“Brings you by, Rachel?”
She never knew how much Brian had told anyone about her condition. He’d said he didn’t mention it, but she figured he had to tell someone, if only after a few drinks. They had to wonder at some point why Rachel hadn’t been able to join them at this party or that, why she’d skipped out on the Fourth of July fireworks with everyone last year at the Esplanade, why they rarely saw her out at the bars. Someone as bright as Caleb would have realized at some point that the only time he saw Rachel was in controlled environments (usually the condo) with small groups. But did Caleb know she hadn’t driven a car in two years? Hadn’t taken the subway in almost as long prior to this past Saturday? Did he know she once froze in the food court of the Prudential Center Mall, that she’d had to sit, surrounded by well-meaning security personnel, short of breath and certain she’d pass out, until Brian arrived to take her home?
“I was shopping in the ’hood.” She gestured toward the square.
He looked at her empty hands.
“Couldn’t find a thing,” she said. “Turned into a browse day.” She squinted through the mist at the building behind him. “Thought I’d take a look at the competition for my husband’s attentions.”
He smiled. “Want to come up?”
“I’ll just pop into his office to . . .”
“He left something in his drawer that he . . .”
“So this is his command center. Mind if I just hang out here for a bit? You can close the door behind you.”
“Did you remodel?” she said.
“Nope.”
“Then there’s nothing I need to see. Just thought I’d stroll by before I headed home.”
He nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “Want to share a cab?”
“That’d be great.”
They walked back up Winthrop and crossed JFK. It was close to five and the traffic heading into Harvard Square had clotted. To catch a cab heading out of the square, their best chance was to walk a block to the Charles Hotel. But what had been a flat pewter sky just a minute before had turned swollen and black.
“That’s not good,” Caleb said.
“I wouldn’t think so, no.”
They came to the end of Winthrop and could see from there that the cab stand in front of the Charles was empty. The traffic snaking toward the river was as bad as, if not worse than, the traffic heading into the square.
The black above rumbled. A few miles to the west, a bolt of lightning split the sky.
“A drink?” Caleb said.
“Or two,” she said as the sky opened. “Jesus.”
The umbrellas were poor protection once the wind kicked in. The rain fell with weight and clatter, the drops exploding off the pavement as they ran back up Winthrop. It sliced in from the right and the left, the front and the back.
“Grendel’s or Shay’s?” Caleb said.
She could see Shay’s on the other side of JFK. Close, but still another fifty yards in the rain. And if traffic moved, they’d have to work their way to a crosswalk. Grendel’s, on the other hand, was just to their left.
“Grendel’s.”
“Good choice. We’re too old for Shay’s anyway.”
In the vestibule, they added their umbrellas to the dozen or so already leaning against the wall. They removed their coats and Caleb took off his Sox cap, which had soaked through. His brown hair was cut so tight to his scalp he freed it of moisture by swiping his palm across it. They found a place to hang their coats by the hostess stand and were led to a table. Grendel’s Den was a basement-level place and they ordered their first round as shoes of every variety ran past on the cobblestones outside. Soon the rain had grown so heavy no one ran past.
Grendel’s had been around so long that not only could Rachel recall being turned away from the door with a fake ID in the nineties, but her mother had recalled frequenting the place in the early seventies. It catered mostly to Harvard students and faculty. Out-of-towners tended to wander in only on summer days when management placed tables out front by the green.
The waitress brought a wine for Rachel and a bourbon for Caleb and left menus. Caleb used his napkin to blot his face and neck dry.
They both chuckled a few times without saying anything. It could be years before they saw rain like this again.
“How’s the baby?” she asked.
He beamed. “She’s magical. I mean, for the first ninety days, their eyes don’t really lock onto anything besides the breast and the mother’s face, so I was starting to feel left out. But on that ninety-first day? AB looked right at me and I was a goner.”
Caleb and Haya had named their six-month-old Annabelle but Caleb had been referring to her as AB since the second week of her life.
“Well”—Caleb raised his glass—“cheers.”
She met his glass with her own. “To dodging pneumonia.”
“We hope,” he said.
They drank.
“How’s Haya?”
“She’s good.” Caleb nodded. “Real good. Loves being a mom.”
“How’s her English coming?”
“She watches a ton of TV. It really helps. You can have a solid conversation with her now if you have a little patience. She’s very . . . deliberate about choosing her words.”
Caleb had returned from a trip to Japan with Haya. He spoke halting Japanese; she spoke barely any English. They were married within three months. Brian didn’t like it. Caleb wasn’t the settling-down type, he’d say. And what were they going to talk about over the dinner table?
Rachel had to admit that it colored her opinion of Caleb when he introduced her to the luminous, mostly mute, subservient woman with the kind of face and body that could launch a thousand wet dreams. What else had bound him to her, if not that and that alone? And was the master-servant vibe she got when she saw them together an outgrowth of some hidden he-man fantasy he’d always secretly pursued? Or was Rachel just being bitchy because it hadn’t escaped her notice that while Caleb had married a woman who didn’t speak English, his partner Brian had married a shut-in?
When she brought that up to Brian, he said, “It’s different with us.”
“How?”
“You’re not a shut-in.”
“I beg to differ.”
“You’re just going through a phase. You’ll rebound. But him? Having a kid? The fuck’s that all about? He is a kid.”
“Why’s it bother you so much?”
“It doesn’t bother me ‘so much,’” he said. “It’s just not the right time in his life.”
“How did they meet?” she said.
“You know the story. He went to Japan on a deal and came back with her. Didn’t come back with the deal, by the way. He got undercut by some—”
“But how does he just ‘come back’ with a Japanese citizen? I mean, there are immigration laws designed to keep people from just popping into our country and deciding to stay.”