One Italian Summer(5)

“That’s not what I said.”

I could see his frustration and his want to control it, too. I felt a bolt of compassion for him.

“I know.”

“We still haven’t talked about us.”

“I know,” I said again.

I had come home a few days earlier. We slept in the same bed and made coffee in the morning and did laundry and put away plates. Eric went back to his job, and I made lists of people to reach out to—thank-you notes that had to be written, phone calls that needed to be returned, my father’s dry cleaner.

It only resembled our old routine. We were skirting around one another like strangers in a restaurant, pausing to acknowledge if we bumped into each other.

“You came home. Does that mean you’re staying?”

In college, before a big test, Eric would bring over a sandwich from this deli called Three Pickles. It had Swiss cheese and arugula and raspberry jam, and it was delicious. He had taken me there on one of our first dates, and insisted on ordering for me. We took the sandwiches outside, found a curb, and unwrapped them. Mine looked like melted, colored wax, but the tang of the Swiss with the peppery greens and tart raspberry was sublime.

“You can trust me,” Eric had said then.

I knew he was right.

I trusted him on our move to New York, on the purchase of our first home. I trusted him through my mother’s treatment, even. The plans the four of us made, where her care would be best, the medications, the trials.

But now. Now how could I trust anyone? We had all betrayed her.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I genuinely don’t know if I can be married to you anymore.”

Eric exhaled like I’d socked him in the stomach. I had. It was unkind and harsh, and I shouldn’t have said it like that. But he was asking me an impossible question. He was asking about a future I could no longer fathom.

“That’s brutal,” he said.

Eric plopped a piece of pizza on a napkin. It was a ridiculous thing to do now. To eat. To begin eating.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

My apology pivoted him. “We can get through this together,” he said. “You know we can. We have been through everything together, Katy.”

I picked up a slice. It seemed like a foreign object. I wasn’t sure whether to eat it or take it outside and plant it.

The problem, of course, is that we hadn’t really been through everything together, because we hadn’t been through anything before. Not until now. Our life had unfolded with the ease of an open road. There were no forks, no bumps, just a long stretch into the sunset. We were, in many ways, the same people who had met at twenty-two years old. What was different was where we lived but not how. What had we even learned in the past eight years? What skills had we acquired to get us through this?

“This is too big,” I said.

“I’m just asking to be a part of it.” He looked at me with big, round brown eyes.

Before Eric and I got engaged, he asked my parents for permission. I wasn’t there, of course, but Eric reports that he went to their house one evening after work. My parents were in the kitchen, making dinner. Nothing would have been unusual about this. Eric and I dropped by my parents’—separately and together—often. On this particular evening he asked if he could talk to them in the living room.

We had just moved to the house in Culver City. I was twenty-five, and we’d been together for three years, two of them spent in New York, far away from my folks. We were home now, and ready to build a life together, beside them.

“I love your daughter,” Eric said once they were settled. “I think I can make her happy. And I love you both, too. I love being a part of your family. I want to ask Katy to marry me.”

My father was thrilled. He loved Eric. Eric had a way of fitting into our family that still allowed my father to be the boss. If you asked either of them, the structure didn’t need to change.

It was my mother who was quiet.

“Carol,” my father had said. “What do you think?”

My mother looked at Eric. “Are you two ready for this?”

In addition to her kindness and hospitality, my mother had a frankness that made her respected and a little bit feared. She could tell it like it was, and she did.

“I know I love her,” Eric said.

“Love is beautiful,” my mother told him. “And I know how true that is. But you’re both so young. Don’t you want to live a little more before you settle down? There’s so much to do and so much time to be married.”

“I want to live my life with her,” Eric had said. “I know we have a lot to experience, and I want us to experience it together.”

My mother had smiled. “Well,” she had said. “Then congratulations are in order.”

Looking at Eric across the table, the pizza between us, I thought that maybe her initial hesitation had been right. That we should have lived more. That we did not really understand the vows we’d taken. For better or for worse. Because now here we are, experiencing all that life has to deal out, and it has broken us. It’s broken me.

“I’m going to go to Italy,” I said to him. “I’m going to go on that trip. And I think while I’m gone we should take some space.”

“Well, you’ll be in Italy,” he said. “So space seems inevitable.” He tried for a smile.