“Love you, buddy,” I say back.
Love you,Tatum mouths to me.
Love you,I mouth back.
“Love you,” Leo shouts, which makes everyone giggle again.
“Love you,” I say sincerely back to him.
Leo rises and wraps me in a hug, slapping my back, holding me for a beat longer than the pre-rehab Leo would have. He’s been clean for almost a year now. He calls me on Sundays to check in, he is rededicated to his job, he left the nightclub business, and he never told my mom about any of it. His skin is shiny, his eyes well rested, his muscles strong when my hands press against his shoulder blades on the other end of the embrace. It wasn’t a seamless process, my tough love, my insistence that he finally grow up and grow a backbone and accept responsibility for the roads he’d put himself on. Tatum wanted to do it differently, and Walter, her dad, told me I was mistaken, that I needed to offer support, not just firmness. But here we are, and he is thriving, and Leo and I proved them wrong.
“I know I’m a writer,” I begin. “But that doesn’t make me an expert in the ways of love.”
“Bullshit!” Leo calls out. “You married Tatum Connelly, so you must be doing something right!”
“That’s true!” Tatum shouts from a couple of tables behind him.
“Well, marrying my wife was the one smart thing I’ve done in the name of love my whole life. Though that just makes me lucky; that doesn’t really make me smart.” I don’t know why I’m announcing this, my most neurotic insecurity, to the crowd of my mother’s and new stepdad’s friends, and I don’t know when I started to think that this might be true. But it comes off as self-deprecating, and everyone grins, then turns to gaze at my wife in the back of the room.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Tatum calls out, playing to the audience, and everyone laughs. She says this a lot to me now—Don’t sell yourself short, dream it, be it!—and I know she’s not trying to be patronizing, but it is. It’s fucking patronizing and demeaning, and even now I feel a red flare of anger rush through me. Like if she stillsawme, she’d know that I don’t need uplifting quips to get me back on track; she’d know that I’m already trying to right my train.
“OK, well, with that established,” I say, “I just want to say that I’m not necessarily wise in the ways of love. I don’t know why our dad was taken from us, and Ron, I can’t say why your wife was either. But I can only say life sometimes grants us second chances, and if they should fall upon you, if you should be lucky enough to be offered another chance at happiness, then you’d be a fool not to seize it.”
I look at Leo, with his own second chance, and he nods, grateful. I look at my mom and Ron, who are genuinely overcome with emotion: her with tears on her cheeks, him wiping them away.
“And so, I’ll ask all of you today to raise your glass to second chances. May we all be lucky enough in our lives to be granted the opportunity for love and joy and family, and when that opportunity presents itself, may we all be as smart as my mom and Ron, who refused to let life slay them when life sure as hell tried.”
Everyone raises their glasses.
“To second chances,” they all say, as Ron leans close to my mom and kisses her. Tatum meets my eyes and blinks, our old code, our old signal. She stillseesme now, like she used to, like we both used to.
“To second chances,” I say again, telling myself I won’t squander my own, whenever the opportunity arises.
14
TATUM
MARCH 2005
Piper calls with the news while I’m in hair and makeup forScrubs. It’s nothing glamorous, a guest star as a college student who comes down with shingles, but the exposure is good, and it’s another line for my résumé. SinceThe O.C., the work has been steady, though not swift, nothing so lucrative and assuring that I’ve wanted to quit P.F.Chang’s. Well, I always want to quit P.F.Chang’s, but I still take a shift now and then, and I still stop in on Thursdays to keep Mariana company or sometimes jump in for her hours if she has an audition of her own or a gig that’s come up. None of the customers recognize me, no one thinks I’m anything to double-take at. I’m not. Half the waiters have booked guest spots of their own or have made it all the way to testing for pilots. At Tisch, I was something special; in LA, I’m a slash—a bartender/actress. I have an audition next week—a period piece calledOn the Highlandsthat would shoot later in the year in Scotland—that would launch me out of the slash category, propel me into the full-time actor mode, but I’ve stopped pinning all my aspirations on every audition. There are too many nos to get invested each time.
“Pipes,” I say into my cell, holding it an inch from my cheek so I don’t mess up the shingles makeup that took two hours to perfect at six o’clock this morning. “Not the best time.”
I can tell that something’s awry before she even speaks. Maybe it’s in the way she inhales or the way that she hiccups or just the way that sisters who have been through so much together can intuit one another, even when thousands of miles apart.
“Piper,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“I know you don’t want to hear about this,” she says, her voice breaking, then dropping into a whisper. “But I don’t know who else to call.”
“You call me,” I say. “You can tell me anything.” I forget about the painstaking makeup and press the phone to my ear, like that somehow brings us closer.
“It’s Dad.”
I already know, once she has said this, why I was the one she didn’t want to call. Other children might worry about car accidents or heart attacks or some sort of unfortunate accident befalling their solitary living parent, but not me, not us. We’ve lived through this too many times.
“What did he do?” I ask. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to pick up more pieces. I want a mother who is alive and a father who is sober, and if I had to swap one for the other, my mom should be here, not him. It’s a horrible thought. I stare into the illuminated mirror in the makeup trailer and actually think this—That is a horrible thought—but it’s true, and it’s not like I haven’t thought it before. When she was going through chemo, and he coped with whiskey:It should be you, not her.When we buried her, and he showed up at our childhood home’s door, sober but not exactly put together:Why her, not you?
And now again.
