Goodnight Beautiful(9)
“Let me guess,” she said when he approached to ask if she knew what “cocktail attire” meant. “You’re a bad boy turned cool/approachable academic who favors band shirts, but only if they’re ironic. You play basketball on your lunch hour with your nonacademic bros and then tapas and whisky with your colleagues. You’ve been invited to a wedding—his second—somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, and now you need a jacket.” She pointed toward the back of the store. “Wait for me in the dressing room.”
She brought him five different suit and shirt combinations, eight choices of ties, a classic navy blazer. Waited outside the room while he changed, stood beside him in front of the large mirror, swiping away lint and pressing wrinkles from his sleeves.
He bought everything she suggested. “That was more than I’ve ever spent on clothing in my life,” he said, finding her back at the tie display after he’d paid. “You should get a raise.”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” she said. “My boyfriend’s birthday’s coming up. Came in to buy him a tie.” That boyfriend was gone an hour later, about the time Sam and Annie finished their second drink at the bar across the street, where Sam probed her about her life, learned about her childhood in Maine, growing up in a house her father—long deceased—built himself.
She was his date to the wedding the next week, his wife within the year, marrying him in the backyard of their new home the day they closed on the house. Annie Potter, a woman like no other. Brilliant, funny, exciting as hell. He still has trouble believing he convinced her to follow him to Chestnut Hill, New York. Charming, that’s the word she used, the first time she came, ninety-nine minutes on the train from New York. “Did you know petroleum was discovered right here in Chestnut Hill?” she said, tugging him by the arm to point out the historical marker he’d never noticed outside the ice cream shop.
And she still thinks it’s charming. She even likes going to see his mother at Rushing Waters, where she’s made a list of every resident’s birthday, stopping at Mrs. Fields in the strip mall to buy them a cookie the size of a dinner plate, coming home to tell him that this was the right thing to do, moving here to help Margaret.
His mom was wrong. He’d never hurt her.
The thought is interrupted by the sound of a phone, and he feels his body tense, realizing it’s his phone, ringing from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. Christopher stops what he was saying—What the hell was he saying?—and Sam reaches into his pocket, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I usually remember to turn this thing off.” He sees the 1–800 number, another credit card company, before silencing the phone and returning it to his pocket. He allows Christopher a few moments to finish what he was saying and then shifts a little in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time,” he says.
“Already?” Christopher says, making no move to stand. Something changes in his expression. “Because there was something else I wanted to mention.”
“Oh?” Sam says.
“A girl at work accused me of sexually harassing her.”
Sam has to restrain himself from laughing out loud. Classic doorknob revelation. A client spends the session talking about something mind-numbingly innocuous like the pros and cons of pour-over versus drip coffee and then right before time’s up—bam!—he drops a bomb, walks out. He needs to say whatever it is out loud, inside the room, but doesn’t want to hear the therapist’s response. “Well, that certainly sounds like something you and I should talk about,” Sam says. “Next Wednesday?”
“Sounds good.” Christopher slaps his knees and they stand up. “See you next week,” he says. “Same bat time, same bat channel.”
Sam flatters Christopher with the same chuckle he forces every time Christopher says this. The outside door slams loudly behind him. That fucking door. Sam takes out his phone, the sinking sensation growing in his gut as he plays the message. He was wrong. It wasn’t a credit card company, it was the bank that holds their mortgage. He deletes the voice mail without listening to it. It’s all going to be fine. The phone calls he’s avoiding. The bank. The credit card companies. He needs to avoid them for another week or so, just until he gets access to his father’s money.
Sam came across the letter from his father in his mother’s kitchen cupboard while preparing to sell the house. She’d been living at Rushing Waters for a few months when he found it, typed on the expensive stationery that his father used for the letters he sent Sam a few times a year, with his name embossed on the top. Other than a phone call every year or so, this was the extent of their relationship. Each was typewritten, and Sam imagined his father speaking a few sentences into a Dictaphone and handing it to a secretary. “Get that thing off for me, okay, sweetheart?”
He sat down at the kitchen table, the same table where he once choked down the world’s worst piece of Pepperidge Farm coconut cake, and tried to make sense of what he was reading. It was addressed to his mother. I have some things I need to say, Maggie.
Three pages long, the letter explained the regret his father had felt for the last twenty years—how hard it was for Ted, living with what he did to the family. I understand why you wouldn’t talk to me when I tried, but I want you to know that not knowing my son has been the most painful part of my life.