That was the most shameful part of it all. He couldn’t hide his anger, nor could he allow it to rain down upon them when they were facing things so bravely on their own. He couldn’t remain a part of their lives, couldn’t even look them in the eye. The guilt was going to eat him alive no matter what, he could already see that. But he deserved a slow, agonizing death by guilt—anything quicker would be too kind. And staying in touch with them would only speed the process.
So he had accepted Caitlin and George’s offer to move in here. Those first weeks, George was overseas for work, and Caitlin came by almost every day—after work on weekdays, and then on weekend afternoons, too, after she’d run all her errands. He sometimes wondered if she didn’t have something better to be doing, some other friend to spend time with. Then again, he didn’t exactly have room to talk. She’d dish up takeout for two, uninvited at the kitchen table. She’d uncork bottles of wine he didn’t feel like drinking. She’d bring DVDs from her classic movies collection, pop them into his player, and deliver commentary the whole way through. He thanked her for the food but ate in silence, he drank the wine without tasting it, and he developed a fondness for the black-and-white starlets from a different era, though he never let on that he did. When the films were over, Caitlin would simply eject the disks, wash out the popcorn bowl by hand, bid him good night, and walk home. Despite his lack of talkativeness and the absence of any outward appreciation for her presence, she kept coming.
It was a new experience, sharing space with Caitlin without the two of them engaging in an unannounced, unjudged competition to see who could be the most clever or the biggest smart-ass. Sure, she’d been there for him after his parents died, but that had been more of a distract-him-from-the-sadness approach, whereby she dragged him to parties and he feigned having fun until eventually the feigning stopped. Never—not back then or any other time—had they spent so much time together and said so little. Finn was amazed that she wasn’t growing sick of his melancholy. And then he began to question if she was really coming just for his sake after all. He’d never before considered that it might be lonely being married to someone like George. And when he stopped viewing her visits as sympathy calls, Finn found that he started looking forward to them rather than dreading them. It seemed as if everyone else in his life had disappeared along with Maribel. He knew he might have pushed them away—but they’d let him, easily. They hadn’t pushed back. But Caitlin had. The silence between them become companionable.
One day, she brought him a listing for a graphic design job with a wedding photographer who had a storefront down the block. “I know the idea of spending your days surrounded by photos of happy couples must be appalling,” she said, raising her arms in a don’t-shoot-the-messenger gesture. “The thing is, though, happy couples are suckers. They pay through the nose for this stuff.”
The salary was ridiculously high compared to the difficulty of the work. The owner wanted someone to design marketing materials for his expanding business, and to lay out custom albums for his customers. The hours were flexible. And Finn could practically throw a rock from his porch and hit the place—an advantage that could not be discounted, as he still had no car to drive and public transport here was minimally serviceable. He owed it to Caitlin to at least go to the interview. He was going to have to start paying rent eventually. It wasn’t whether or not George could afford to carry him, it was the principle.
So he had taken the miserable job, airbrushing the happiest days of other people’s lives, putting things in order for them, laying everything out on the pages of their albums to remind them of better days when times got tough. And they would—Finn wasn’t far gone enough to imagine their lives would be perfect—but at least they’d have each other, for the foreseeable future.
The pitfalls of the job were outweighed not only by the paycheck but also by the fact that it met his lone requirement, which happened to be at odds with his line of work and overall skill set: It required no creativity whatsoever. He could no longer have conjured his imagination even if he’d tried. At five o’clock sharp, he would walk home and sit on the wraparound porch with a beer, slouched down as if he could blend into the painted wood behind him. Winter was coming, but he hardly felt the cold. Usually, he had the whole big house to himself, though occasionally the sound of an acoustic guitar would drift faintly down from the free spirits upstairs if they weren’t working one of their odd-hour, odd-job shifts. He’d watch people walk by—to and from the nearby sports bar, the cafés, the drugstore, the wine cellar—and feel both more and less lonely. They’d stroll past with their dogs or their drinking buddies or their reusable shopping bags or their steaming carriers of takeout, and their laughter looked like a luxury. He wished to be any of them, anyone but him.
Finn went into the spare bedroom, where he’d left his button-down cooling on the ironing board. Even this apartment was much too big for only him—it made his head shake if he let himself think too hard about the fact that this was only a third of the building that Caitlin and George had mortgaged for no reason other than to make their own house look better. He alone had three bedrooms and two baths. But who was he to point fingers at their excess? It was keeping a roof over his head. They’d reluctantly agreed to let him start paying rent, but it was way below what they could surely get for this space, Finn knew. He didn’t have the energy to argue. He was happy to be giving them something so it didn’t feel like a handout, but he knew George’s pity wouldn’t go away anytime soon.
Finn and Caitlin had reached this easy balance, talking but not talking, passing time together without consciously spending the time together. But it was a few months in now, and he’d still barely seen George, who had been closing some kind of big-deal acquisition. It was finally done, and he’d be around more now—not all the time, but definitely more. Hence the dinner invitation. This one had come from George himself, standing in his driveway, volleying with Finn across the lawns about the UC Bearcats’ season. And that had made it harder to decline.
Finn carried the shirt back to his bedroom, where he stepped into his nicest pair of dark jeans and laced up his suede Vans. Though he already knew he was going to feel underdressed, he worried that dressing up any more would make him look like a teenage delinquent summoned to the headmaster’s office for a chat. He grabbed a bouquet of flowers he’d had the presence of mind to pick up, and without bothering to lock the door behind him, headed across the lawn.