Falling Together (34 page)

“Which is—unusual?”

“Highly. Ours is an Augusta-drop-off-pick-up relationship. That’s about it.”

“I see,” said Will. “Hey, if I met Patrick, would I like him or would I want to slug him?”

“Yes,” answered Pen emphatically, adding, “But I thought you were over the slugging thing.”

“Over slugging, not over wanting to. I probably wouldn’t want to slug Patrick, though, because I’m guessing Augusta wouldn’t like it.”

“Augusta,” began Pen, and for a second, she sounded on the verge of tears.

“You okay?”

“Possibly. I’m not sure. I just left him about five minutes ago, so I haven’t had much of a chance to sort things through.”

Will was trying to stay neutral and open-minded, but he had to admit that he liked the sound of “left him.”

“You want to talk about this later?” he asked.

“God, no. How will I ever sort it out if I don’t talk to you about it?”

She’d been on her way to drop Augusta at day camp and run a couple of errands afterward when he called. When she looked at her cell phone and saw that it was Patrick, she let Augusta answer it.

“I am going to camp right now,” Augusta announced in her cell-phone voice, painstakingly enunciated and somewhere between a shout and a bellow. “We are having baking today, but I won’t be able to bring you any cookies because, generally, we eat them.”
Generally
was her new word. “Iloveyoubyebye,” she yelled and handed the phone to Pen.

“Let me call you back after I drop her off,” said Pen. She cherished these mornings, walking through the city with Augusta, talking, feeling the delicate, stalwart bones of her daughter’s hand inside hers, new light washing the sidewalks.

“Do you have any time today?” asked Patrick.

“For what?”

“To talk.”

“You mean in person?”

Patrick gave a halfhearted laugh. “Why do you make it sound like such an outlandish idea? We talk in person all the time.”

Pen ignored this. “I need to do a few things, stop in at the office, but I should be home around eleven. Okay if I call you then? I have to pick up a writer at five thirty, but I have some time in the middle of the day.”

“Well, yeah. Don’t want to put you out or anything.” Pen could hear the pout in his voice. “Just call when you get home.”

But when she got home, before she even got to her apartment building door, there he was, sitting at a sidewalk table at the café across the street, waving her over.

Will lay on his back on his front porch listening to this because Pen had called just as he was rounding the corner onto his street after his run, and he was too sweaty to lie anywhere else. The porch wasn’t particularly comfortable, but Will was too engrossed in Pen’s story to mind the porch boards grinding into his spine and shoulder blades. When a fly started buzzing around his head, he swatted at it absently, without fully registering what it was or even that it was there. In the old days, he and Pen had never really gotten the hang of phone conversations; they were together too much. Now, though, they had it down to a kind of art. With not a lot of effort, Will could close his eyes while Pen talked and have what she said come alive inside his head. At times, her descriptions were so vivid, it was almost like watching a movie, so that, in short flashes, he could even picture Patrick, whose face he’d never seen.

Patrick was sitting at the café table nursing a beer, a bad sign, Pen knew, since Patrick never drank in the daytime; it made him too sleepy.

After the waiter brought Pen an iced tea, she said, “All right, Patrick, what’s up?”

“What’s up is that Tanya got a job offer from this big-time health advocacy group, and she wants to move us to Boston.”

Move us,
thought Pen, as though Patrick and Lila were pieces of furniture, such a maddeningly apt choice of words that Pen didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She did neither, just sat there for a long, silent moment, feeling like a pond that Patrick had just dropped a rock into.

“What about,” she said at last, in a flinty voice, “your daughter? Your other daughter, I mean.” She felt the same jolt of anger she’d felt so many other times because she knew that the “other daughter” was who Augusta was and would always be, to Tanya but also—and there was no getting around this, no matter how much he loved her—to Patrick.

She waited for Patrick to defend Tanya, but he surprised her by getting angry instead, angry at Tanya. Patrick almost never got angry at anyone. Pen could never decide if it was due to inner peace or laziness or a kind of emotional ADD, but, whatever the reason, it just wasn’t in his nature to get mad.

