Heart the Lover - 3

II

M y boys unleash themselves from the back, shove open their doors, and race across the dirt road to the silver slide. Their steps ring out on its metal rungs.

‘That’s old school,’ you say about the slide as we trail behind them.

Why are you here, is what I want to say.

The park is on a long finger of land that pokes into the Atlantic. The water glints and dances through the pines all around us.

Harry gets to the top first, Jack right behind him, grabbing onto his brother’s back. They drop down fast. Jack tumbles sideways off into the dirt and pulls Harry with him and they’re rolling and laughing. They’re five and seven, my boys.

You watch, shake your head. ‘That thing is way too high and way too steep. Are there no safety codes up here?’

‘I’ll have to check the paperwork on that, Mr. Cautious.’

You look at me and laugh. The boys get up from the ground and run back to climb up again. Jack makes it to the steps first.

I wait for you to say the things people like to say about Jack, about his speed, his fearlessness, how he’d soon be giving his older brother a run for his money.

‘They’re happy kids,’ you say as they slide down again.

‘You’ve been here less than two hours.’

‘I can tell. All my friends’ kids are fucked up. These ones seem okay.’

You bend down and pick up a brown pine needle off the ground. ‘God, when was the last time I saw one of these?’

As if I know.

‘Harry! Jack!’ You jog toward them. You had a runner’s body once, sharp glutes beneath the band of your gray sweats. Now it looks like things hurt. ‘Let’s climb one of these.’ You’re pointing to the pine trees behind the swings, silhouettes against the dark, sparkling ocean.

I don’t think Jack has climbed a tree yet. They look at me and I nod and they run to you. They each take a hand. Does this surprise you? Jack starts to skip. How easy they both are with you. They normally hold back with other men, men who aren’t their father.

You choose a tree. I’m stationed at its base. Up you all go. I have to lift Jack up to get his feet on the first branch and then he climbs like a spider monkey.

‘Higher?’ you say to them.

‘Higher!’ my boys chime.

There are creaks and snaps of tiny twigs and then you stop before I have to say anything and the boys climb up to where you are and stop, too.

‘Mumma, can you still see us?’ Jack says. He’s straddling a big limb, patting it like a horse. If he slips, I can easily catch him.

‘Barely,’ I say.

Your three faces are looking down on me, the bottoms of your sneakers swinging. You tell them the story about Daphne fleeing from Apollo through the woods, running, running, calling to her father the river god for help, then her arms becoming branches and her feet roots. You put your hand flat on the tree’s trunk. ‘And for a few seconds,’ you tell them, ‘Apollo can feel her heartbeat through the bark.’

The boys press their hands to the trunk, too.

A squirrel leaps from the tree next door onto a high branch, looks down, and leaps back in surprise. The three of you laugh and the tree’s needles tremble.

What do you know and why are you here?

You and the boys come down the tree.

‘My highest is eleven,’ Harry is saying.

‘What? That’s crazytown,’ you say.

‘Mine is nine and a half,’ Jack says.

‘A half?’ you say. ‘I want to see a half.’

Then you are all too far away to hear, sprinting toward the water, leaping down the little embankment of scrub grass. When you reach the wet sand the three of you slow down and start taking stooped steps, looking for flat stones.

A disheveled dog, barely bigger than a squirrel and a lot faster, starts running circles around me and yapping.

‘Fabio!’

An older woman comes across the playground with a thin leash. ‘I’m sorry. He slipped by me when I opened the car door.’

Fabio stops moving when she bends to clip on the leash. He even extends his tiny neck for her.

‘Cute dog,’ I say.

She straightens up and looks toward the water. ‘Cute kids.’

We watch the boys on the beach, their thick hair and wiry bodies. They’re showing you their rock-skimming technique, arcing back on one foot, bending low, and releasing a flat stone across the surface just the way Silas taught them. Jack jumps up and down on the sand. Harry cranks his arm around over his head. You give it a try and up comes a great holler of surprise. You bend down low for their high fives.

‘Cute dad, too,’ the woman says.

‘He’s not their dad.’ I regret how sharply I say this.

She isn’t bothered. ‘You sure?’

I laugh. The three dark heads on the beach search for more flat stones. ‘First time I’ve seen him in years.’ Twenty-one years.

‘Ah.’

‘Yeah.’

I love how fast women get things.

Another cheer from the beach. Jack takes a victory lap then waves for me to come. I give Fabio a little scrub between the ears and head to the water.

