Page 252

My stomach tightens. "What kind of questions?"

"Why I don't have kids of my own. Whether I'll be around at Christmas." He holds my gaze.

"I'm running out of ways to tell him nothing."

"I know," I say, and I do. I've known for weeks that we're running out of time, and that every dinner and every Saturday at the park makes the truth harder to explain.

"I just need a little longer. I need to know how to tell them without breaking something."

He could push. Six weeks ago, he would have. I watch him consider it, watch the argument take shape behind his eyes, and then I watch him set it down.

"Then we'll figure out how together," he says.

"But I'm going to keep asking."

"I know you will," I tell him.

Upstairs, Miles yells that Wells is using his toothbrush, and Ross pushes off the counter to settle it before I can move. I stay in the kitchen and listen to his voice on the stairs, patient and amused, and I think about how easily he has stepped into a place in this house that I spent years insisting didn't exist.

***

Dolores Park on a Sunday in the summer is half the city spread across one green hill. Picnic blankets cover the slope in every direction, music drifts from three different speakers at once, and the downtown skyline sits across the valley as though someone painted it onto the sky. Miles has wanted to come here for weeks, ever since a boy in his soccer camp told him this hill is the best place in San Francisco to kick a ball as high as you can. Ross said yes before I could come up with a reason to say no.

We claim a spot near the top, beneath one of the palm trees, and Ross spreads out the blanket while Miles bounces the ball impatiently off his knee. Ross is wearing a baseball cap pulled low, a concession to my nerves, but within ten minutes he's taken it off, because Miles keeps knocking it sideways with the ball.

"Come on," Miles says, already backing down the slope.

"You said you'd be goalie."

"I said I'd think about being goalie," Ross says.

"That's the same thing," Miles informs him.

Ross looks at me, and I wave him away. He follows Miles down the hill, and within minutes, the two of them have marked a goal with a sweatshirt and a water bottle and are arguing about whether the palm tree counts as out of bounds.

Wells stays with me. He sits cross-legged on the blanket with his book open on his knees, though I notice he hasn't turned a page since Ross left. He's watching the game. Every time Miles scores, the corner of Wells's mouth twitches, and every time Ross makes a dramatic dive and misses on purpose, Wells shakes his head in disgust at the lack of effort.

"He's letting Miles win," Wells says finally.

"Maybe a little," I say.

"He doesn't let me win at chess," Wells says.

"Would you want him to?" I ask, and Wells gives me the same look he gave Ross that first afternoon, the one that tells me I've asked something obvious.

"No," he says. He closes the book, stands, and brushes the grass off his shorts.

"But somebody should make it fair."

He jogs down the hill to join them. Ross sees him coming and doesn't say a word. He simply steps aside so Wells can take the goal and switches to Miles's team, and suddenly it's two against one, with Wells defending the sweatshirt goal as though his life depends on it.

I stay on the blanket and watch them. The sun is warm on my shoulders, and the air smells like cut grass and the sweet smoke from a vendor's cart near the path. Miles is shrieking with laughter. Wells is shouting instructions to himself. Ross is on his knees in the grass again, with a streak of dirt across his cheek and his shirt untucked, grinning at my sons in a way I've never seen him grin at anything in a boardroom or a ballroom. At my sons, I think, and then I correct myself. At our sons.

Something loosens in my chest as I watch them. For once, I let myself stop calculating. I stop measuring the distance between what we are and what I'm afraid of, and I simply look at the three of them on that hill, the tall man and the two dark-haired boys who move so much like him, and I see a family. It isn't the one I planned for, and it isn't the one I spent years telling myself we didn't need. It's just a family, laughing in the sun on a Sunday afternoon.

I'm happy. The realization is so unexpected that I almost laugh out loud.

A few blankets away, a man in a gray jacket lifts a camera with a long lens and points it in our direction. I notice him the way you notice anyone on a crowded Sunday, and I assume he's photographing the skyline, because half the people on this hill are. I hear the faint, rapid clicking of the shutter. Then Miles scores against his brother and throws both arms in the air, Ross scoops him up and spins him around, and I forget about the man with the camera completely.