“I was never sure you really wanted to,” I say.
“I did,” he says. “When I asked you to marry me, I meant it.”
“And after?”
He runs a hand around the side of his neck. “I don’t know,” he says. “I wanted to be with you, but I wanted a lot of things. I wanted a lot for you, too, if you’ll believe that.”
“I do,” I tell him.
“So you never got married?” Robert asks. “I notice you’re not wearing a ring.”
He sits up a little straighter and does a flourish with his hands when he asks, like he’s fixing some sort of invisible tie.
“No,” Tobias says. “We didn’t.”
“You were close, though,” Robert says. His voice is sad. “It must have been so tragic. So much unfinished business.”
Tobias hangs his head. “We had set a date, yeah,” he says. “But the accident…”
“We weren’t together, exactly,” I say. “We got in a big fight, we hadn’t spoken in over a month.”
I hear Conrad’s fork clatter down on his plate. “You were broken up when he died?”
I feel the tears well up within me. I’m afraid if I speak I’ll never be able to stop crying.
“It’s okay,” Robert says. “It’s not even eleven yet.” He looks at me, and the hope on his face, the belief, splits me right down the middle. And all at once I know the thing I want to ask him, the question at the heart of the why.
“Would you want to change things if you could?” I ask Robert.
I see him weigh it in his mind. His wife, the children. The baking and bruised knees and school drop-offs. The years he filled with them.
“Yes,” he says. His voice is scratchy. It catches on the one word. “If I could make things right with you—yes.”
“Even if it would change everything?”
Robert clears his throat. “The one thing you can never rationalize is the loss of a child. Everything else. People become paraplegics and they find God. They lose all their money and they say it brought them a deeper level of peace, that they discovered what’s really important in life. I have heard people say the worst of things happened for the best. But no one ever says that about losing a child.”
Conrad makes a noise at the other end of the table. “Well,” he says, but that’s all.
I look at Robert. He’d want to go back, if he could. Undo all the life that was lived after. But that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a little girl—for him to prioritize me, for him to care, for him to return. But hearing him say it now, I know it wouldn’t be right. I’m not the only thing that mattered in his life. There was a family that needed him, too, that deserved to exist, and being my father, now, at this point, would undo all that.
Robert is looking at me with what I can only describe as love. Nervous love, timid love, love that does not know its place or where or how it will be received—but love all the same. And I think that maybe that’s enough. For now, at this table, that’s enough.
TWENTY-ONE
TOBIAS QUIT HIS JOB THE NEXT WEEK and was out of his office in three days. Not that he’d had much by way of a desk. He came home with a box filled with prints—all of which he’d brought there to begin with.
“Is Lane taking the gig?” I asked him.
“For now,” he said in that way that let me know he didn’t want to talk further about it. That was Tobias—he could be brash about things. When he made up his mind, that was that.
“That’s great,” I said. “We should celebrate.”
We went to our favorite taco place in Park Slope. We ordered margaritas and gorged on free chips and guacamole. I pulled out a box and set it on the table.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A belated birthday present,” I said. His birthday had passed with little fanfare the previous month. He had said he didn’t want a present (just a cake, a card, and me with nearly no clothes on), and I’d listened, but I’d been wanting to give him this for a while.
“Sabby,” he said. “I told you not to.”
“Still.”
He opened it. Inside was a pocket watch I had from my father. My mother had given it to me years ago—I couldn’t even remember when. It was gold, with a tiny thread of silver around the perimeter.
“I love it,” he said. He held it in his hands gently, gingerly.
“It’s also a compass,” I said. I pointed to the hands.
“In case I get lost.” He looked at me, but he wasn’t laughing.
“So you can always find your way back,” I said.
He took my palm. He kissed my fingertips. When a mariachi band started playing, Tobias held out his hand: “Dance with me?”
The restaurant was small, maybe ten tables total—and it was late, past eleven.
He pulled me in close to him. He was wearing a checkered shirt, one I knew he didn’t like, but that I loved and commented on frequently. I knew we were at a cheap taco stand, sharing an entrée and filling up on free chips. I knew we were twenty-nine and maybe too old for this, but in that moment I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. Tobias was home. It was as simple as that. The rest, I reasoned, would fall into place. Who would worry about money when you had love?
“What are you thinking?” Tobias whispered as he dipped me.
“That we should be in Mexico,” I said. “Tulum, maybe Cabo. Or the Caribbean.”
“Mmm,” Tobias said. “Tell me more.”
“You, me, the island breeze. Midnight swims.”
“And?”
“Bikinis only.”
“Sometimes not even those.”
“We could stay at one of those hotels with big canopy beds that just have curtains for doors.”
“What about bugs?” Tobias asked.
“This is paradise island, baby,” I said. “There are no bugs.”
I felt him stiffen in my arms. For a moment I didn’t get it, what had happened, and then it hit me. The vacation was fictional. He had thought I meant we should go to Mexico for real, we should take a vacation, and in that one comment I’d expressed to him that I knew we wouldn’t. We didn’t have the money; of course we wouldn’t. But he was still buying into the fantasy. The idea of but maybe, perhaps, what if?
I thought about Paul in that moment. I was ashamed I did. I thought about our trip to Portland. How we’d stayed at the Heathman like it was no big deal, eaten out at nice restaurants, and gone to two concerts, just because. We’d been to San Francisco and London, too. It was all so simple, so seamless, and not for the first time, I missed that—the type of partnership where I didn’t feel like the weight of our world was on my shoulders alone.
Two weeks passed, and then two more. Tobias busied himself with setting up the site. He was home all the time, working on his computer. He said he’d just get it up and running and then send out an announcement.
In hindsight, I should have known. Tobias was creative, passionate, extraordinarily talented, but he was missing the link—the thing that hooked that talent to a viable means of income. When he had had the job, and Wolfe before that, there had been structure, order, a system to fall into. He hated the system, but he didn’t understand that every business, no matter how creative, needs one.