In the car on the way home the boys are sleepy. You tell me about a book you read over the winter, a novel about Iceland and sheep. Silas has parked behind your rental in our driveway, so I park on the street. Jack’s friend Otis sticks his head into the open passenger window.

‘Crater time,’ he says. Then he notices you an inch from his face. ‘Who’s this?’

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He hustles Harry and Jack out of the car and they all run to his yard next door.

‘Crater?’ you say.

‘It’s a game they made up. I think it takes place on the moon.’

On our way to the house, you stop at your rental and pull your bag out of the back. It’s the green duffel you brought to Paris. Now it’s come to Maine. The sight of it is jarring. I wish you would put it back in the car. I wish I hadn’t offered you a place to stay on your trip up the coast to see friends.

Silas and I moved up here from Massachusetts before Harry was born. We sold our tiny apartment in Cambridge for more than the price of this three-bedroom in Portland. It’s an old house, low ceilings, horsehair poking out of the plaster, the remnants of a wooden latrine in the downstairs closet.

You follow me up onto the side porch and through the door. Our dogs skitter loudly across the pine floor of the kitchen to smell you. You squat to give them your full attention.

‘Who’s this?’ you say, mimicking Otis perfectly to our bulldog Nelson, who mashes her face into yours. ‘And who’s this?’ you say to Maxie the beagle while his hard tail thwaps loudly against the rungs of a chair. You look up at me. ‘I didn’t know you had dogs.’

I shrug. Why would you?

On cue, Lupe, who was in a crouch beneath the wood stove, struts across the kitchen and presses her forehead to your knee. ‘Or a woeful cat.’ You stroke her from tip to tail. ‘Your characters never have pets.’

I don’t know what of mine you’ve read.

I take your bag and put it by the stairs.

‘Wow,’ you say, looking left into the living room. ‘It’s like walking into the Breach House.’

‘Why?’

‘It just feels like it.’

I get two beers from the fridge and get you back outside. Our house is nothing like the Breach. We sit in the two beat-up wicker chairs on our porch. You answer my questions about your work and I answer yours about mine. I barely know what I’m saying. It’s so strange you’re here, and so unnerving how familiar you are, the rhythm of your voice, the tilt of your head, the shifts of your body, the hair on your wrists, the scar on your lip. Every now and then I can hear my boys next door and their voices keep some part of me rooted. And some part of me is aware that Silas is home and hasn’t come down. The house is too small for him not to know we’re back. I wonder where he is and if it’s odd that I haven’t gone to find him and if that seems strange to you.

You tell me about a case you worked on for two years, a slam-dunk corruption suit against a school for the deaf that was extorting its students, only to have it be dismissed due to sexual misconduct by your assistant attorney. ‘He was sleeping with the head of the school,’ you say. ‘He’s still sleeping with her. I went to their wedding last month.’

I laugh and shut my eyes and wish I could keep them shut. The familiarity is too much. It goes too deep. I don’t know why you’ve come. And I can’t hear the boys anymore. Where is Silas?

I stayed in Brooklyn with Carson for a week. My oatmeal suitcase took up a quarter of her studio. When the phone rang while she was at work, I didn’t answer it. When she was home, I refused to speak to you. Carson told me you told her bullshit things about savings and timing, about how your friend in publishing had left for a job in finance, how you could write a draft of a novel on the cheap in Atlanta, which was much more affordable than New York. You tried out a Homeric allusion to the thread of fate.

‘Are you in or out?’ Carson asked.

You didn’t answer.

‘Then let her go,’ she said, and put down the phone.

I went to my mother’s in Phoenix. I was there five months. Strange to say, under the circumstances, but it was a beautiful time with her. My last long uninterrupted time with her before she died. She did not once question my decisions. I needed help and she gave it to me without hesitation. She found the agency and sat with me on their loveseat as we looked through three-ring binders of people without names or addresses, just professions, personal statements, and photographs. I chose the couple looking at each other, not at the camera. She did the classes with me. I didn’t want the drugs. When I went into labor, the only place I could look was in her eyes. ‘You are going to be okay,’ she said to me, over and over. When the baby finally came, it was my mother who said, ‘Oh sweetie, it’s a girl.’ We had an hour with her, then a proper goodbye. She was never mine. I always knew that. I could not keep her.

In my head I call her Daisy.

Sometimes she comes to me, more a feeling than a vision, a warmth, not a regret. I worry about many things, but I never worry about Daisy. Somehow I know she is well.

