I'd Give Anything(31)

He smiled at me. Daniel’s smile involved rampant eye twinkling and several sets of parentheses around his mouth. I’d seen it lots of times before, but for some reason, this time, the sight dazzled me. His smile swept through that gray morning like a lighthouse beam.

“Exactly. Which means I’ll have all tomorrow to recover,” he said. “So fire away.”

“Seriously, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice,” I said. “Especially when it’s talking about my own life.”

“Well, hold on to your hat, then. Because Mary Nash York is a fascinating human being.”

“Her maiden name is Nash?”

“Her maiden name is Briggs. Mary Nash is her two-name first name. It’s a southern thing.”

“I like it.”

“I’ll tell her. She’ll like it that you like it.”

“So you grew up in the South?” I said.

When I asked this, Daniel’s face turned a shade more serious. He opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated.

“Was that a bad question?” I said.

“No,” he said, quickly. “Of course not. There are no bad questions in the dog park, right?”

I’d told Mag and Daniel about how the dog park was my new Quaker burial ground, just blurted that out one morning, mid-conversation, which meant that I then had to explain about my old Quaker burial ground. But despite the topsy-turvy telling, they’d understood instantly.

“It’s like there’s truth serum in the air,” Mag had said. “If serum can actually be in air. Or even if it can’t.”

“It’s like The Breakfast Club,” Daniel had said. “Except we’re nicer to each other and no one has dandruff.”

Now, Daniel said, “I guess I just feel a little awkward because I don’t think I ever mentioned that I grew up around here. Sort of.”

“Oh,” I said, startled. “You did? Sort of? You sort of—did?”

He laughed. “Sort of.”

“How could I have missed you? Not to embarrass you, but tall? Handsome? Smart enough to become a vet? And you grew up here? Boy, my young self really fell down on the job with that one.”

Then, it was as if the invisible person colorizing the black-and-white photo of the morning painted two pink spots, one on each of Daniel’s cheeks.

“Well, thanks. But I don’t think I was actually any of those things back then.”

“You weren’t tall?”

“Okay, I was sort of tall. But not this tall. I grew in college.”

“Ah. A late bloomer.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it. The truth is I was kind of a screwup in high school.”

“I can’t even imagine you being a screwup.”

“I started off okay. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My parents met in college there and ended up staying. When I was fifteen, my dad got a new job up here, and we moved, so I spent the last three years of high school at Westville. It was rough, I guess.”

Westville was a high school just over the Pennsylvania line. It was big and public, but, probably due to some egregiously strategic school zoning, it drew mostly from an affluent part of the state.

“Rough?” I said. “The mean hallways of Westville?”

“The school wasn’t rough. But my transition into it was, so rough that it never fully happened. I hadn’t wanted to move. I was shy, and I went from knowing everyone to knowing no one. To get back at my parents, I fell in with some pretty wild kids. We drank too much. Did stupid things. Not terrible things. But stupid.”

He dropped his gaze to the frosty grass. “Senior year went completely off the rails. By the time I graduated, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

“My senior year was like that, too,” I said, quietly.

“But look at us,” said Daniel, brightening. “Back and better than ever.”

He pulled off his gloves and got down on one knee to scratch Dobbsey, who was lying, stomach on ground, paws on chin, a position Avery and I called “Flat Dobbsey,” at Daniel’s feet.

“You’re better than ever,” I said. “I have a would-be philanderer for a husband, a newfound impatience with the directionlessness of my life, and no idea how to grieve for my mother.”

Daniel looked up at me, brows lowered, concern in his eyes.

“Do you think there’s a right way to do that?” he said. “Could it be that you are grieving for her, talking about her, telling stories about what it’s been like to be her kid?”

“But all my stories are about how we’ve never gotten along. Because that’s the only kind of stories I’ve got. The horrible truth is that I don’t even know if I miss her. I might not.”

Daniel stopped petting Dobbsey, and Dobbsey batted his hand with his paw until he started up again.

“What if—” He paused, and I could see him processing, calling up words. “What if grief isn’t only missing people and being sad? That’s how we usually think about it. But what if it’s just—reckoning with their being gone and with knowing they’re never coming back?”

Suddenly, I felt unsteady. All along, all week, I’d been so solid. Now, with what Daniel had just said hovering nearby, without really considering his words or understanding exactly what they meant, I felt my hinges loosening.