We only really talk about the pictures one more time.
“I’m struggling with it,” he tells me. We are driving out into the country. It’s an unanticipated warm night, close to seventy degrees. He wants to show me an abandoned farmhouse that he loves close to the Indiana state line.
I ask how he’s struggling.
“With the decision I made to show you those,” he says. “It’s a responsibility thing. I am responsible for exposing you to it. You said it yourself. Just remembering it was traumatic for you.”
“You were eleven,” I say. “Eleven-year-olds do not make decisions. In no way were you responsible.”
“I disagree.” He flicks a look over at me before returning to the road. He likes these conversations, the long, winding philosophical disagreements. “Eleven-year-olds make life-changing decisions all the time. They have all the weight and responsibility of any other human being.”
“Those decisions are uninformed. Or they’re informed by what’s in front of them. Eleven-year-olds have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.”
“I know several people who have always been their own decision makers,” he says. “From three feet high on. Present company included.”
“Well, I’ve made some pretty shit decisions,” I say. “So.”
“I shared an incredible burden with you,” he says slowly, “forced it on you, actually. And I’m having a hard time forgiving myself.”
He’s silent for a moment. It’s dark. The hills are beginning to roll larger, giving our car the feeling of a boat on smooth and even waves. A college station is spinning an entire Wilco album we’ve discovered we both adored years ago, a soft song with a sweet radioed buzz, falling in and out of frequency. Distance has no way of making love understandable.
Suddenly there’s a crack in the sky, a flash of pale orange light tearing down the horizon to the ground. “Heat lightning,” Teddy says wonderingly.
I love this life. I love being in the safe, shadowy cell of this car, speeding by farmhouses spiked with the warm yellow of interior lamps. I can’t remember the last time I felt such gratitude for what I have. I can’t remember the last time I felt so lucky to be right where I was.
I reach over and take his hand.
—
We all get together on Friday nights for dinner, Mel and the boys toting plastic bags from Kroger up the stairs and filling the kitchen with noise and flour dusting and splashes of tomato sauce everywhere, seemingly, whether or not the recipe calls for tomato at all. They kill a couple of six-packs while they cook and everyone’s drunk by the time we sit down to eat. The meals are big, hot, yeasty affairs: homemade Sicilian pizza, frittata, meatloaf. Tatum makes dessert for every production, assembling it at home in a cast-iron skillet or an old-school blue-and-white Corningware dish. They are touchingly exquisite. A flaky apple pie so good it would have made Kent rip his hair out. Layered baklava that leaves us all sucking honey and olive oil from our fingers for two sweet days. “That’s our lil treasure,” Mel says, corking a wet willie into his ear. Tatum and Ryan follow Mel around the kitchen, deferring to her, looking to her approval for jokes, opinions, even the way they harass each other. Mel’s always had disciples, the most striking of the New York followers being Fart—big, burly guys with a certain amount of social anxiety—but these two are a package deal, and she is good to them. We watch movies after dinner and I usually fall asleep on Teddy’s lap, awake to him shaking me, saying, “Sweetheart, everyone’s leaving,” Mel and Tatum and Ryan behind him, bundled into winter coats, giggling at each other, cigarettes tucked behind their ears.
Mel and I both put on some weight. Our cheeks fill out and bloom up red. We’re more polite, suddenly remembering all the staples of social nicety that New York makes you forget—opening doors for people, saying please, making brief, nonthreatening eye contact.
And our project, slowly but surely, is beginning to pick up. “See?” I tell her. “It’s good, being here. We could live here. We could live here, and it could be great.”
She shrugs, peering at the storyboard, glasses pushed up to rest on her head. “Maybe,” she says.
—
The heat wave stretches into the week after Thanksgiving. Teddy and I eat dinner at a Cuban restaurant downtown and walk along the edge of the Ohio River after, dark and rocky, skyscrapers looming behind us. We have been in Louisville for almost a month. Our studio will be vacant after Christmas. I’m trying not to think about whatever comes after this—after this walk, after this week.
“This is what makes me love Louisville,” he says. “This view. I don’t care that we’re looking out onto Indiana. I really don’t.”
He smiles at me but brings his eyebrows in, like he’s thinking. “What is it?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. Pulls me into his side. Then says, “We’re pretty happy here, right?”
“Right.”