Lost and Wanted(70)

“He would never eat that at home—even if I knew how to make it.”

“When they help cook, they always eat.”

Terrence began gathering the plates. His T-shirt was short-sleeved, a brilliant blue, as if it were the middle of the summer, and it was clear that the kettlebells were in use. The tattoo on the inside of his arm that I hadn’t been able to make out before was a sea creature—a stingray.

“I was thinking about the yard in the back,” Terrence said. “Do you ever grow anything?”

“Besides the grass?”

“Simmi and I had a little garden in L.A.—peas, strawberries, Chinese cabbage, gigante beans. We even tried some corn.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t start with that here. But maybe some tomatoes and beans. Even summer squash would probably work.” He picked up the stack of plates, and took them to the sink. I’d automatically agreed with Charlie’s parents, when I’d first heard about Terrence from Charlie, that he was somehow beneath her—now I realized how stupid that was. What woman wouldn’t want to be with a handsome surfer who cared about his daughter’s education in math, and loved to cook? It was true that Terrence had gone to a two-year community college, did a job that had nothing to do with what he’d learned there. Wasn’t the kind of education Charlie and I had received simply a set of words and references that connected you to a group of people like yourself? In physics we say that we do science for science’s sake, and that there is value in that. Our knowledge of our universe itself, from its explosive early inflation to its current growth rate, has become exponentially more precise in my lifetime. We could all give a quote to a journalist, or end an undergraduate lecture with a few sentences about scientific thinking as a key component of our humanity, and I think most of us really believe those words. When a practical application is available, though—the ramifications of closing the freedom-of-choice loophole for cybersecurity, for example—we rush to emphasize it. While someone services our car, cooks our meal, or bathes our children, the sentences and paragraphs about our fundamental utility spin out like magic.

    “That sounds great,” I told Terrence. “Anything that makes him enthusiastic about food. He doesn’t like being shorter than the other boys in his grade—I tell him he has to eat to grow.”

“How tall was the guy?”

I wasn’t used to anyone asking about Jack’s origins. Even my closest friends tiptoed around it. I thought I might have behaved the same way in their places, and yet I always wanted to talk about it. Charlie, notably, had wanted to know all the details. She’d expressed remorse at the time that she hadn’t been there to go through the bios with me, to help me choose.

“Tall,” I said. “Six-two—most of them are. It seems like height is a lot of mothers’ primary concern.”

The kitchen was too small for me to be helpful without getting in Terrence’s way, and so I went back to the table to get the mugs, the crumpled paper towels the kids had been using for napkins.

“I’m going to have to start going down to New York,” he said. “Maybe every other weekend. We’re opening a store in Williamsburg. I’ve been postponing it—you can do that, when you work for your brother—but it can’t last forever.”

I was hoping I knew what he was going to say, but I didn’t want to guess and be wrong.

“She’ll usually be with her grandparents, except this weekend they’re going to a wedding. They said they could skip it, but I thought—”

“We’d love to have her.”

“It’s only two nights. And then the next time you go away—”

“It’s no problem.”

“I get you, you get me back.” He looked up then, hopeful. “And I think it’s good for them, too, since—”

“—they don’t have siblings.”

    Terrence looked relieved. “Yeah.”

We could hear the kids jumping around in Simmi’s room; she had put on Taylor Swift.

“You know, I thought Addie would be so helpful. To have a woman in Simmi’s life right now, and all that. My mom’s—well, we’re good now. But she’s not anyone’s idea of a role model.”

I laughed. “Addie’s definitely role model material.”

Terrence nodded. “Charlie’s ‘issues’ with her mom seemed like a lot of nonsense to me, honestly,” he said. “She would go on about ballet and piano and church, and I would be like, uh huh. I mean, it sounded ideal.”

“In some ways, I guess.”

“But now I totally see it. I’m not even talking about Addie’s whole thing with me. I could deal with that—temporarily—if it was good for Simmi. But I don’t know anymore. She was asking the other day if it wouldn’t be better to sign her up for ballet instead of gym.” He shook his head. “And I’m like, yeah—let’s change up the one thing she actually fucking likes—the one thing that makes her happy right now—so she can fit into your little vision of how everything’s supposed to look.”

“You want me to dry those?”

“They’ll dry.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a dark brown bottle with an elaborate label. “It’s kombucha,” he said. “You want some?”