We order a pizza and watchFerris Bueller’s Day Off, Joey’s favorite, even if it’s not totally appropriate for an almost nine-year-old. He sobs when we tell him about Monster, and I realize this is the first real death he’ll remember. He was too little to recall the day we buried Leo, even though he was there, holding my hand. And my mom and Ben’s dad will always just be faces in photographs for him, stories we’ll tell.
I promise him we’ll get another puppy soon. Go to the shelter after Hawaii and bring home whichever dog he chooses. I can already hear Luann in my ear, excited about the notion of a photo op, all the ways my unselfish act for Joey can be marketed.
Joey falls asleep right when Ferris is serenading the city of Chicago. His head lolls into Ben’s lap, his arm splayed off the couch. Ben rests his palm over Joey’s chest, as if he can intuit the beats of his heart, and then laughs out loud at the screen. This was always his favorite part: the parade. The pure ridiculousness of it, the total joy and inanity of Ferris’s antics.
“Let me wake him, take him up to bed,” I whisper. “He has school tomorrow.”
“I’ll carry him,” he says. “In a few.”
I nod. Neither of us is in a rush to disrupt the bubble, false as it may be, that surrounds us.
I think of Damon, how on our first date he told me that was what I needed—to liveoutsideof my bubble, that getting out of my comfort zone could be the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s right, of course. But challenging yourself to be uncomfortable, especially when so many people think they know you, think theyseeyou, is complicated. It means that you disrupt their perception of who you are to them, and that means you disrupt your perception of who you are to yourself too.
“Hey,” I whisper again. “When we were happy, happier, do you think I had walls up? Like, do you think that as things got bigger for me, that I shut you out?”
He considers this. I watch his hand rise and fall on Joey’s chest.
“When we first met—remember in the bar?”
“Dive Inn,” I interrupt.
“At Dive Inn, I guess I thought you were the most fearless person I’d ever met. And then withRomanticah, I thought you were the best actress I’d ever seen ...”
“So the answer to my question is yes.”
“Tate, you know you do, have walls. I mean, you had to. You’reyou, the great Tatum Connelly. Of course you had to put up barriers.”
“I never cared about being famous.”
“I know.” He reaches out, touches my knee.
Joey stirs, and Ben’s hand returns to him. He gently hoists him up, wrapping our son’s limbs around him to carry him upstairs.
Ben guides Joey’s head onto his pillow, and I pull the duvet up to his chest. We watch him wordlessly for a minute, maybe two. I’m surprised to find my cheeks wet again, missing Monster, missing all of this: how easy it could be, how deeply I once loved Ben, how difficult it was to destroy it, and yet we did.
Ben sees my tears. “Do you want me to stay?”
His question catches us both off guard. I can see it in the quiet alarm behind his eyes; I can feel it in my quickened pulse as I reach for an answer. Then I remember:Amanda.
“You have a girlfriend now. You should go home to her.” I hate that I’ve said it so coldly; I hate that I mentioned her at all.
“You guys come before her,” he says.
I want to say,Of course you should stay,but his nonanswer, that we come before Amanda, is not exactly a proclamation of unrequited devotion. I don’t want to be the first one to say it, to say,Stay.Also, I have no clue whether Ben’s implying anything more than sleeping on the couch, eating a cold piece of pizza.
I say, “I have to be up early anyway. I skipped all those scripts today.” I sigh. “Shit, I have so much work to get done before Piper gets here.”
“OK,” Ben says. “I have work too.”
“Code Emergency?”
He shakes his head, plunges his hands into his pockets. “Something else.”
“Mysterious.”
“I’m stuck on the ending,” he says as we tiptoe out of the room, down the hallway and then the stairs.
“Want me to read it?”
