“Okay,” she murmured.
Carver leaned in to give her the sort of half-hug that they always gave each other. Nora acquiesced, squeezing him by the biceps like she always did. Her normally pale green eyes were vivid from crying, and they searched him with what almost looked like desperation. After a moment, she reached up to stroke his hair back from his forehead.
This surprised him, and he choked up. “Love you, Mom,” he managed.
“Love you,” Nora said, in a faint voice.
Carver left her in the study and went into his bedroom, got into bed and pulled the covers over his head so he could weep. He loved his mother and hated her and felt terribly sorry for her all in equal measure. There was a gap between them that could never be closed and a tie that could never be severed; it was likeshe dangled him endlessly over the void by a rope, not pulling him up and not cutting him loose. She knew him so well, yet wasn’t capable of understanding him. How could that be?
And how could it be that his father had been a real person, entirely alive and embodied? Not a stoic and distant ancestor but some poor unlucky son of a bitch who’d been terrified to die? He thought hearing more about him would help, and instead it was like doing coke — the high was great but faded almost immediately, leaving behind grinding emptiness. He was the very worthy heir to a ghost.
The weeping went on for long enough that Carver started to feel stupid and tried to knock it off, dragging in deep breaths that were chopped up by hiccupy gasps. Then he thought about spending the next several weeks alone on his yacht and started crying afresh. The thought of contacting Josh or Lena didn’t even help, because he knew nothing about them, and he was afraid to Google them. He was scared to build them up in his head and find reasons they might not like him; he wanted to make contact first, make himself a known entity to them before they became known entities to him.
What were they going to think, anyway? For them, this was just another Sunday night. They had no idea he was out there, waiting to crash into their lives. If Lena was Isaac’s older sister, she was probably seventy years old or close to it. Did a seventy-year-old actually want some random long-lost nephew showing up in her life? What if she was polite but disinterested?
Carver tried to comfort himself by imagining them as nice, kind, loving, welcoming. He thought about what Scott said and clung to it, then thought about Scott himself. It all felt so solid when they were together, but ridiculous when they were apart. Scott was going to date him? Scott the rock musician, who seemed to have — based on his Instagram comments — a healthy contingent of male fans who wanted to be him and female fanswho wanted to fuck him? Sure, he was no Kurt Cobain, but he was known to people, especially in certain contexts. Would he actually be game to walk around with Carver on his arm?
Even if his fans were cool with the basic premise of Scott seeing a man, it was hard to believe they’d be cool with Carver specifically. He’d spent two decades in the service of institutions these people despised. And that was a lot of the problem with leaving Blackbrick. What was he going to do with a life outside private equity — spend the next ten years justifying himself? Explain again and again that he’d saved more companies than he’d destroyed, that if someone else had been in his chair these past fifteen years they might have taken more risks and done more damage? And how much of this shit did he even believe anymore? How much of this shit would Scott believe?
Maybe none of this had to matter. Maybe it could all get washed away by love, if what they had really was love or at least its precursor chemicals. Maybe it would be alright if Carver spent the next few weeks or months confused and wobbly and weepy. Maybe Scott could manage to not be turned off and scared away by this.
As he lay there, his mind kept grasping for bargains he could make. He could fix Scott’s financial problems, if not with his own money then at least with his acumen, but of course Scott did not want this, had not asked for this.
He eventually got tired of thinking and tried to remember how Scott’s hands had felt on him, how his arms had felt around him, until his hot and swollen eyes were so heavy that sleep entered through them and took him away.
Sunlight woke Carver the next morning, pouring in through the tall window above his bed. They were only just getting into late May, but the light had the quality of early summer and remindedhim of the long June mornings of his youth. He remembered how he felt back then, always waiting for something to happen, and it occurred to him that he’d spent most of his life that way. Now, finally, something had happened.
He showered, shaved, put on his last clean t-shirt and pair of running shorts and went downstairs. He expected to find his parents in the kitchen, and there they were in the breakfast nook. Nora appeared to be looking at a stock analysis website on her iPad, and Doug was reading the sports section. When he walked in, they looked up and said hello, and Nora added, “There’s bread, bacon and eggs in the fridge.”
Carver retrieved the bread and put two slices in the toaster. As he waited, a suffocating silence fell over the kitchen, something his parents didn’t seem to mind or notice. They were both absorbed. Ralph lay on the floor nearby, asleep in a dog bed that had been placed in a slant of light.
“What sports are you tracking this time of year, Dad?” he said, desperate for some sound.
Doug turned to him as if confused, his reading glasses resting on the end of his nose. “Hmm?”
“I know you don’t watch hockey or basketball.”
“Oh, uh, golf. And a little bit of baseball.”
Carver’s toast popped out. He retrieved it and smeared butter on it. He was surprised to even find butter in his parents’ fridge — they were traditionally a margarine household — but maybe it was because they’d had company.
He made coffee, too, and took his cup and plate over to the breakfast nook, sitting down opposite Doug, who glanced at him as he did so. “They’re making men’s shorts awfully short now,” he said, looking back down at his newspaper.
“Uh-huh,” Carver said with a smile.
“That goes in and out of fashion,” Nora said, squinting at her iPad and tilting the screen as if fielding a glare from the windowbehind her. “They were very short in the eighties, you might remember.”
“Not the ones I wore.”
“You never wore shorts.”
“I wore shorts to the gym,” Doug said, stabbing a piece of egg on his plate.
“Oh, I guess you did.”
“You waiting for the market to open?” Carver said to his mother.
Nora glanced at him. “Oh, uh, yes. I want to see what Apple does. I think our money manager has us too into Apple, I might tell him to pull back.”
