I burst out laughing. “Are you really complaining because you had a private chef?”
“Grass is always greener, right? I truly think I missed out on a childhood rite of passage because I never had a cake that came out of a box.”
“I forget you were born with that silver spoon up your—”
“Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever had a proper party. My birthday was always during the school term,” Wyatt says. “I think once my mother had a cake shipped to me. From Fortnum’s. But that was because she canceled a visit to see me to go to France instead.” He shrugs. “That’s the thing about being obsessed with the past. It keeps you from having to notice the present.”
He is speaking lightly, words running like mercury, just like mine were when I didn’t really want him to look too closely at my responses. Even so, I’m reminded of who Wyatt truly is, and not what he projects into the world.
“You’re the marquess now,” I state. “So why haven’t you gone back to England?”
“Turns out being the director of an Ivy League program is a much more acceptable profession than being a fledgling Egyptologist.”
We both stare over the lip of the balcony at the cheek of the horizon, and the blush of the moon. “Your father, was he alive when you took over at Yale?”
“He was,” Wyatt says. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and cues up the voicemail. “He called me and left a message. Honestly, I think he probably had to get my number from my mother, since he’d never done that before. I didn’t answer—not because I was busy, but because I didn’t know how to have a conversation with the man.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. Never listened.”
“You—what?”
He looks down at the glowing green screen. “I couldn’t,” he says softly. “At first because I was afraid I might still be a disappointment. And then—after he died—because I was afraid that maybe Iwasn’t.”
I know how something in you changes when a parent dies. You go about the rest of your days just like you have before, pretending you are fine, knowing it is all a lie. It isn’t until you lose a parent that you become an actor in the play of your own life.
I hold out my hand. “Give it to me.”
“No,” he says.
“I’ll listen for you.”
Wyatt’s eyes widen. “Absolutelynot.”
“Why? Is this all some scam for pity? Is the message really from a restaurant in Cairo confirming your reservation on Friday at eight?”
Scowling, Wyatt passes me his phone. I press the little paused arrow and hold the phone up to my ear.
The voice is much like Wyatt’s, but deeper and grained, like old wood.I hear congratulations are in order.
A beat.
Well.
Well done.
Son.
I realize that his father could have simply left out that last word, and it would have been enough.
I hand Wyatt back the phone. “Your father wasn’t disappointed in his child,” I say. “Trust me.”
He slips it into his shirt pocket and fiddles with a button at his cuff.
“Like, how much of a not-disappointment?” Wyatt asks. “On a scale from one to Jesus?”
“You’ll just have to listen one day if you want to find out.”
