“What? Katie? No way. I was just—”
He took another hit and then started the car. “I’m not a fucking moron, Tyler. Stay away from her. I mean it.”
14
Tyler
Present Day
New York City
Arthur took me to a diner near Central Park the morning after Katie and I’d gone out for dumplings downtown. He was, I’d say, 80 percent amused I’d missed the meeting and 20 percent concerned. I’d been sober for a long time, and Arthur was, in my opinion, the perfect mix of crotchety old-timer and fun-if-not-slightly-strange great-uncle.
I’d met him the first week I moved to New York, a few months shy of my twenty-fourth birthday. He shoved a meeting directory into my hand, forced me to come to dinner with him and a few of his buddies, and then started dragging me to a psych ward in the Bronx once a month to tell shit-out-of-luck teenagers my story.
Anyway, we ordered coffee, eggs, and toast and sat in his favorite corner booth, where I asked at least fifty follow-up questions regarding Arthur’s all-of-a-sudden trip to Northern California. Arthur was what you’d call a low-bottom drunk, and while he’d won his wife back thirty years ago, things hadn’t been as simple with his daughter, who was a teenager when he got clean. He hadn’t been invited to her wedding, and he’d only met his college-boundgrandchildren twice. Yesterday, his daughter called to say the twins had been asking questions, and she wanted them to have a chance to know their grandfather before it was too late.
I really did care about this, by the way. I was legitimately ecstatic for Arthur. It was just that when he finished talking, I knew the conversation would come back to me—and that I’d have to fess up about the deal Katie and I’d struck on Monday in the park.
“What do you mean,” he said, “you guys are juststarting over?”
I fiddled with a pod of creamer. “I don’t know. I tried to do what you said—to tell her I wanted to make amends, to be willing to explain what happened without making things worse between her and her mom. But every time, she just stops me. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She gets really stiff and closed off and... I don’t know. And then, when we’re together, if I don’t think too hard about it, it’s all so easy. It’s all so natural. It feels just like it used to.”
Arthur sighed. Over the past month, his yearslong stance on my leaving Katie alone forever had softened, but his usually laser-sharp direction had too. The situation was, for lack of a better term, a total clusterfuck, and the friendlier Katie and I became, the harder it was to determine right from wrong and selfless from selfish.
“At this point,” he said, “you’re in uncharted territory. Who you date, what you want—that’s your business. I can’t tell you what to do, not anymore. You are so far beyond making all this disappear now. The amount of time you two are spending together. The dinners, the texting... It’s something, that’s for sure. But I’m not the arbiter of anybody’s sex life. You know that.”
“We’re not having sex, to be clear.”
“Yet,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not like that. You know I can’t do that. Not with her.”
Arthur gave me a knowing glance, and I winced, poking an egg around my plate. Then, after a moment, he said, “Do you want my honest opinion?”
I shrugged. I was going to get it, like it or not.
“If Katie doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s not your job to read between the lines. If she sets a boundary, respect it. But check your intentions, stay close, and keep an eye on yourself. This girl, this job... it’s a land mine. Things are going to come up. Things you thought you were over and done with. These are problems you ran from when you were a kid, and I get why you did, but you can’t sweep this shit under the rug forever. At some point, you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to forgive yourself for the choices you made, for what happened to Mikey. For the deal you struck after he died and the way you left things with Katie when you ran off to Providence. You’re going to have to stop carrying all that guilt around. You don’t need her permission to do that, and you don’t need her help. It’s your side of the street I’m concerned about.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Then Arthur dropped his sponsor scowl and said, “Is she still pretty?”
I grunted, then took a sip of my coffee.
“Annoying?” he said.
“She’s infuriating.”
“And pretty?”
“Like staring into the sun.”
Because I was a moron, I texted Katie as soon as I got home.
I slept like a baby, I wrote.I mean, only from seven a.m. to ten a.m., but still.
I’ve been told, she wrote,I have that effect on people.