We sit on the porch with our beers.

‘You have a real life here, don’t you?’

‘I do. I imagine you have a real life, too.’

‘I don’t.’ You look down and rub your jeans. It makes me remember this cassette tape I had of Faulkner reading As I Lay Dying . We listened to it in your car a lot. Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. That was our favorite line. The Deep South cadence created a strong drumbeat. Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. We repeated it randomly for months. For a moment I think you’re going to say it, and maybe you are, but Silas comes up the driveway.

He’s been on a run. He often runs after work. Somehow I’d forgotten this.

He’s flushed and a little sweaty. He comes up the steps two at a time and normally we’d do some hugging and kissing and he’d try to mush me against his damp T-shirt and I’d pretend to be grossed out, but now we are self-conscious in front of you. I go for a kiss and he a hug, and my jaw hits his ear.

The two of you shake hands. You sit back down and Silas leans against the railing and asks about your drive up from Logan, and who you’re going to see up the coast.

I say I have to start dinner, and flee.

I was in grad school in Pennsylvania three years later when the phone rang late one night. ‘Ivan died,’ you said.

He had died that morning. It was impossible to hang up. I listened. Ivan had gotten an infection that tore through his intestines in a few weeks. You and Sam had been there in the hospital with him the whole time. At the end you took turns reading him Joyce. Shakespeare. Dylan Thomas.

We talked for three hours. At some point you started reading me some of those passages that you’d read to Ivan. Then you read something that made you think of me, you said. It was from Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. The narrator was remembering a goodbye he’d had with a girl named Molly at a train station. He hadn’t said goodbye properly, he hadn’t appreciated what they’d had together. It was beautiful. Full of regret. There was a line about how he’d kissed her but not as he should have. I’ve tried to find that passage in that book so many times but I never have.

You read me those lines, but you didn’t say more about them, and I didn’t ask you to. We did not speak of what blew us apart. I did not tell you about our child or that I could not write a story in grad school without a baby in it.

You called a few more times that winter. You asked if we could see each other in the spring and I said no. Oh, how I wanted to see you, that lonely winter in Pennsylvania. Those calls reawakened all the love and all the wounds. I couldn’t trust you again with my heart. I was glad when you didn’t call back.

The next year I got a poem in the mail. A poem by D. H. Lawrence copied out in blue ballpoint on yellow legal paper.

‘The elephant, the huge old beast,’ it began, ‘is slow to mate.’ They wait ‘for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse.’

I wasn’t an elephant. My heart had never been slow. I tore it up.

You and Silas stay on the porch. I’m glad to have the kitchen to myself, glad for a break from your unsound observations. The Breach was fussy, grandmotherly, frozen in 1957. Our house full of children and animals is nothing like that. Silas is laughing. He’ll be indifferent to your scrutiny of him. He might notice it, but he won’t take interest in the verdict. Once, as we were leaving the house after dinner with a couple we didn’t know well, we heard one of them say through an open window, ‘Well, what’d you think of that?’ I slowed to hear the response, and Silas tugged me down the driveway. He did not want to know.

Your conversation sounds animated, from what reaches me through the screen door. I season the chicken legs and put them in under the broiler. I trim the asparagus, drop them into the steamer. I see you come in and go through the living room to the bathroom. On your way out you stop in the doorway and ask if I need help. I send you back to the porch with another beer. Setting the table, I can hear you two talking about The Invisible Man . You must have asked Silas what he was teaching in the fall. I call to Silas to round up the boys from next door and you both go across the yard. You come back all together ten minutes later, Harry and Jack explaining the rules of Crater to you.

‘But why can’t you go in and get the three rocks and win right at the start?’ you say.

‘Because only one side knows where the crater is.’

Your eyes widen. ‘The crater changes locations?’

‘Yes!’

‘And size?’

‘Yes!’

‘Genius,’ you say.

We sit at the table, you between the boys. Jack’s feet knock against his chair in excitement. He likes you.

‘Look at this feast,’ you say. ‘Do you get this every night?’

‘Yup,’ Harry says.

I had enough time while everyone was across the street to make some hollandaise.

Jack passes you the little bowl of it. ‘You have to try this. It’s really excellent.’

You smile at me for this praise. You know my sauces—I learned them all in Paris. Without testing it, you pour the hollandaise over everything and that makes them all laugh. You start cutting up your chicken and I know exactly how you’ll eat it, fork in your left hand, chicken, asparagus, and hollandaise all piled up on the back of it.

