They were arguing about the rights of the living versus the dead. It was true, his wife had hated him, not just after he had left her but before then, too. Yet he had hoped in this small way that eventually, after they had divorced and everything had settled down, he with his new girlfriend Beverly, her with that Chinese man she had been dating recently (who had just arrived, and was now standing in the corner of the living room with his purple-haired daughter, the both of them stunned and silent), after they all had rearranged themselves into new formations, that he and Edie would be able to come back together as friends.
He had told no one this wish before, and he wasn’t even sure if he deserved her friendship, but they had created these people, Benny and Robin, and they, in turn, had created lives for themselves, and he and Edie shared those two beautiful grandchildren (even if Josh was oversensitive and Emily a little mean), and he had imagined that one day they would watch them graduate from high school, and college, and dance together at one or both of their weddings, that they would be able to sit next to each other, share the same air, laugh about things that had happened a long time ago that only they knew about, secrets just for the two of them and no one else. He had left her because she was killing herself and killing him, too. And now he was saved: He had fallen in love with a woman named Beverly, and she had fallen in love with him, too. Now he was more alive than ever, and he had wanted Edie to have the same experience, but it had been too late for her. Too late for love. And now he was the only one who knew their past. He was the only one who knew that eventually, one day, Edie would have forgiven him. He had been there with her the day her father died and held her hand and stroked her hair and taken her into his family and life when she had no one left, when she felt she was an orphan. One day he would have reminded her of this. One day she would have been in his life again.
“He didn’t kill her,” said Rachelle.
“He might as well have,” said Robin.
Upstairs, loud music began to play, a song that was played at Josh and Emily’s b’nai mitzvah just a few days before. The mourners looked even more stricken, their skin colorless, their lips grim. Music was incorrect. Benny left the room casually, but as soon as he hit the stairs, he raced up them.
“I’m an orphan now!” screeched Robin, but her words blurred within the bass of the dance music.
She’s going to regret saying that, thought Middlestein. Someday she’ll want her father again.
But she does not regret it, at least not while he’s still alive. (At his funeral, however, she is devastated. She heaves tears, Daniel’s arms locked around her shoulders, the other family members distant from her, battling their own grief.) She barely speaks to him for the next decade, and then only briefly, at family functions. Sometimes they only lock eyes across the room, and then she’ll look away, her lips crumbling with hurt, but still he treasures those moments. She ignores him at Edie’s unveiling ceremony, and at Emily’s and Josh’s birthday parties and graduation ceremonies, and even at Benny and Rachelle’s twentieth-anniversary party. She doesn’t invite him to her wedding. He only hears about it a few months after the fact, and it is an accident that it is even revealed to him. At Benny’s house he sees a picture of Robin in her wedding dress standing with bridesmaid Emily. Beverly is there with him—by then she is his wife—and she looks so devastated on his behalf that he can’t help but sob for a moment, and he has to excuse himself to the restroom, and he stays in there too long, his hands clutched to the sink counter, leaning forward, missing Edie, missing his daughter, wondering if what he had done wrong was really that terrible, and wasn’t life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy—he was nearly seventy!—and if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever. If he could do it all over, if he could have that one shot, he would have fought harder for his life with Edie, he would have fought harder for her life. No, that wasn’t true either, because there was a knock at the bathroom door: Beverly, checking up on him, gently holding his hand, his second chance, his late-in-life angel, her skin still smooth everywhere but around her eyes, her figure, her smile, her hold on him, on his heart, on his flesh. There she was. This was why he had traded one life for another.
But he was not there yet: He had only begun to regret; he had only begun to understand; he had only begun to mourn. Middlestein’s daughter was fighting with his daughter-in-law, his son was walking downstairs and then into the living room, shaking his head angrily, and his dead wife’s new boyfriend was now sobbing on his son’s living-room couch, his hands clutching his kneecaps, his daughter’s arms wrapped around his chest. The music upstairs stopped.
“She wouldn’t have wanted him here,” said Robin. “I can speak for her. I am totally correct in speaking for my mother.”