“Sorry about that. I’m in my office now. Don’t want Leslie to overhear this.”
“Dad, on second thought, we don’t have to talk about this. It’s probably none of my business—” I flip through one of the albums, fixating on a school picture of me in the first grade, my front tooth missing, the freckles on my nose pronounced from the summer sun.
“Actually I think we should discuss it. I know your mom has always had ideas in her head about why I left.” I hear him take a drink of his beer. “I know she’s always felt I left her for Leslie—that I was having an affair with her.”
The word affair hangs between us, like a chime dangling in the air, silent until a gust of wind blows it and causes it to release a musical sound. I chew my lower lip, removing a photo of my mom and dad from behind the plastic in the album, one taken on their wedding day, the picture sticking slightly to the backing as I pull it out. My mom’s dress is ivory, with an antique lace overlay, her hair swept up in a bun with loose curls falling around her face. She has her arms wrapped around my dad’s neck, kicking her leg up behind her. My dad’s tie is loose and he is leaning his head toward her, his eyes closed.
“Kate? You still there?” my dad asks, his usually sturdy voice sounding weak.
“Yes,” I answer as I turn the picture over in my hand. My mom had written: The end of a perfect day but the beginning of a perfect life.
I think of Jules. I thought she’d been in a perfect marriage too. And I was engaged to be married to a guy I had always thought was perfect for me. How do we know the difference between what’s real and what we tell ourselves is real? Did perfection even exist? Or maybe it was just a very dangerous notion, one that we can only see in others’ lives, but never in our own.
“Kate . . . I didn’t have an affair.”
“Then what happened?”
“Sweetheart, there is no one answer to that question,” my dad says, and I hear ice cubes hitting a glass. I imagine him now mixing a drink in the bar in his office. “We just grew apart.”
“Then why doesn’t Mom see it that way? Why is she still so . . .” I pause, choosing my next word carefully. “. . . stuck?” I finally say.
“I’m probably to blame for that.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t give her a whole lot of warning, Kate. I said we grew apart, but maybe what I should’ve said is I changed.” He takes a breath. “By the time I came to her and talked to her about how I was feeling, it was already too late—something inside of me had shifted. I wasn’t the twenty-four-year-old man she married anymore and I needed to figure out who I was, and I didn’t feel like I could do that with her. That’s the thing people don’t realize about the forever part of marriage—you’re going to change, and if the other person doesn’t adapt, things can go sideways pretty quickly.”
“So then why did you get married again right away?” I ask, knowing that’s the sticking point, the thing my mom can’t accept. That my dad pulled away in that U-Haul intending to go find himself, but instead he found the woman of his dreams.
“I know your mom has always thought I had an affair because of the timing, but like I told her back then, I didn’t know Leslie before I moved out. I met her after. Believe me, another relationship was the last thing I was looking for—but it just happened. Life is short, and when you meet someone who makes you as happy as Leslie makes me, well, let’s just say everything else seems to fade away,” he says.
Was my love for Max so strong that the rest of the world stopped when we were together? Yes, I had come back in time for him. But maybe it wasn’t because nothing else mattered to me but my love for him—maybe I just couldn’t bear being left alone.
“If you could do it all over again, would you still have married Mom?” I ask.
“Of course—because we had you. But, Kate, even if I had the opportunity, I wouldn’t want to rewrite the history of my life.”
“Not even if you were given the chance to go back in time and change anything? You wouldn’t?”
“Nope. Sometimes your mistakes turn out to be your biggest blessings—so you can’t live your life second-guessing every choice you make.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you’re really not living it at all.”
I consider my dad’s words as I place the wedding photo back in the album.