For a few minutes there’s only the scrape and clash of silverware on dinner plates. They all eat like jackals, not just you.

‘Why is there a photograph of Crested Butte in the bathroom?’ you ask. ‘Are you from there?’

Silas smiles and shakes his head.

‘Papa asked her on a date,’ Harry says, ‘but he drove to Crested Butte instead.’

‘Really?’

‘Then he sent her that postcard and she forgave him.’

‘All it took was a postcard?’

‘Yeah, and it’s mostly about a dog he saw in a store.’

‘Wow.’

‘Are you married?’ Jack asks.

‘No sir, I am not,’ you say.

‘Do you have a significant other?’ Harry asks, a term he’s just learned.

‘Not at this moment.’ You take another bite. ‘But do you know what happened to me on a date once?’

The boys shake their heads eagerly.

I can’t imagine what he’s about to tell them about a date.

‘Well. I went out with this perfectly nice lady. We had a very nice dinner, at the end of which I asked if she would like to visit the bookstore across the street—a large chain, not the kind of cozy bookshop you have in these parts. She was amenable and off we went. And right there as we entered the store was a display table with piles and piles of one book and beside these piles was a life-size poster of . . . Guess who?’ After a few seconds you tip your head my way.

‘Mumma?’ Harry says.

‘This is not a true story,’ I say.

‘It is a true story. You’d just won that prize. And my date says, “Oh, I loved that book. ” ’

‘Maybe there was a little photocopied flyer.’

‘Life-size poster.’

‘Did you tell her?’ Jack said.

‘That I knew your mother? No. I was speechless.’

‘Did you go out with her again?’

‘Never saw her after that night.’

‘Do you have a job?’ Harry asks.

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s very, very boring.’

They think this is very funny.

‘But what do you do?’

‘I litigate.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I spend months and years sometimes trying to prove in a court of law that one plus one equals two, and most of the time at the end of it all a judge will say, no, I’m sorry, one plus one equals three and a half.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just the way the law works.’

‘We’re about to lose one of our best teachers to law school,’ Silas says. ‘Maybe you could come convince her that her lousy salary is actually a blessing in disguise?’

‘Gladly. Though law school was a blast. It’s what comes after it that’s unpleasant.’

When we’re finished, the boys clear the dishes and Silas gets out ice cream and a strawberry rhubarb pie he must have bought with the asparagus. The boys are surprised by the dessert. I smile at Silas. It’s a sweet, special-occasion gesture.

Harry eats his quickly. He likes to draw after dinner. It’s part of our ritual. Then Jack will choose a game.

You watch him across the table. ‘Clearly Harry’s going to be an artist.’ You turn to Jack. ‘What about you, peanut?’

‘Olympic athlete.’

‘Which event?’

‘I haven’t narrowed that down yet.’

You laugh at how he says this. ‘Well, you still have some time.’

I watch Harry draw a tree. Somehow he knows about shading. He’s filling in the trunk now, making shadows. I bend closer. He’s drawn a face just below where the branches split.

‘What’s her name?’ he asks without looking up.

‘Daphne,’ I say.

Jack leans over you to see the drawing. ‘That is so cool.’

Harry tears it out of his sketchbook and hands it to you. ‘You can have it if you want.’

‘Really?’ You look down at the drawing. I see your old face briefly, when it was more expressive, full of feeling. Your new face is guarded, slower to react. ‘Thank you.’

It is perhaps as confusing for you to be here as it is for me.

Jack takes our bowls to the sink and puts a deck of cards on the table. ‘What are we playing?’

‘Do you mind?’ I say to you.

‘No. Cards are great,’ you say. I can tell you haven’t played a card game in a long time.

Jack shuffles and you laugh as his small hands split, riffle, and bridge the deck back together. ‘Only a child of yours could do that so young,’ you say.

We’ve been in a Rummy 500 phase all summer so it’s a surprise when Jack says, ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster?’

‘No,’ Harry says. ‘It takes too long to teach.’

‘You can make a chart,’ Jack says.

‘I know how to play,’ you say.

The boys don’t believe you. No one outside our family has ever heard of this game. You insist that you do, and they tell you to prove it by naming a whole family.

You smile. You love a challenge to your memory. ‘All right.’ You look at Silas. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster.’

The boys nod.

You look at me. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s wife.’ You nodded at Harry. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s eldest son.’ You turn to Jack. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s ten children.’ You glance over at the dogs, asleep on the couches beyond the wood stove. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s nine servants.’ The boys laugh. You pause. You look around for the cat but she’s vanished. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s parrot.’

