“Crab Rangoon?”
“What is it? Cream cheese?”
“I think you’ll like them.” She smiles. That’s generally enough to get him to commit. “So I was thinking. I mean, I can’t help but be aware. It’s almost fifteen years.”
He looks desperately for a waiter. “Yeah.”
“Do you want to do something for it?” she suggests. “Maybe for the kids?”
Yes? Maybe.What could it be?He hums, noncommittal.
He knows he is guilty of simplification, that Susan, in the ocean of his mind, has lost any sharp edges, is pearl-round and gleaming. That she has become unlike herself. But how can he let go of the ways in which she was, truly, perfect?
“I wish I could have spent more time with her,” Tillie says.
The day that Susan and Tillie met at Dan’s engagement was a painful day. Not that he remembers the specifics. Rod said something horrible, Susan was late. They came home to a mutilated mouse. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is Tillie’s kindness. That for a brief moment, they brushed against each other, laughed about some nothing. That her presence made a difference.
“I felt sorry for her. She was never really comfortable around us. Not that I was always comfortable either, it’s just. I was a native.”
“Susan was comfortable anywhere,” he asserts.
“Well, it just seemed to me that she felt she had to try quite hard. Almost like we expected her to perform.”
He’d never thought about it that way. His wife’s charisma had always seemed—to him—effortless. At least before she was sick. It was only then that he could recognize the cost.
“You know, for a while, we all kept expecting you to move to the West Coast.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Given she was in California so much.”
Dumplings arrive. Tillie stabs into them, slices open their slick skins. Al can’t find his appetite. It was strange, the phrase “a year to live,” when really, they meant “a year to die.” It’s hard to make the most of time thatis running out. In the mornings, Al felt a sense of having cheated death if he could breathe in the hazy smell of her, half-lidded, for ten, fifteen sweet minutes before waking fully to the hourglass.
“So, do you want to talk to the kids about doing something?” Tillie asks. “Some kind of memorial?”
Even though he has been speaking with his children more, he knows them less; who they are and what they want. They text him undescriptive and largely functional messages, asking for a particular recipe or the name of somebody they might have seen on the street. They have lost interest in him. And why not? Children all become disillusioned with their parents.
“Could you do anything with Sebastian’s old piece?” Tillie asks.
Over the last several years, Tillie has been excavating Viola’s room with the delicacy of an archaeologist. She has been converting it, tactfully, into a small study. A place to do her watercolors and sudoku puzzles. It’s a benign intent and has his blessing. A few months ago, she uncovered Sebastian’s early collage under Viola’s bed and they laughed about her first visit to the house. He had marveled at her, unfazed by the haunting.
He was obviously talented even then, she said.Your daughter must have seen it.
Leave it to Viola to save the work. As if she knew he might need it at a later date. Tillie reapplied glue to pieces that were dried and peeling. Superior restoration work. All of it made him feel idiotic for ever having feared her reaction.
It has taken Tillie to show him how to see his son. He knows, now, how to talk about what Sebastian is doing. Tillie has given him language: inventive, exploratory, composite. He is beginning to see his similarities with Sebastian: a love of sifting through ancient things, clarifying their purpose, rescuing them from obscurity.Is it too late to rescue something between them?When she gets up to use the bathroom, he takes out his new phone, his fingers still clumsy against the screen, the too-small letters.
Al
How are you doing Seb?
Having dinner in Boston
Nice sunset tonight.
For a flickering moment, after he threw the tapes into the ravine that night, he had considered jumping after them. Perhaps his children had been the only thing standing between himself and that great doorway.I should thank them, he thinks,for needing me then.
Dawn is a thin red strip slicing through the leafy North London skyline, waking Viola from the space between Orson’s shoulder blades, the back of her hand arching toward a headboard that he selected years ago with the Armenian supermodel. Orson is breathing gently. It’s when he’s sleeping that she notices his age the most, the soft folds of his face beginning to betray him, his slack jaw and wrinkled elbows.
