The Night Before(17)

He goes on for a solid ten minutes, talking about all of their fertility treatments and how his wife has endometriosis, etc., etc., and TMI. I remind myself that we are trying to travel a long distance at the speed of light. I am sympathetic. I am. I truly am.

But I want to know about that car. And why he didn’t move back to New York.

It’s not fair to Jonathan Fields that I feel annoyed. He’s just answering the question I asked.

He finally stops. He gets us another round. I watch him walk away and think that I like the way he walks and that he is a nice man. He loved his wife. He wanted to have children. He has parents who loved him enough to let him live in their basement after college. He is a good man, and I will try to find a way to let him in.

Then I think this. I think about my sister and how if I met her today, I would not make her a friend. I wouldn’t dislike her, but we are too different and we would annoy each other. She would judge me and I would judge her and we would get in a girl fight and that would be that. But she is family, blood, and so I will never leave her. Not in a million years. The things about her that might annoy me I find endearing. I don’t know if she feels this way about me, but I think she does. Even if I move away again, part of me will always be hers and part of her will always be mine.

She is the first person I call when the shit really hits the fan. Like it just did not two months ago. And she came running as fast as lightning.

So what is it about love between strangers? What makes two people who are not family, not blood, stay and not leave? Do they just decide to do it? Do they swallow down their misery at being together when they want to be apart? Staying with Rosie is not a choice. Loving Rosie is not a choice.

Then I think about Jonathan Fields and his wife and all those years they spent together. And then she just decided to leave? Just like that. Or maybe not. Maybe I don’t know the whole story. Still, I wonder.

“Okay,” he says. “Now my turn.” He sets down the new drinks.

I smile sheepishly. “Okay. Shoot.”

“Was that guy in New York, the one you mentioned on the phone—was that a serious thing? Was it a hard breakup?”

I try to decide what he’s asking me, really. Is it whether I am capable of a long-term relationship? Is it whether I’m still in love with someone else? Or is he still trying to find out why I came back home?

And from there, why I left.

“Yes and no,” I begin. “It wasn’t that long that we dated. But I did have feelings for him. And, yes, it was hard when he ended things. I guess we’re in a similar type of boat—obviously mine is much smaller.”

He studies me carefully. “You said on the phone that he sent you one text ending things and then just disappeared. Stopped calling and texting you. Did you try to find out why?”

I shake my head. “No. I mean, if someone dumps you in a text and then disappears like that, I think that’s a sign. What would prevent him from doing that again? Walking away is a bad habit, but it is a habit and it’s hard to break.”

I expect him to pontificate on this rather introspective observation. But instead he dwells on my behavior.

“But you didn’t at least reach out? Even on social media? Ask one of his friends?”

Now I feel cornered. I can’t answer this without revealing the fact that I don’t use social media, and that I didn’t really know his friends. We spent our time together alone. It was new. New and perfect.

I shrug and that’s all I give him.

“Okay, you know what?” he says. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve both moved on in our boats and now here we are and that’s a good thing. I know that sounds trite, but I really believe that. Everything that matters is here right now, or coming tomorrow. And what I see here right now is an incredibly beautiful, smart woman, and I am lucky that guy was a total prick because now you’re here and not there.”

He says this with total sincerity. Not even my finely tuned skills of perception can detect an iota of BS.

It comes again, the surge of warmth like I felt before. He’s found a wormhole.

We talk more about this. About life and about mistakes and how hard it is to look forward or live in the present moment. He speaks also of his family in Boston. His mother who just died a year ago. His father who was married to her for forty-four years. He speaks of a sister and her family who moved to Colorado and I speak of my sister Joe and Mason. He doesn’t ask me if I want children, so I don’t have to lie, and the conversation keeps flow ing like the water just outside, flowing into an ocean—of what, I have no idea. But I like it. I like it all.

His eyes stay on me the whole time. I can smell his skin when he leans forward to sip his beer. And then I smell the beer when he leans back. And all of it mixes together with the vodka I’ve been drinking into a brilliant cocktail of attraction.

I fight to keep it. I fight against the little things that enter my brain and go on the list of concerns I will use to build my mountain of a molehill—things I am perceiving that don’t add up. The timeline of his story between college and moving back here. His company, which doesn’t sound like any of the companies that have stayed out here in Connecticut. He says it was a hedge fund, but the larger ones have moved out of Branston. I know this because his business is my business.

There are more wrong things that I have been gathering: facial expressions, sideways questions about my past, my childhood. I can’t decide if these things are normal, because I’m not normal. My sense of perception. My mountains from molehills. My fists for hands.