‘No!’ The boys shake their heads furiously.

‘You always forget the donkey,’ I say.

You grin at me. ‘I do. I always forget the donkey.’ I can’t help smiling back. ‘Okay. The donkey, the parrot, the twins, and the baby!’

‘How does he know?’ Harry asks me.

‘Our friend Ivan taught it to us. Many years ago.’

‘I didn’t know it came from Ivan,’ Silas says.

Harry can’t understand this, these years before him, before our family existed. He looks at Silas. ‘You weren’t there?’

Silas shakes his head. ‘I didn’t know them then.’

Jack, dealing out the cards, is taking in this information easily, but Harry looks like he would like to go up to his room and mull over questions of time and existence for a few hours.

We fan out our cards. Silas keeps his low, close to the table. He’s started to do that lately, hold things farther away to read them. You’re making the little humming noises you always make when organizing your hand.

‘You’re left of the dealer,’ Jack tells you.

‘Oh, excuse me. Silas?’ I could tell you were up to a little mischief.

‘Yes.’

‘May I please have Heart the Lover?’

‘Yes, you may.’ Silas passes the king of hearts face up, close to you, trying to get you to touch it before saying thank you.

‘I thought you might,’ you say and reach for the card and we get ready to scream. A half inch before you touch it you say, ‘Thank you,’ and pick up the king with a flourish that makes the boys laugh. ‘Silas,’ you continue.

‘Yes.’

‘May I please have Heart the Lover’s wife?’

‘No, you may not.’

‘Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying,’ he says.

Silas and I chuckle and Harry asks why that was funny and now I’m the one who wants to go upstairs to ponder time and existence for a while.

I lose twice. I don’t keep track of what people have. Jack is dismayed by my poor performance. He and Harry, flushed and hoarse from the yelling, beg for another round, but Silas tells them to say their goodnights. They stand up reluctantly. I hug them tight and kiss their steamy hair. You stand up and say you’ll be off early in the morning and might not see them and they both wrap their arms around your waist. Silas says he might miss you, too, as he has to be at school at seven tomorrow.

‘Great meeting you after all this time,’ Silas says and gives you a loose hug and a few pats.

I don’t want them to go upstairs but they do.

‘Good guy,’ you say.

‘Yeah. He is.’ I go to put the kettle on. ‘Tea?’

‘Sure.’

You lean your back against the kitchen counter as we wait for the water to boil. I feel a bit giddy from the game and terrified to be alone with you.

‘Does he maybe look a little like Sam?’

‘Seriously?’

‘In the face? Around the mouth maybe?’ You push your lips together with your fingers.

‘No. Stop.’

My alarm amuses you.

‘Good lord.’ I get mugs from the shelf, boxes of tea from the cabinet. I need to redirect things. ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’

‘Like a shrink?’

‘Like a person.’

‘No shrink. No woman. No cry.’ You smile at your little joke.

On one of our first dates Silas told me when he was younger he thought it was ‘No Woman, No Crime.’

‘No dating?’

‘I participate in the courting ritual from time to time.’ You choose a teabag and a mug. ‘It’s scary out there, now that I have this profession. Women like a guy with a job. They love a worker bee. It’s like they see the pollen on my legs.’ He brushes his pants with both hands. ‘But what else am I going to do with my time? All my friends have disappeared into their houses. I only see them if I get invited to the sidelines of one of their kids’ soccer games. What is it with soccer? It’s so fucked up.’

I tap the photo of Jack’s peewee team on the fridge.

‘Et tu, Brute?’ you say.

We take our teas to the couches in the family room. You sit on one and I sit on the other. The dogs follow us in and jump up beside you. You look to the wall of bookshelves Silas and the boys built earlier in the summer.

‘I didn’t picture you living in a house.’

‘I know. It’s weird.’

‘After all those tiny rooms. Your room on Pye Street?’

All bed, you once said.

‘And that little closet in Paris?’

‘Chambre de bonne,’ I say.

‘Chambre de merde, didn’t we call it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I can’t believe you don’t see the similarities to the Breach. That radiator.’ You point to our big black radiator in the corner. ‘We had the same one. Remember? In the hallway across from the bathroom.’

‘It’s a radiator.’

‘And the moldings on your doorways, with the circles at the top corners? Same.’

I don’t remember the moldings.

‘It’s uncanny.’

