This Close to Okay(53)
“And my dad and his wife will be there…they’ve been married since I was in high school. I wasn’t needing any bit of a stepmom, but I love her and we get along fine. My dad’s name is Augustus, but everyone calls him Gus, and my stepmom’s name is Glory—”
“No Gus, no Glory,” Emmett said.
“Most people get a kick out of that,” she said. “Okay, let’s see…bunch of Lionel’s friends and our cousins. My best friend since elementary school, Aisha, usually comes with me, but she’s at a yoga retreat in Lake Tahoe this weekend. And some of my other girlfriends show up a lot of the time,” Tallie said, counting people off on her fingers.
“You and Joel used to go together? He’s a Halloween guy?”
Tallie flattened her hand in the air, tilted it back and forth—the universal hand signal for “so-so.”
“Every year except last year because we were separated,” she said.
“This is the first time you’ve ever taken another dude?”
“Dude,” Tallie said, laughing. “Sorry, I just don’t think of you as a dude. Not like, some dude.”
“Some guy, some man, some date,” he said, definitely flirting, but only a little.
“I’ve been dating or married to Joel since day one of Lionel’s costume parties. Although this guy I dated in college and off and on after…Nico Tate…he’s the one I was dating a bit when I met Joel…we started hanging out again sometimes…he told me he would be there tonight,” she said, eating. Drinking.
“So is he going to be pissed you’re bringing me?” Emmett asked, thinking of the pictures he saw of her on Nico’s Facebook page. Embarrassment tingled his ears, remembering them.
“If he is, it’ll be news to me. I mean, at one point…Nico wanted to get married, but I didn’t. Or couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He was busy playing a lot of tennis, professionally for a bit. I’m not quite sure what happened between us. We were together, then we weren’t. He married his childhood sweetheart, but they got divorced…and honestly? Sometimes I think I made the wrong choice not marrying him back when I had the chance. Waiting and finding Joel, marrying him instead. Then I feel awful for thinking it, which is ridiculous because I obviously don’t owe Joel any loyalty at this point. So yeah, it’s a nonstop loop up here,” she ended, pointing to her head.
“All right, but hear me out…you could’ve been Tallie Tate.”
“Ha! No. I wouldn’t have changed my name. I’m dying Tallie Clark.”
“Not anytime soon, I hope.”
“Right you are,” she said. “And besides, I’m never getting married again.”
“Me neither.”
They looked at each other, still and quiet in the noisy, crowded pub.
“Well, tell me if you need me to give you space tonight if your boy Nico Tate is there. Men can get weird,” Emmett said.
“Ain’t that the truth? And nice try, but I’m not letting you off the hook completely about talking to your family. I won’t bug you anymore about it tonight, though. Not until tomorrow. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said, wiping his hand on his napkin and offering it across the table for her to shake.
*
When they were finished at the pub, they went over to the gelato shop. Tallie: stracciatella and basil. Emmett: butter pecan and black cherry. He paid for lunch and the gelato, too; they walked through Fox Commons with their little cups, pale ping-pong scoops.
(The storefronts and homes are decorated with pumpkins, scarecrows, and leaf garlands, strings of purple lights wrapped around the wrought-iron banisters and porch swings. Orange and yellow and rich wine-colored everything with acorns and walnuts underfoot, like storybook illustrations.)
There were plenty of nice neighborhoods in his hometown, but there wasn’t anything like Fox Commons. It was much more than a neighborhood: it was a fully operating city within a city. Clean and safe. The kind of place where people lived and worked, and if and when something terrible happened there, they’d probably look earnestly into the news camera and say, We never imagined this could happen here.
The neighborhood kids were dressed in their Halloween best. They passed a buzzing group of tiny robots, a gaggle of princesses, countless superheroes, a trio of mummies, several covens of little witches. There were plenty of food trucks over by the lake—kettle corn, s’mores, and caramel apples, too. And a small hay maze was set up with people snaking inside, defiant under the heavy gunpowder skies that seemed mere seconds away from exploding. A little girl wearing butterfly wings ran past, reminding him of the butterfly wings wilted and resting in his new backpack at Tallie’s place. Another little girl squealed at something behind them, startling Tallie, who threw up her hands and turned around before laughing.
“She scared me! Pregaming for tonight,” she said. “Oh! And there’s lots of food at this party. Plenty. Which reminds me, I need to stop by the bakery for a cake. It’s Lionel’s favorite.”
Since Tallie didn’t take his hand, he didn’t want to seem too forward by initiating it. The warmth of touch comforted him; he hadn’t realized quite how much he’d missed it. She walked close, occasionally touching his shoulder to guide him to look at something she wanted him to see—a small black dog dressed as a flower, a big brown dog dressed as a pirate, pint-size twin boys dressed as skunks. And he knew she was trying to steer him away from the house with the yard filled with fake tombstones. The silly pun-names, the skeleton hands shoving up through the leaves. If people weren’t actively grieving, they’d probably never think about how hard Halloween could be on those who were. So much death. The constant reminders of where everyone ended up, never leaving them alone for even a second.