Not Perfect(94)

“Now, I need help,” he said seriously.

“I thought I already helped you. I let you come over, didn’t I?” she said, teasing, not wanting to give in to his apparent mood shift yet. She still wanted to be here, focusing on this monumental discovery. She had that feeling she got when she carried one of the kids’ backpacks that was so ridiculously heavy that she had no idea how they didn’t bend over backward when it was on them, and then they took it from her for the last block, and she felt propelled forward by the sudden lightness. But Toby had given this to her, so she would try to give him what he needed.

“Okay, okay,” she said now. “What can I do to help you?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “I have to figure out a way to live with myself after what I did to Jane. I need to do that so I can honestly and openly move on—with you. Telling you was helpful, but how can I make it better? How can I pay my penance?”

Tabitha thought again about her question of whether unsolicited drugs played a part. But she could see that he and Jane were long past that at this point. What he was really talking about now was making amends for the havoc it all caused.

“Have you talked to her? Have you said you were sorry?” Even as Tabitha said these words, she wondered if they were the right ones. Apologizing was one thing, opening the door to mending their marriage was another. Though she was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen.

“I have,” he said. “And she is happy now. She just got engaged. I just found out a few days ago. I am really, really happy for her.”

“Wow, that’s something,” Tabitha said. “That’s a big something. But I do have this idea, which is to do something nice for someone once a week, or maybe even once a day for an entire year. I don’t mean my kids, or you, or Rachel, because I always want to do nice things for you guys, of course, but I mean the people I took from, stole from really, and the people who helped me, and also people I don’t know, strangers who need help.”

Toby didn’t say anything, and she thought he must be thinking she was even more of a crackpot than he realized, thinking that if she went out and sprinkled glitter around, things would magically be okay.

“I want to start now,” he said, surprising her. “What can I do?”

“Really?” she said, sitting up. “I don’t know. We could go out into the Square, and you can do something for a homeless person, maybe. You’ve already started to do that, now that I think about it, by giving away the bread, so that counts for something. I would say we could go out there now and offer a few sandwiches, but I still haven’t gone shopping, and I have absolutely no food in the house.”

“I do,” he said, pointing toward his bag. “I’ve got a bunch of things from the buffet at the bar—I know how much you like that. Tacos, chicken wings, you name it. The spread isn’t quite what it was, now that football season is morphing into basketball season, but it still looked good.”

She smiled. That was classic Toby, as good as naming his dog Yo-Adrian. How lucky was she that she was going to get to be an official part of it all?

He jumped up and held out his hand to her. She let him pull her to standing.

“Are you game?” he asked.

“It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

They put on jackets and he grabbed his bag. He was quiet in the elevator, and when they got out in the lobby, he stopped.

“This is silly, right?” he said. “Giving a homeless person tacos and wings is not going to take away the fact that I slept with my ex-wife’s cousin and ruined our family unit for my daughter. It is not going to fix the fact that I took an oath that was meant to last a lifetime, but in a matter of minutes I hacked it all to hell. Nothing is going to take that away.”

“No, of course not, nothing is going to take that away, but I have this idea now that we take and we give, right? And it isn’t always to the same people. Sometimes you take from one but give to another. So, you did some bad things, one really bad thing. I did some bad things, though, I am so happy to say, I did not do as many bad things as I thought I did—though still plenty. If we try to even that out with good, that is something. Really, that’s all we can do.”

Toby smiled. He put his arm around her as they walked out into the frigid night air. Tabitha wondered if the kids were having a good dinner with Stuart. She hoped so. She hoped he would come back to Philadelphia and be a part of their regular lives. It sounded to her like that was his plan. She hoped she would be able to find a small apartment, keep her new job, be with Toby. Across the street she stopped and leaned into him. He leaned back.

“Dare I say: ‘And they lived happily ever after’?” Toby said jokingly, his lips on the top of her head. She could feel them move as he talked.

“No!” she said, pulling back. “Don’t ever say that!”

“Why not?”

“Nobody lives completely happily ever after—haven’t you realized that by now? The pressure is too great. I don’t want that pressure. How about: ‘And they were not perfect, and they had many things to atone for, but they had a lot of fun and could eventually afford light bulbs and everything bagels.’”

He nodded and pulled her back toward him.

“I can live with that,” he said. “Now let me go start this long process of canceling out the bad with a little good. I wish I had brought blankets for someone. It is so cold out here.”