I stop and look down at my hands. I can feel the support beams in my head start to shiver under the question’s weight. I haven’t been asked to verbalize a pitch yet; we don’t really have a pitch to speak of. I try to imagine the synapses in my brain building a road, point A to point B. Question: answer. “Well, we’re thinking it’ll mostly be about my stroke. You know, my life before, my life after. How it’s changed.”
Is it a lie? Sort of. I try to negotiate with the writhing in my middle while Teddy tilts his head, continues to look at me, fingers peeling the label from his pilsner. That’s a stare. That’s a warm, interested stare. Shit. I only have so many chances to present myself honestly. So I take a deep breath and I start. Because talking to Teddy, in some way I can’t articulate, is different than talking to anyone else.
“I was in a coma for about a week,” I begin.
He folds his arms on the table and turns to me. “Wow. Okay.”
“Yeah. They weren’t sure I wasn’t going to be a vegetable when I woke up. It happened really suddenly, this blood vessel breaking in my brain, and they’re still not sure why.” I trail off, shake my head. “I was really lucky. Anyway, when I was out, Mel found this sort of log I’d been keeping in my journal of every man I had ever been infatuated with.”
“Industrious of you to write it all down.”
I nod, pinch my lips. Try to look wry, or self-effacing. Something other than what I feel, which is embarrassed, with a hearty edge of shame.
“My life before the stroke was—complicated. I had a really hard time with guys. I had intimacy problems, I guess you’d call them. Spent more time imagining the relationships than actually being in them.” I say this with difficulty. “I sort of made up stories and lived in those. Make sense?”
He nods. “I hear you.”
“But because I’m a total obsessive, I kept this log. It’s sort of embarrassing, really. But Mel found it when I was sick, and she thought it was really weird and interesting. She thinks it means something about me, the way I’m wired.” And here’s the giant white space in the middle of the story. The one that features your creepy dad. “So it’s kind of a story about me making this list, or the story will be told through this list. That’s how we might frame it. Still working it out.”
“How many guys are on this?”
“Over a hundred.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Really? Wait. Okay.” He holds his hands out in front of him. “You’ve been in a hundred relationships?”
“No. Like a tenth of those were relationships. Most of them, it’s just, like—”
“Pining from afar?”
I shrug uncomfortably. I know too well what the next natural conclusion will be: That’s a fuckload of pining. What’s wrong with you?
But he grins, big and toothy. Says, “I’m the king of pining from afar.”
I exhale, relieved. “Well, I may be competition for you, friend,” I say. “Because I spent years making this list of my little failures.”
He nods. I try to say something else, but it all falls apart. My mind blanks, my tongue seizes. I’ve got my hands in front of me, trying to sketch in the air what I mean. I let them fall, hit the table. “Talking is hard. Goddammit. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Don’t apologize.”
“I had lots of speech therapy. But there are still. Holes? Am I freaking you out? I’m freaking myself out.”
“You’re not freaking me out in the least.”
“You’re just saying that.”
He clears his throat. “Hey, Sharon? My dad raped little girls and took pictures of them tied up asleep. You, of all people, should know—my tolerance for being freaked out’s pretty high.”
We both burst out laughing. I look down at my hands. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? Stop saying that, would you?” He takes hold of my shoulder. “Hey. Really. You’ve done nothing wrong here.”
Oh, but I have. I’m getting the feeling that I’ve done something very, very wrong just by coming here. Just by making Teddy a party to whatever’s going to happen next. I clench my hands and open them. Look him in the face. “That must have been hell for you,” I say. “And I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”
“Let me tell you something my aunt Nadine told me during the court case. Okay? You ready? I want you to take these words to heart. Take them to the grave.” He leans in, puts his hands on my shoulders. Whispers, “Sugarpie, it ain’t your fault Daddy’s a kid diddler.”
I clap my hand over my mouth. Teddy grins. Mel and Tatum and Ryan stare at us. “What are you looking at,” Teddy says to them.
He gives my arm a quick squeeze, sudden and intimate. My breath catches in my throat. “In my experience, it usually makes it weirder to try to avoid the subject,” he says.
He leans in, picks up his beer. There are glints of silver right above his ears, a little gray in his stubble. Every year that has passed between then and now is in the way he sits. Mel showed me the article the night before online—Honus Caudill spent a grand total of eight months in prison before, like her mom, he was stabbed by another inmate. Child molesters, she explained, tend not to last long in Gen Pop.
“And you say there’s no rough chuckles in you,” I say.