It gave Markie no joy to know it, but Kyle had not risen to the occasion as a divorced dad. Instead of spending every other weekend with his son, as the parenting schedule allowed, he showed up late on the occasional Saturday or Sunday morning, took Jesse to lunch, sometimes (but rarely) adding a matinee or some other short excursion, and returned him before dinner. Most weeks, he didn’t show at all. Sometimes he texted to cancel, but not always, and Jesse had spent a lot of time standing in the driveway, a flat hand over his eyes like a visor, peering down the street for a car that never came.
“It’s just that he’s really busy right now,” Jesse would tell Markie when he gave up waiting and returned to the house. “He wanted to come, but he got caught up with something.”
The “something” changed often—Kyle was helping a buddy move or paint or put on a new roof or pave the driveway. Or he was focusing on his new job or traveling for work. Or getting ready for an interview, after he “decided to leave” his last position. The end result was always the same—another week gone by with Jesse not seeing his father.
Markie wasn’t one of those divorced women who liked to nod, self-satisfied, as she listed for herself all the ways in which her ex was disappointing their son. She and Kyle were over, but Jesse and Kyle would never be. She wanted them to have a good relationship. She wanted her son to be able to count on his father. For that to happen, though, Kyle had to become reliable—not his strong suit.
It had been endearing at first, his flightiness and the scatterbrained way he meandered through life. In college, she was his wake-up call during final exams, his external conscience when the bar beckoned more loudly to him than the library. Her friends made fun of their dynamic, calling her “little mother” and him “wayward son,” but she liked the roles they had fallen into. After a childhood of being deemed incompetent by perfection-seeking parents, it made her feel good to be the responsible one in the relationship, the person with the answers, the master plan. Plus, she assumed this must be the way of life for all beautiful people: as compensation for their good looks and charisma, they were allowed to let their far-less-captivating partner handle life’s boring details while they, unhindered by such trifling concerns, floated about, charming everyone. She was the backstage director who worked so hard to make the star shine and without whom there could be no show. She was needed. And that made her feel secure.
Marriage didn’t change things. They would plan a dinner party, and when the appointed date arrived, Markie would be dashing madly around the house getting everything ready, while Kyle, having lost interest in place settings and wine pairings, would wander off to the gym. There would be frantic calls from her, sincere apologies from him, along with a last-minute shower and change of clothes as their guests were arriving, or often after they had already come.
She would be frazzled and anxious and wondering if the entire night would be a failure, and then he would burst into the room, hair still damp, smiling and laughing and greeting their friends as though it were perfectly natural for him to make such a late entrance. Within thirty seconds of his dazzling arrival, the party would be on its way. Markie would begin the night thinking she wanted to strangle him and end it gazing at him over the candlesticks and wondering how she had been so lucky to find such a man.
In the early years, she’d refused to let it bother her. Some people were made to manage all the mundane details of life, she told herself, while the beautiful people like Kyle were meant to breathe animation into it. Markie was social enough, but she didn’t have a fraction of what Kyle had when it came to entertaining, whether it was adults for dinner or Jesse’s ten best friends for a sleepover or just the three of them at home on a weekend. She was invitations and polished silver and perfect place settings. Kyle was music and dancing and backyard bonfires and ice-cream sundaes for dinner. She could never take on his role. Why expect him to do hers?
After she had collected more years, though, along with colleagues, bosses, and neighbors, some of them rivals with Kyle in the charm-and-sex-appeal department, she realized it wasn’t a Beautiful People Thing that prevented Kyle from participating in the tedious workings of their household; it was only a Kyle Thing. And whether because of learned helplessness or advanced age or a rebellion against the unceasing demands of adulthood, it got more pronounced over time, until a formerly endearing quirkiness started to look, to Markie, like unappealing flakiness. The more she pleaded with him to act his age, the more childish he seemed to become, and over time, the “trifling minutiae” he couldn’t be bothered to invest in went beyond events of little consequence like dinner parties or parent-teacher meetings and expanded to things like work deadlines, job interviews, and commitments he made to Jesse.
The inevitable ending to which it all led—Kyle’s ignoring the bills, their budget, their wedding vows—should have been something Markie saw coming. The fact that she had ignored the warning signs was completely on her. It should also have been, she thought, the nadir to which he allowed himself to sink, at least where Jesse was concerned. But unfortunately for Jesse, his father’s rock bottom was apparently still a few fathoms away. Even an event as sobering as divorce hadn’t convinced Kyle to deflakify, and that was on him.
Since their split, she had tried a few times to get him to see things from their son’s point of view and step it up in terms of regular phone calls and showing up on time (or at all). But his response was always the same: He and the kid were doing fine. They were men. They didn’t need hours together to gab. They sent texts every few days, had the odd meal together here or there. They were good.
She told him she wasn’t so sure, that texts and calls might be enough for Kyle, but Jesse needed more from his father. She had learned, though, that there was no person in the world a man was less likely to take advice from than his ex-wife. She had the feeling that when she discussed this topic with Kyle, her words sounded to him like those of Miss Othmar, the unintelligible teacher from Peanuts.
Despite her pleas, he had not increased his visitation with his son, nor had he increased the frequency of his texts and phone calls or gotten better at showing up when he said he would. This was why Markie was pretending to read a novel on the patio one Saturday morning in late September when really she was holding her breath, squeezing her eyes shut, and saying a prayer that this time Kyle would come through.
Moments earlier, Jesse had walked down to the driveway to wait for his dad, his backpack slung over a shoulder. “See you in the morning, Mom,” he had said, not making eye contact, and Markie, relieved he wasn’t looking at her when she spoke, called up her most confident voice and told him to have a great time. She heard a car pull into the driveway, and at the same time, Mrs. Saint’s side door opened.
“Hey, Dad,” Jesse called. He said more, but Markie couldn’t make out the words. A row of shrubs between the patio and the driveway muffled the sound and blocked her view. She rose and was tiptoeing over to snoop through the branches when she heard Mrs. Saint call out behind her.