“It was almost comical,” Pen told Will. “Like when one of those adorable, shaggy lap-doggy dogs with chocolate-drop eyes thinks he hears a burglar and starts barking? That was Patrick, except blue-eyed. An enraged Lhasa apso. A choleric cocker spaniel.”

“Wow,” said Will. “Could you do me a favor and never describe me? To anyone?”

“You want to know the sad thing, though? I liked it. I loved it. I found it so deeply satisfying—Patrick getting all husky-voiced and fiery-eyed and righteous on Augusta’s behalf—that it was just this side of a turn-on. How pathetic is that? To be on the verge of throwing myself at a man because he shows, after so many years, a little fire, a little
fight
for his own child?”

“I’d say that if anyone in that scenario is pathetic, it isn’t you.” Right after Will said this, he wished he hadn’t. Even though he was just being honest, bad-mouthing Patrick behind his back made Will feel like a sneak. “Still,” he added, “good for him, right? What did he say?”

He had said, “Like I would just pick up and go hours and hours away from Augusta. Like, ‘Oh sure, honey, I’ll just rip up roots and trail after you like some stupid puppy.’ Not to mention Lila, who has a life here, too, in case Tanya hasn’t noticed.”

Pen had been too thrown off by his anger to do more than nod.

“And here’s the thing: this place has been asking her if she wants to work for them for years. She’s had what amounts to a standing offer, and she’s never said yes. But we’ve been squabbling lately. Not full-blown fighting, but pretty damn close.”

Even though Pen knew Patrick was waiting for her to ask what they’d been fighting about, she didn’t. She found herself to be peculiarly incurious, even slightly repelled at the idea of seeing into the cracks in Patrick and Tanya’s marriage.

But Patrick went on as though she had asked. “Tanya’s just so controlling. Case in point, she cut down my
tree,
if you can believe that.” Pen wondered if he was speaking metaphorically, a thought that might have made her smile if her mind wasn’t becoming increasingly bogged down with sadness at the thought that Augusta might lose her monthly weekends with her daddy.

“Your tree?” she asked.

“My Japanese maple. My buddy Vince was making some landscaping changes and came over one night with this tree he’d dug up from his yard. Prettiest, most petite thing you’ve ever seen, almost bonsai-sized, with leaves that turn the best color red in the world every fall. I planted it in our side yard and it was thriving, for God’s sake, getting kind of shapely and lacy.” He squeezed his face between his hands, like the guy in Munch’s
Scream.
“It was a living organism! I put a little stone Buddha under it, you know, so that the tree was sheltering him, and one day, the tree was gone. She took a damn contract out on it and had it disappeared. And not gently, either. Turns out she had some asshole chop it down and dig up the roots. Obliterated it from the face of the earth. Because it didn’t work with her
colors,
her fucking
plan
. It was too Asian. Can you imagine that? I found the Buddha just sitting there, exposed. A Buddha! It wasn’t some damn garden gnome, you know? It was a religious icon.”

Pen understood why this would upset Patrick, but it annoyed her anyway, the way he described it like it was the worst thing to ever happen, genocide and desecration rolled into one.

“Well, but it
was
decorative, right?” she couldn’t resist saying. “I mean, you’re not actually a Buddhist.”

“Still,” said Patrick, “a little respect. A Buddha’s a Buddha. And a tree is a tree no matter how small.”

Pen had to smile. Patrick, channeling Dr. Seuss. “You are the Lorax,” she wanted to tell Patrick. “You speak for the trees.”

Instead she hid her smile inside her glass of tea and then said, “I’m not sure I get it, though, how the, uh, squabbling has anything to do with her wanting to move you to Boston. I’m pretty sure people still bicker in Boston.”

He looked surprised, as though he’d thought she would get it right away. “She’s worried I’ll go back to you.”

Pen stared at him.

To Will, Pen fumed, “‘Go back to you.’ As if that’s all it would take, his showing up on my doorstep.”

