“So she wants us to come keep her company.”
I squint at my phone and Vin reaches one gigantic arm across me and hands me my glasses. “The Fourth is tomorrow,” I say. She’ll want us to drive out today—Sunday—and spend the night there.
“I have off work.” He clears his throat.
“Traffic’s gonna be a nightmare,” I groan. And then I toss the blankets off. “We better get going.”
And so we race off to his mother’s, at a glacial pace. Just outside the Holland Tunnel eight different cars honk at Vin for the high sin of…changing lanes. He pushes his Yankees cap even higher on his head and leans over the console for another bite of the breakfast sandwich I’m holding for him.
A little question mark forms between my brows as I watch him select the longer route on Google Maps.
“Why are we going the long way?” I ask him.
He glances at me. “Less traffic. Less stress.”
This is very unlike the Vin of yore. I mean, he’s a born New Yorker. Traffic does not bug this guy. Get there and be done with it, that’s his motto. But…he’s choosing the path of least resistance. I ponder this. This and broken glasses of orange juice. This and Vin’s reaction to Lauro jumping out at us last night. But really, I’m just pondering Vin. Vin post-accident.
“So,” I ask him after we’re out of the hairiest traffic and onto the two-lane highway that leads to his mother’s pretty little house on the side of a hill. “Less stress…Is that because…Are you…This PTSD thing, you really think we have it?”
“My therapist thinks that I do.”
“And based off that…do you think that I do, too?”
“I don’t know. I know that…you are different than you were before the accident. And not in a bad way. But…you…used to come to me with all your problems. And not to haveme solve them…but just to lay them down somewhere…Which I loved. That I could be that person for you…But…you don’t do that anymore. And…I’ve wondered if the…rift between us wasn’t…so much because of the accident itself…but because of the things we’ve had to dosincetheaccident…personally…individually…toheal from something like that.” He’s glancing at me as often as he can peel his eyes from the road. “Does that make sense?”
I consider this. “Are getting super stressed out at the drop of a hat and never knowing why you’re so fucking off-kilter signs of PTSD?”
He quirks his eyebrows and I laugh. “Oh, fine,” I say. “I probably have it, too.”
I survey him. So familiar it hurts. “You want my problems, you say? You miss hearing them?” I ask.
He nods.
“Well. You asked for it. Here I go. You could feed all of New York City every night with the food that restaurants and cafeterias toss into their dumpsters. That’s a problem I have. I want to feed the whole world. I want to be beautiful. And not just for me but because you’re aging like a fine fucking wine and it’s a perpetual fear that people will look at the two of us and think,Why the hell is he with that hag?I want to look at someone and knowexactlyhow to draw their collarbones. I want the sort of fine motor control that Degas had. I want to understand how I’m feeling at any given moment and not take it out on you because you’re there and you love me and you, apparently, won’t leave me. I want to go back to the day before we got these scars and hug you and tell you that in a year everything will be okay.”
He nods after each point, laughs after some of them, and holds my hand after the last one.
I don’t pester him while he gathers his thoughts.
“If one of us is aging like a fine wine,” he says, “it’s you.”
“Oh, please!” I crow. “Check out what these diabolically strategic bangs are covering.” I lift them and show him my forehead. “It’s like an accordion up there.”
“Everyone has an accordion up there if they dothatwith their eyebrows.”
“Well, someday soon it’ll be an accordion whether I’m doing that with my eyebrows or not.” I’m brushing my bangs back down with my fingers.
“Roz, you know that getting old with you was like the whole reason I signed the paperwork, right?”
“Did you just refer to our wedding as ‘signing the paperwork’?” I’m glowing, burning, twisting on the inside, but playing it cool on the outside.
“Name one other thing we did at our wedding besides sign paperwork.”
Well, he’s got me there. Eloping is desperately romantic when you’re leaving behind a jilted fiancé and racing to the other end of the country to start your new life, or something. Eloping in real life is just showing up to the county clerk with your marriage license and waiting in line like you’re at the DMV. Vin and I repeated after the nice lady and then signed the papers. After that she leaned forward and told us we could kiss.
“Kiss!” I tell him. “That’s one other thing we did at our wedding.”
He assents. “It was a really good kiss.”
