Matchmaking for Beginners(51)

“I’ve been here, ah . . . three weeks maybe?”

“Were you here when she . . . when she died?”

“Yeah. Although she would prefer we said when she made her transition.”

“I didn’t even know she was sick. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. Yeah. Me neither. Not until I flew in. And then I found out she was dying. She’d been sick for months, maybe even years without telling. But then once I was here, she wanted me to stay, to see her across, you know.” He opens my beer and then his own and puts the opener down on the table. “She was a funny one. Kept things like that a secret, I guess. Didn’t want sympathy. Of course she and I weren’t all that close as you know.” He looks around the rooftop and shakes his head. “She was always just my crazy Aunt Blix, saying such weird woo-woo stuff it was hard to pay attention to. But you never know, do you? What’s going to happen to the people you somehow belong to.”

“Odd that you, of all people, would be telling that to me.”

He laughs a little bit through his nose. “Okay. Fair enough.” He looks at me for a long moment, and I’m surprised to see how sad his eyes are. “You have every right to be pissed off at me,” he says. “That was a horrible thing I did to you, and I want you to know that I’ve kicked myself many times.”

I sit down on one of the wicker couches, feeling woozy. “Really? Have you now?”

“Well, let me clarify. I’ve kicked myself for the way I handled it.”

So there we have it. He’s not sorry he left. Just sorry for the way it went down. Nice.

He laughs again. “Please. Let’s don’t talk about this. It cannot lead to anything good.”

“So what happened with Africa? Why aren’t you still there? You had to dump Africa, too, did you?”

He grimaces a little at my joke. “Yes. Africa. Well.” He sits down on the couch across from me and starts peeling the label off his beer, the way he always used to do, and launches into a story that involves Whipple signing both of them up to teach music to schoolchildren as part of a fellowship he’d gotten, but then, as he puts it, bureaucracy happened. Whipple, in typical fashion, hadn’t filed all the papers they needed and after a long, drawn-out time of bobbing and weaving and trying to go through other channels, finally they got kicked out of the country.

“Same old Whipple bullshit,” he says with a sigh. “Fun but sketchy. For a month or so, we hid by traveling around, trying to keep from getting deported. But it was touch and go, and then . . . well, I decided I’d had enough, and—well, I figured I’d come back to the US, and I arrived here in Brooklyn just before Blix died. I think he’s still backpacking around trying not to get jailed.”

He’s silent, picking something off his shoe. Then he looks right at me, and my heart does a little unauthorized flip-flop.

“She liked you, didn’t she?” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”

I look down, suddenly shy. “Yeah, I think she did. She was nice to me.”

“I know. That horrible party at my mom’s. The way she stayed there talking with you the whole time. God, my mom was so pissed that you weren’t circulating! Neither of us circulated much, I guess. Did you know that’s a guest’s job according to my mom? Apparently you can’t just go and have a good time, you have responsibilities.”

“I think I’ve heard something along those lines.”

“Yeah, well—fuck that! I went off and played pool with Whipple because I couldn’t take listening to my mom and all her fakey-fake friends. And—didn’t something else bad happen?”

“Yeah. The Welsh rarebit situation.”

He throws back his head and laughs. “Ah, yes. My mom said you wouldn’t eat it due to some snobbish thing?”

“No, I wouldn’t eat it due to who knew what the hell it even was! We didn’t have such things at chez MacGraw in Jacksonville, Florida. You might have warned me, you know, that there’d be an exam on British culinary practices. But you weren’t anywhere around. I had only Blix to defend me.”

“So that’s when it all started,” he says absently. “That’s when the whole thing unraveled. Whipple and I were playing pool, and he started telling me about his amazing fellowship and talking me into getting in on the act with him, and I was thinking about the need for one more big adventure. You were talking to my Aunt Blix outside in the snow, as I recall. And everything got set into motion.”

“That was it?”

“That was the moment.”

“So you’re saying that if we hadn’t gone our separate ways at that party, then we would have just had our regular wedding and you would have stayed with me? Because, I have to say, that is absurd, and you know it.”

“Well, who knows for sure?” he says. He looks right into my eyes. “All I want to say is that I did love you, you know. I really thought I wanted to get married.”

“Until you didn’t,” I say, and he laughs.

“Yeah, until I didn’t. My bad.”

“So are we to conclude that in the great scheme of things, I lost you but got your great-aunt?”

He puts his hands behind his head and looks up at the sky. “Maybe. Oh, hell. There’s a lot I regret, you know, when I think of her. Our family wasn’t very good to her. I tried to make it up to her at the end, but we never did really connect in a huge way, no matter how much I tried. She was always—well, you know . . . crazy.” He pauses. “Listen,” he says suddenly. “Want to grab some dinner? I haven’t eaten anything today but a peanut butter sandwich. I know this sweet little place on Ninth that’s got amazing burgers and stuff. Some local beers. Good people. Because as long as we’re both here, we might as well have fun, right? No hard feelings for all that bullshit that happened?”