I picture him again as a twenty-two-year-old—all his promise, his gameness, his carefully laid plans and goodmanners. I see Reid on the fire escape, the fairy lights dancing in his eyes. I want to keep him there.
“Oh, Reid.” I gently touch his elbow, and he offers me the smallest smile.
My mother’s hand flies to her heart. The gesture is old-fashioned, somehow, an open, unironic demonstration of her sympathy. “That’s just terrible,” she says. “I’m sorry, honey.”
“Thank you, Joan,” Reid says. “I am too.”
After that, I manage to finally redirect the conversation toward neutral ground, and my parents eagerly follow. My dad tells a story about meeting Edie Sedgwick at a Factory party. (“All I remember is she was wearing a pair of little boy’s overalls, with nothing underneath.”) My mom brings out a Salvador Dalí statuette, a twisted Christ rendered in eighteen-karat gold, another of her collection’s crown jewels. And then Reid trades a story about how, back in the sixties, his chronically late mother had just missed meeting Dalí at one of Frank Zappa’s parties in the Canyon. (“That was the last time she was late for anything.”)
Eventually, after we finish up the champagne and clear the table, my father recruits Reid to help him fix his printer. “While I have a young person here,” he says. “This thing hasn’t worked since the Obama administration. The first one.”
Reid follows him. “At fifty-two, it’s nice to be called young.”
After they leave, I load the dishwasher while my mom handwashes the cabbage platters and good knives. (“Never put a wooden handle in the dishwasher,” I hear her refrain.)
We’re quiet for a while. I know it won’t last.
My mom hands me a dish towel and a platter. “Reid is a nice man.”
I can’t help but laugh at her opening gambit, and she does too.
“He is indeed,” I say.
“He’s a friend from college, you said? I don’t remember ever meeting him.”
“You didn’t. I didn’t know him well enough to introduce you.”
She drops a handful of knives onto my dish towel. “And you know him well enough now?”
I pause. It’s a good question, and one I’ve been grappling with since last night. How well do I know Reid? How well did Ieverknow Reid? We only spent a week together, though the depth of our connection never quite squared with the brevity of our... whatever it was. And then there was another lifetime’s worth of elapsed years.
I think back to when I saw him first, on that hellishly hot day at Sin-é. The way I felt intuitively that I’d encountered him before, that I knew all the tics and quirks and vulnerabilities that hid behind his cool exterior. And I felt that way again when I saw him last night. The distinct...Reid-ness of him was how I recognized him from a distance, across the deep, wide gulf of time.
I run the dish towel over a knife, then wrap it around the wooden handle and gently press the water from it.
“I know him as well as I possibly can,” I say. It’s the most honest answer I can give.
“You didn’t know his wife died. Don’t you think he should have told you sooner? And not in front of your parents?”
“It’s... complicated.” I take a deep breath. “I don’t know, Mom. You don’t get to our age without collecting some baggage.”
My mom puts her hand on mine and squeezes it. Her nails are painted the color of glossy candy apples, as they have been since at least 1985. The big things change, but the small things don’t. The small things, I think, are often the most meaningful.
“That man,” my mom says, “is in pain.”
My heart sinks. There’s something about my mom telling me what I already know that makes it even more real. I know she’s right. And I know Emme was right last night, when she warned me to guard my heart. Before now, I never would have second-guessed these warnings. I never even would have gotten to a point in my feelings when I would have needed to be warned anyway. I certainly didn’t with the handful of men I dated after James and I split.
But none of those men were Reid. There’s something about him that calls to something in me, a quiet hum of resonance I’d forgotten I could hear.
I like him. The admission to myself feels dangerous. I like him enough that I’m actually considering poking my head out of the shell I retracted into after the divorce. He’s only been back in my life for a matter of hours, but I can already feel myself changing shape, becoming a person who might take calculated risks again.
I open the drawer at my waist and slot the dried-off knives inside. From the office, I hear the labored chug of the printer, followed by the whoop of my dad’s laugh.
“I don’t know anyone who isn’t in pain,” I say. “But maybe we don’t have to let our pain rule us.”
My mom raises a brow in a way that means she’s seeing right through me. “I wish you really believed that, sweetheart.”
X