I picture you going back to Atlanta and telling this to Sam. It’s uncanny. She’s re-created the Breach in Maine right down to the moldings.

‘I haven’t lived in a house since then,’ you say.

‘You have. MacDougal Street.’

‘That was just a room. It didn’t feel like a house.’

‘You should rent one, then. Or buy one. Worker bees buy houses.’

‘What would I do with a whole house? It would only make me feel lonelier.’

‘What about Sam? You must see him a lot.’

‘Sam is busy procreating like the rest of you.’

You get up to look more closely at our books.

You have no idea. My body relaxes slightly. I thought perhaps that’s why you’d come.

Silas thinks I should tell you. And here is my chance, right here. For a long time I said nothing out of anger. I punished you with the only weapon I had, silence. Now I feel like I would hurt you more by telling you. You don’t seem strong enough for it somehow.

You study all the books by Churchill—the histories, the memoirs, the letters, the speeches, the poetry—for a long time and make no comment.

On a table beside the shelves are a few framed photo­graphs. You lift up the one of my mother.

‘Silas said she died. I didn’t know that.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Not that long.’

‘Nine and a half years.’

‘He said it was sudden.’

‘It was. She went to Chile on vacation and she came back crumbled up in a box.’

He winces at this. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I know she would have liked the quick painless exit. It was definitely her style. But selfishly I wanted a goodbye. A real goodbye.’

I took that photo of my mother. She’s on her deck in Phoenix, squinting in the sun, waving a hand at the camera. At the edge of the picture, on the chair beside hers, is the lumbar cushion she’d bought me for the back pain I had during the last trimester.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ you say in nearly a whisper.

‘When?’

‘When your mother died.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I guess you’d met Silas by then.’

‘I met him six months later. I was a wreck. But he understood.’

‘I wish you’d called me.’

Above us I can hear Silas and the boys, their bedtime noises, bickering, giggling. One of us tells them a story every night. Silas has a long-running tale of two hedgehogs. This week they have been stuck on an ice floe in Antarctica.

I see you struggling to say something, another reproach I really don’t want to hear. ‘I think Silas needs a closer up there. I better go sing some songs to settle them a bit.’

You nod. You understand I’m cutting you off.

‘Your room’s the first one on the left. Twin bed. Yellow bedspread. Just kidding—it’s blue.’

Early the next morning, before anyone else is up, we eat a bowl of cereal and I walk you out to your car. You open the trunk and hand me a book, the one you talked about yesterday, about Iceland and sheep.

I thank you. We hug. You get into your car.

When you roll down the window, I say, ‘Drive safely.’

‘You know I will.’

We look at each other a bit warily.

Why did you come?

You wait for me to say something else and when I don’t, you lift your fingers briefly off the steering wheel and back out of our driveway. I follow you in bare feet and wave in the road until you’re gone, then walk back to the house.

I sit on the porch steps and look at the paperback you gave me. It’s your copy, a bit worn, the pages swollen, the cover starting to curl back. There’s a scrap of paper wedged in the middle of it. I pull it out. It’s not addressed to me or anyone. It’s just a paragraph. But I recognize it immediately. It’s the Céline passage you read me that time. I don’t know if you meant for me to see it. The handwriting is messier than in your letters.

I read it.

We kissed. But I didn’t kiss her properly as I should have, on my knees if the truth be known. I was always partly thinking about something else at the same time, about not wasting time and tenderness, as if I wanted to keep them for something magnificent, something sublime, for later, but not for Molly and not for this particular kiss.

It goes on about his fear that life would steal away in the night with everything he longed to know about it, while he was expending his passion kissing Molly.

I wouldn’t have enough left, I’d have lost everything for want of strength, and life—Life, the true mistress of all real men—would have tricked me as it tricks everyone else.

I read it over several times. You have your regrets and I have mine. I sit on the porch step for a while, thinking about life’s tricks, the ones we see, the ones we don’t.

Silas’ car comes in the driveway. He gets out holding a pint of blueberries, adorable in his short-sleeved work shirt.

‘What about your meeting?’

‘It was moved to later. Blake came in with these from his farm and I got this craving for pancakes.’

‘The boys will be ecstatic.’

He looks down at the book and the paper in my hand. ‘He’s gone?’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Good guy.’

‘That’s what he said about you.’

‘I liked him,’ Silas says. ‘You didn’t—’

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Someday.’

‘Someday. Maybe.’

He puts out his hand and I take it. He pulls me up to standing and we go inside to make the pancakes.