Dad nods. “You’re busy, honey,” he says. “She doesn’t want to bother you. You’re not always easy for her to get on the phone.” Then: “How was seeing him?”
I think about it. “Fine,” I say. “Strange. I think the last time I saw him was five years ago.”
“Before Leo.”
I nod.
“He’s a nice guy,” Dad says carefully. “But he wasn’t the one for you.”
“Is that what he is?” I say. “Nice?”
Dad laughs lightly, and I feel us exhale into the space between us, the ease that has just always been there. Dad was the one who I could go to, the one who wouldn’t punish me if I screwed up on an exam, or stole a vodka bottle from the liquor cabinet. Dad was always able to see the context in whatever I had done. He was never hard-lined, always inquisitive. He was the first person I told after Stone and I had sex for the very first time.
“It’s better to think of old loves as nice,” he says. “Keeps you out of the muck. If someone is an asshole, well—that’s fire. Fire is alive, you get me?”
I do. Stone was never an asshole. But then again, nice is not how I’d describe our relationship, not exactly.
“Things work out,” I say. “I’d never have Leo.”
“That’s right.”
I look out over the water. The seafoam appears iridescent against the black sky. It feels like we are both waiting for me to say it, and so I do.
“But Stone was there, you know?”
He witnessed our history. He was there for so much of my becoming.
Dad knows about his car accident. My mother told him. I don’t know how the conversation went, because I wasn’t there—I just know that one day my mother and Sylvia and I had a secret, and the next all four of us did. My father, by all accounts, believed her immediately. Not just because he loves her—although I suspected that was most of it—but because, as he put it, it seemed to explain a lot about her nature, why she had become so drawn and anxious.
It connected them more deeply, deeper than they had been before. I’ve heard only children sometimes say that they feel a part of their parents’ marriage. That there is no “us” and “them” but instead just “we.” That there is no separation between a marriage and a family when there is only one child.
But I always felt like a little bit of an outsider to my parents’ marriage. I suspected my dad was my mom’s priority, and I didn’t resent it, exactly, but I didn’t like it, either. And after the accident it went from suspected to obvious. To fact. My mom orbited around him—the man she loved, the man she had saved, the man she’d do anything to protect. And so I started to protect him, too.
I hear my phone ringing, a soft hum from inside. It jolts me out of the moment.
“Go,” Dad says. “I’ll close up.”
I kiss him on the cheek and head inside. Leo is calling.
“Baby!” he says. His voice rings through the phone loud and clear and happy. “How’s it going out there?”
“Good. Dad and I are just having some wine outside. How are you?”
I toss some paisley pillows on the floor and sink down into the old leather couch.
“What did Sylvia make?” he asks.
“Pasta,” I say. “Among other things.”
“Shabbat spaghetti?” His voice gets farther away and then comes back again.
I hear a door slam.
“Save me some of those leftovers.”
Dad turns around and waves through the glass. I wave back and mouthLeoto him. He gives me a thumbs-up.
“So tell me how it went,” I say into the phone.
