“Nothing like that.” He shifted in his seat. “I’m not—I don’t know that it’s a good idea, for me to get serious with someone.”
“You’re one of those, then. Commitment-phobic!” She threw up her hands. “I’ve met a bunch like you. When you turn forty and start losing your hair you’ll probably want to have a baby.”
Will resisted the urge to touch his hair.
“No, that’s not it.” Or at least it wasn’t that particular version of it, not the way Sally meant.
“It’s her or it’s no one,” he added, and as soon as it was out of his mouth he felt the truth of it, right in the aching center of his heart.
Sally had a look on her face like Mrs. Salas when he talked medicine. “So why isn’t it a good idea?”
She said it so nicely, so genuinely, that Will thought he probably could’ve told her the whole thing, and she would’ve listened.
I’ve got this fear, he could’ve said,that I’m exactly like my parents.He could’ve said,I’ve got this fear that I don’t know how to love anyone any other way. He could’ve told her about what had happened to him, when he’d seen that picture: a big, blurry rush of unpleasant memories. He could have told her that seeing his parents so young and in love had only reminded him of where they’d ended up: utterly lost at the prospect of being without each other.
I’ve got this fear that I’d lose sight of everything else.
But Will’s boss was still in the other room and Sally didn’t have all night, and anyway, this wasn’t as simple as fixing up Donny’s apartment or finding a home for the two cats sitting next to him. This wasn’t the kind of thing Sally could have a solution for.
So instead he said, “She and I, we’re pretty different.”
Sally shrugged. “Gerald and I are different.”
“You’re divorced.”
She pursed her lips and cocked her head at him, giving him an exasperated look. “Obviously,” she said, “we areworkingon it.”
He nodded down at his placemat, appropriately chastened.
“Will,” Sally said, and he could tell a big, frustrated,Why are you like this?sigh was lingering beyond it. “Let me ask you a question.”
One of the cats started to climb onto his lap. Quincy, which meant it was fifty-fifty he was about to get peed on, screamed at, or both.
“Why not,” he said blandly, pretty much to both Sally and Quincy.
“Do youwantto work on it?”
Quincy’s tail swiped across Will’s face like an admonishment, and frankly, it was extremely clarifying.Of course you try to fix a brain bleed, asshole, he thought to himself, straightening in his chair. It was like having an anchor dropped in his body, slowing him down enough to see his surroundings, to actuallythinkfor what felt like the first time in days, maybe since he’d seen that picture. He thought about Gerald in the other room, washing dishes and probably deep breathing through his annoyance over Sally’s elbows on the table. He thought of Gerald in the hospital, asking him about purchasing a kitten or a gift card, trying to sort out ideas for nonroutine dates.
God. Suddenly, being more like Gerald Abraham seemed a whole lot better than being himself, selfish and sullen and ruminating. So he’d overreacted to the photograph. So he’d gotten too in his head about his parents, and about himself. That didn’t mean he couldn’t work on it with Nora; that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way to figure this out so that it would be good for them both. He just had to focus. A diagnosis, and now a treatment.In fact it is common sense!
“Yes,” he said to Sally, gently moving a stiff-legged Quincy back to his chair. “I do.”
Sally smiled across the table at him, her expression a mixture of pride and excitement that dampened some of Will’s confidence. He cringed, thinking of theGood lucktext.
“Pretty sure I’ve dug a big hole here,” he said.
Sally might as well have had a tablet and a neon pink binder in front of her when she spoke again.
“I suppose it’s a bit like that mess of an apartment you walked into not so long ago! You’ve got to start somewhere.”
When Will walked into his own dark apartment an hour later, “starting somewhere” did, admittedly, feel like a dimmer prospect than it had when he’d been sitting across from Sally. After all, Nora was still in San Diego until tomorrow, and his options for starting to fix things were limited. He could’ve called, but she’d been pretty clear about wanting to wait until she got back, and anyway, he wanted to give this the focus it deserved, didn’t want to call her unless he’d really thought about what he wanted to say.
And anotherGood luck–type text message absolutely wasn’t going to cut it.
He kept the lights off at first, not ready to see his spare, functional apartment yet, not wanting the reminder that he— unlike . . . Gerry? . . . nope, Gerald—might not ever get out of this purgatory. But as he moved through his lonely nighttime routine—shower, sleep shorts, brushing his teeth—lights became a necessity, and when he went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water, he caught sight of his mother’s old book on the counter in the spot where he’d left it almost a week ago. The photograph was in there, he knew; he’d seen Nora slide it gently between the pages when she’d come to find him.
One place to start, he supposed, would be taking that photograph out and staring down at it until he could be assured he wouldn’t overreact again. But the fact that the book was still there at all, he supposed, was progress of a sort—years ago, months ago, weeks ago, even, he probably would’ve gotten rid of it, would’ve put the photograph into the same box where he kept all pictures from his childhood, small and shoved into the back of his closet.
