sure.
“Do you mind if we just sit and chat here?” Elizabeth points to the pair of pristine black leather couches to the far right of reception with nary a butt dent in them. “All my furniture is piled in the middle of my office to accommodate the painters coming later today, and I’m trying to impress you, not frighten you away by the mess.” Having fought mightily and won the opportunity to hand-deliver me to my interview, Quinn makes zero moves to leave and follows Elizabeth and me over to the office living room.
