“I tried to talk myself out of coming here. I wasn’t sure I was ready to see you,” she says, and then more softly, almost apologetically, “I wasn’t sure you wanted to see me.”
“Please, Kat,” I say, trying hard to be nonchalant. “Of course I wanted to see you. It’s fantastic to see you. It’s so good to see you,” though mostly what I remember of my relationship with Kat were stolen moments in the back seat of my parents’ cars, romantic moments that were brief and hurried and filled with anything but romance, regular intervals of breaking up and making up, hurt feelings, teenage melodrama, walking around with her on my arm just for show. But still, there was something so exhilarating about being with Kat.
Even at the time I knew it wasn’t love. But it felt like love for two teenagers who’d never before been in love. And then I met Clara, and suddenly love came with a certain clarity I’d never known before.
“I have a son now,” she tells me, and I tell her I have a daughter. A wife, a daughter and a dog. And another baby on the way.
“Tell me about your son,” I say and she does. He’s the antithesis of everything his father is, she says. “You remember Steve?” she asks, and I nod and say that I do. Gus—Kat and Steve’s son—doesn’t like sports. Unlike Steve, he’s narrowly built, tall and thin and more musically inclined, the kind of kid obsessed with video games and his air guitar and Harry Potter books. That’s the way Kat describes him, and from the impression my mind forms, I like this kid already. He’s my kind of guy.
“He looks nothing like Steve. He acts nothing like Steve. He’s shy, sensitive. All Steve wants to do is teach him some basic wrestling skills, but at twelve Gus shows no interest in wrestling at all.”
Kat and Steve started dating about three days after I left for college, she tells me—he apparently swooped in just at the right time, while Kat was grieving my loss—and before she knew it, there was a baby on the way. It’s the reason she never answered my emails or returned my calls. “Steve wanted to make an honest woman out of me, and I said okay. You remember my parents,” she says, with a roll of the eye. I do remember her parents. Strict and demanding of total obedience. They scared the heck out of me. I can see why she and Steve decided to get married, but hope for her sake that she was at least in a little bit of love.
“You’re happy?” I ask, and she shrugs her shoulders and says sometimes. Sometimes she’s happy, though I have this sense that there’s so much more she wants to say.
“You?” she asks, and though there’s a part of me that thinks she wants me to say that I’m not, I say that I am. I’m happy. I have a beautiful wife and a child and another on the way. Of course I’m happy.
“I’m so glad,” she says and then she presses a warm hand to either side of my cheeks as she used to do, and forces me to see her eye to eye. “I’ve always hoped that wherever you were and whatever you were doing, you were happy.”
“I’m happy,” I say again with a smile.
And it’s then that I catch the sound of applause, of movement in my purview. It’s Jan, I’m sure, returning for the dental exam, and I half expect to see her standing there with cotton pellets in hand. Except that when my eyes cast a glance toward the doorway it’s not Jan, but rather Connor, standing there in his dental smock, clapping his hands at me. An ovation. Suddenly Kat’s hands feel like fire on my skin, and I draw back quickly and rise to my feet.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice circumspect, but also panicked. What did Connor hear, and what did Connor see?
“I have patients to see,” he says, his voice composed as he turns and parades down the hallway.
“Give me a minute,” I say to Kat, circling the end of the dental chair. “I’ll be right back,” and I leave before she can say anything. I follow Connor down the hall, calling to him, though he doesn’t stop. I jog to catch up.
I set a hand on his shoulder and force him to look at me.
“Does Clara know?” he asks and I don’t reply. He shrugs, jaw set, eyes wide. “Far be it for me to give marital advice, but I think you know as well as I do that sooner or later, the wife always finds out in the end.”
I’m speechless. I can’t reply. My mind is rattled by the fact that Kat Ables sits in the very next room. A vision floods my memories then—the last time I laid eyes on Kat—overcomplicating my thought process, Kat’s skin as a pastel painting, the spindly bones of her vertebrae as she stood, back to me, undressed save for the flimsy sheet she held around her waist like a toga, gazing over a shoulder as I left. Until next time, she’d said, and I’d replied, See ya, because it didn’t occur to me that I might never see her again, not for over twelve years when she showed up in my dental chair.
“If you don’t mind,” says Connor, drawing away, a patient file in his hands. He flips through it breezily. “I have an appointment,” he says.
“The hell you do,” I snap, feeling suddenly angry, trying to reach across him and snatch the file out of his hands. On his face is this goading look, a challenge. He’s wondering what I’m going to do about it, and whether or not I have it in me to make him leave. “You don’t work here anymore,” I say, “or have you forgotten that already?” And somehow in that moment I forget completely that there was a time that Connor and I used to be friends. I expunge from memory all those late-night confessionals over endless bottles of Labatt Blue. I cross my arms across my chest and take a step closer to him. Connor isn’t bigger than me, but he is stronger, a rock climber and a motorcyclist, the kind who believes he’s invincible and has nothing to lose.
But in this moment, I, too, have so little left to lose.
“I’d hate for Clara to find out about the blonde,” he says, but I call his bluff on this and say, “You wouldn’t.”
He assures me he would.
“I’ll give you three seconds to gather your things and leave,” I say, as the office ladies step foot into the hallway to see what the fuss is all about, “and then I’m calling the police.”
He stands there, holding his ground, hands placed on his hips. I forget about Kat in my dental chair, my wife at home, combing through endless parenting websites for the perfect baby name. I forget about horse races and basketball games, and think only of what it would feel like for my fist to connect with the side of Connor’s face. There is so much anger in me in this one single moment, so much rage I didn’t know I had.
And then I begin to count, grateful that by three he leaves, though there’s a nagging thought in the back of my brain that Connor and I aren’t through yet, and that he’s only toying with me, planning his counterplay.
CLARA
The phone in Maisie’s hand rings as we drive to the park. It’s my father, Boppy, I tell Maisie, who squeals and claps her hands in delight, handing me the phone. Boppy, Boppy, Boppy! Maisie loves her boppy. Boppy is even better than Candy Crush to Maisie.