He holds up a hand. “Stop questioning this. I want to spend time with you, and I also like being a come-with guy. Just accept it.”
“A ‘come-with’ guy?”
“TheSeinfeldpilot.” I look at him blankly. “Jesus, Lili. And you call yourself a New Yorker?”
Then he waves away my credit card and drops his on the table.
“I’ll let Gracie know our plans changed, but I can’t show up empty-handed,” he says. “Any good bakeries in the neighborhood?”
“You see? It was a good thing I got the extra lox,” my mom says.
She nudges the plate of salmon across the table toward Reid. He’s already eaten a bagel and a half, like a champ. Now he declines the fish but astutely asks for another scoop of coleslaw.
We’re sitting at my parents’ sun-drenched kitchen table, beside the curved bay windows that overlook Riverside Park and the sparkling gray-green Hudson beyond. It’s a gorgeous early summer day, and my mother has cracked open the window. A sense of satisfaction settles over me, that specialclickof putting everything in its right place. Not only did we set up my parents’ electric, credit card, maintenance, and mortgage payments this morning, but wealso collected all their login information (which previously my father had scrawled on loose Post-it notes), wrote it out on a single piece of notebook paper, and took a photo of that piece of paper for when it inevitably gets misplaced.
Reid was game throughout this ordeal, though once or twice I noticed him moving to reach for the mouse when my dad stumbled through a step before tethering his patience and calmly walking him through the explanation one more time. And he laughed genuinely at all my father’s jokes, including the one about the first Jewish president’s inauguration that I personally have heard a minimum of four hundred times. My father rolls this one out first, but only to people he’s trying to impress: “See that man at the podium?” the president-elect’s mother whispers to the man sitting next to her. “His brother is adoctor.”
While we holed ourselves up in my father’s study—the “computer room,” as he still calls it—my mother plied us with coffee and cookies before breaking out her overzealous deli run. She even pulled out a bottle of champagne, which has been sitting in their fridge since their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2018. I know this because I bought it for them.
Before we arrived, I texted my mom with the least-complicated explanation for the strapping gentleman joining me to help digitize their bills: Reid is an old friend from college, in town from Los Angeles with his daughter.
When we walked in, I noticed my mother do the thing she’s always done when confronted with a good-looking man: straighten her posture and gently touch her fingersto her hair, a Jean Seberg–esque pixie cut she’s maintained for the past thirty-five years, once butter-blond and now an elegant dove gray.
Then Reid presented to her the box of black-and-white cookies he picked up on the way, and she’s been his shadow since.
“Leave the kid alone,” my dad says now. In a show of solidarity, he pulls the plate of lox toward him, away from Reid. My mom playfully slaps at his hand.
Reid laughs. “Believe me, I appreciate this. LA has some great delis, but the bagels don’t come close.”
“It’s the water,” my mom intones, as if she has come to this conclusion herself, after years of rigorous experimentation. “It’s no good out there.”
Her eyes narrow, studying Reid intently, generally the precursor to a probing question. I want to swoop in with something, anything, to get the attention off him—Emme is learning how to make crochet sushi figurines!—but my mom has decades of practice in the art of extracting information. She cuts in faster than I do.
“So you have a daughter.” She innocently busies herself with topping up our glasses.
“I do.” Pride radiates even from those two words. “Gracie. She’s going into her senior year of high school.”
“Gracie’s two years older than Emme,” I add, reattempting to gain control over this conversation. “She’s interested in NYU, so Emme is showing her around the neighborhood today. I know they’re going to Washington Square Park, and I think she’s taking Gracie to that Thai restauranton West Third Street? Remember the one we went to after Emme’s dance recital a few years ago?”
But my mom would never relinquish her agenda so easily.
“So it’s just you and your daughter here?”
Reid takes a long sip of his drink. He nods warmly. “Just me and Gracie, yes. Always just me and Gracie.”
My mom lifts an eyebrow. “Divorced?”
“Mom,” I warn. Under the table, I graze my hand against Reid’s leg, trying to communicate to him that he doesn’t have to answer this question.
Even though I desperately want to know.
“It’s OK.” Reid looks at me briefly, and there’s something like an apology in his eyes. Then he turns his gaze back to the table and grips his champagne glass with slightly too much force. “Widower.”
The word is a stone, dropped in a bucket. It shatters the levity of the afternoon.
There’s a beat of silence. When he looks back up at my mother, his gracious smile is back in place. But I can see the effort it took for him to get there.
This is what he wanted to tell me about last night at dinner, I realize now. I study Reid’s face through the lens of this new knowledge. This is the cause of the emotion I noticed stalking the lightness behind his eyes. This is the suffering Gracie scrambled to cover up. This is why Reid wants to keep her so close.