Will couldn’t think of anything to say to this that wouldn’t qualify as maligning Patrick, so he didn’t say anything.

“But then I thought about it,” Pen went on. “How my life might look to Tanya or even to Patrick. I’ve dated here and there, but, honestly, not much, never anything serious. Nobody Augusta’s even met, so Patrick probably doesn’t even know, which means that unless Tanya’s been having me followed—which is not outside the realm of possibility—she doesn’t know, either. And, God, the idea of their thinking that I’m just waiting around for Patrick makes me insane.”

On an impulse, Will asked, “What have you been waiting for?”

When Pen answered, her voice was solemn and sheepish. “How did you know? Because you’re right. I am waiting. It hits me now and then: that I’ve been saving myself for something. A sign. A person.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Mostly, though, I’m just busy.”

When Patrick told her that Tanya was afraid he would go back to Pen, Pen said, “Well, that’s a ridiculous thing to worry about.”

All Patrick’s bravado disappeared, and hurt filled his eyes. “
We
never bickered, did we?” he said.

Oh for God’s sake,
thought Pen.

So quickly that it made Pen’s head spin, Patrick began to map out a plan: he would divorce Tanya at last, hire a cutthroat lawyer, file for custody of Lila; the four of them would be together, a family.

“It’s what I should have done from the beginning,” he told Pen.

There were so many things Pen could have said. “She would die before she let you have Lila.” “You’re mad at Tanya, but you won’t stay that way.” “You can’t come back every time you get restless or angry or bored with your marriage.” “It would be too confusing for Augusta, especially when you leave again, which you surely will.”

“But I didn’t say any of those things,” Pen told Will.

“What did you say?”

“I said the thing that rendered all those other points, as true as they are, moot. I said it for the first time ever.”

“What was that?” asked Will.

She had wanted to be gentle. Whether Patrick deserved it or not, Pen found herself wanting to be as kind as possible at that critical moment. She leaned across the table and took, not Patrick’s hands, but his forearms, his skin warm inside her hands, and turned him directly toward her. She looked for a sign in his eyes that he knew what she was going to say, but they were hope-blue and as unsuspecting as a baby’s.

“You can’t come back to me, Patrick, because I don’t love you,” she said. “I care about you and I will thank you in my heart forever for helping me to have Augusta in my life, but I’m not in love with you. More importantly, I don’t want you back, not at all, not anymore.”

Will said, “Sounds rough.”

“It was. Looking him in the eye and getting the words out was, but once it was over, I felt so good, like I’d been rained on by the cleanest rain in the world.” She laughed. “A fat lot of good it did, though.”

“Meaning what?”

“He didn’t buy it.”

“Uh-oh.”

“He said, ‘I know you’re protecting yourself and Augusta. I get it. Why wouldn’t you? You think I’ll come back and then leave again, but I won’t. I promise you that. We’ll be so happy.’”

She had let go of his arms and told him, “I don’t think you really believe that. I know I don’t.”

“You’re hurt,” Patrick said. “You’re angry.”

“No,” said Pen. “I’m really not.”

To Will, she said, “He said, ‘Don’t answer right now,’ like I hadn’t just answered.”

“Did he tell you to sleep on it?”

“He did. He used those exact words. And then,
then
he started talking about how Tanya’s moving them to Boston would really not have been that bad.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He said, ‘I’m glad I’m not going,
so
glad, even though Boston really probably wouldn’t have been as bad as it sounds. It’s not that far, when you think about it, and I could’ve kept my job, since I do most of it online and over the phone anyway. We have a lot of long-distance clients, in fact, maybe as much as forty percent of our business. I’d have to come here for meetings and such now and then, but that’s it. But then there’s Augusta, and, sure, when she gets a little older she could ride the train up by herself, under the care of the conductor or whatever, or even fly, and I’d get down whenever I could, not monthly, but fairly often. But it wouldn’t be the same. We’d have solid, quality time, I know that, but I’d miss things, concerts and school plays and…’ He went on like that for quite some time.”