Thank You for Listening(80)

They commandeered a table in the empty lobby and the bored desk manager was more than happy to set them up with a pot of peppermint tea and some biscotti. Nick excused himself to the bathroom and arrived back just as the tea did, looking like he’d splashed water on his face and run his hands through his hair.

She poured them both a cup and they sipped in silence while Sewanee embedded herself in the moment. The buttercup glow from the deco floor lamps, streaks of moonlight limning the ripples of the canal out the window behind Nick’s chair, the occasional creak of a floorboard from a hallway above them. Eventually, Sewanee felt warm enough, inside and out, to ask, “So, what would you like to talk about?”

Nick took a sip of tea. “My aunt.”

Not what she’d expected. She’d thought they’d immediately start exhuming their relationship, sorting what was truth from what was fiction. To go back to the beginning and dig themselves out. But, really, what was more formative than family?

NICK’S MOTHER HAD been pregnant at twenty-one and dead from an overdose at twenty-five. He had no memory of her. Which he knew sounded sadder than it actually was. He hadn’t known who his father was until a 23andMe test five years ago, which led him to a middle-aged finance guy living in New Jersey with two kids in college and no honest-to-God memory of Nick’s mother, either. But he’d been nice and apologetic and had wanted to hear Nick’s story and this is what Nick had told him:

His aunt, Deborah June Sullivan, had been older than his mother by about a decade. She’d been a radical feminist (at least by Prescott, Arizona, circa 1994 standards) doing graduate work in Ireland. She hadn’t wanted a toddler; she was, after all, intentionally husband-and child-less. But Nick was the only family she had left and June could be sentimental when she wasn’t being contrarian. They lived in Dublin for twelve years, but when June broke up with Tom, the closest thing Nick had to a father, she moved them back to the place she swore she’d never return: Prescott. Why? Nick didn’t know. Except that June liked a good fight.

Once he’d covered high school in Arizona, summers in Dublin at Tom’s pub hanging around musicians, best-friending Jason sophomore year, and the teasing he endured because of his funny accent and the fact his aunt wrote “smut,” he summed it all up by saying, “You know, typical dysfunctional family when you get down to it.”

He told Sewanee his aunt had issues, generally, with men, present company included. He never felt he could live up to her expectations. She wrote fantasy men and measured real ones against them. He wasn’t academically motivated, he didn’t care about his appearance, he answered her questions with monosyllabic answers, he would rather play guitar than spend time with her . . . in short, he was a typical teenage boy. But to June, he was becoming just another poor excuse for a man.

He went back to Dublin for university, but only lasted a year. He came home, a college dropout who wanted to play music. A whole lot of nothing looking for something. One thing he was sure of: he would never become one of those men June lionized.

The night manager, alone in the hotel with nothing to do, brought them two small glasses of grappa, just because, and Sewanee and Nick thanked him. As they sipped, Nick said, “Do you think people sometimes know they’re dying, the way elephants do? Because June had started working on this project based on what she wished had happened between her and the guy she’d loved before she went to Ireland and met Tom. Of course, in her fictional version, Tom died a horrible death and the one-that-got-away was a legendary lover.”

Sewanee smiled. “Of course.”

Nick smiled back. But it quickly faded. “She called last October and said we had to talk. In person. I went. Her premonition or intuition or elephant-sense or whatever was spot-on. She attempted to make everything right between us. The struggles, the past, the conflicts . . . you know, as one tends to do at death’s door. Then, she laid out the Casanova project she was writing and made me promise to do it and that I would also promise to have you do it. She was adamant. To the degree that it was not to be done unless we did it together. She had to have things her way right up until the end. I actually admired that about her.” He stared off. “Three weeks later the writing was done and so was she.”

Sewanee winced. “When was this?”

“Right before Thanksgiving.”

“So, in Las Vegas . . .”

He nodded. “I was very much in it.” He gazed at his shoes. “I’m still in it.” He slunk down in his seat, stretched his legs out, crossed the ankles, rested the teacup on his chest. Sighed. “And when I plunked down next to you in the bar, I’d just come from sitting at a signing table for six hours. And being completely honest? I was livid at her then. Livid she waited too long to go to a doctor. That it took her dying to tell me how she felt. She left me with everything we could have had if only . . . it was a lot.” He fell quiet.

Then he finished the grappa and stood. “You look as knackered as I feel. I’m going to go.”

Sewanee stood, too, glancing at the clock above the reception desk and startled to see it was 2:15. “I’m a little insulted you didn’t try to pull off Just One Room. You could have run out the clock here and then been like, ‘oh, wow, look at the time, wherever shall I lay my weary head tonight?’”

“I considered it. But I thought it was a wee repetitive so I went with The Perfect Gentleman Who Knows He Should Give a Woman Space.”