Ask Again, Yes (46 page)

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”

“You think you can handle it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

She smiled like the old Kate, and he saw that she’d been afraid he’d say no. A few minutes later he heard hangers sliding back and forth as she pushed around the clothes in their closet, deciding what to wear.

He chose the restaurant, one they both thought of as new because it had opened during those dark months leading up to his hearing. It looked out over the sound, but they didn’t arrive until after dusk and missed the sunset. Walking from the car they could hear water lapping the shore. Once seated, a bottle of Perrier on the table between them, they discussed the kids for a while, the house. They talked about whether Kate’s position at the lab would change. They talked about the school where Peter worked, and whether he should have become a teacher after college, whether he regretted not considering it when he was in his early twenties, when he spent all those months casting around for an idea of what to be. Since they were already on the subject, and as they were finishing up their meals, they wandered into other regrets. They began
small. They began safe. The classes they wished they’d taken. The places they wished they’d been.

“But big ones?” Kate asked. “I’ve never really thought about it. What’s the point? I guess I should regret sneaking out with you that night.”

“But you don’t?”

“I’m sorry about everything that happened after, but if we hadn’t snuck out that night, maybe we wouldn’t be together now. Frankie and Molly wouldn’t be here.”

Peter thought about that.

Kate picked up her napkin and folded it neatly before her. She smoothed the edges and then tucked and retucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

“I’m not sure it’s a regret but there is something I have to tell you.” She looked over at the table next to theirs, at the people sitting there. As Peter watched her struggle, he felt something inside him cave in. Her lips were pursed. A vein in her neck throbbed.

“What?” he said, and just like that the ground beneath him felt more precarious than it had in months.

“Your mother. When she showed up that night looking for you, it wasn’t the first time. I spotted her years ago, when we were still in the city. Before we were married. And after. And a few times at the house.”

“And what? You sent her away?”

“No. Not exactly. I just knew she was there, watching. Checking in on you. And she knew I knew. She didn’t approach and neither did I. Until that night. I went out to her car because I felt like I needed help. I needed to talk to someone who loves you as much as I do, who was looking out for you first. So I lied about that. She didn’t come to the door.”

Peter leaned forward over his elbows to better understand what she was saying.

“All those years when I thought you were better off without her maybe you could have used knowing that she was there. Maybe it would have made things easier for you. To know she hadn’t forgotten about
you, that she did care about you. Maybe if you’d known that she was out there fifteen, seventeen years ago, you wouldn’t have ended up feeling so lost.”

It was news, yes, but not at the level she thought it was, clearly. As he’d tried to explain to her before, he never doubted that his mother loved him. But as Francis Gleeson had once told Kate, love is only part of the story.

“I used to tell myself that I was keeping it from you to protect you, but I’m pretty sure I was thinking more about myself.” Kate was looking at him closely now, to see how he was taking all of this.

“Okay,” he said. What would he have done if he’d known? Maybe nothing, just as she had done nothing. He felt lost long before his mother left his life, he wanted to tell her, but it would ruin their dinner, their night. He thought of Frankie and Molly doing their homework with music and talking and laughter in the background. The doorbell ringing, kids stopping by, Kate on the phone, pots boiling over, everything a chaos of love. Then he thought of himself at their ages, alone in a silent house, listening for a creak on the stairs.

“You’re not angry?” she asked.

“No.” He checked himself to make sure it was true. “I have to think about it more, but, no, I’m not angry.”

He watched relief pass over her face, her shoulders relaxed.

“I have one,” Peter said. He went back to the day they decided to get married.

Kate sat up straighter in her chair and listened so closely it was as if she’d shut an actual door against the noise of the other diners, against their chatter and the tap of knives on plates. Her hair fell over one of her shoulders and he thought about how lovely she looked that evening. He’d been looking at her face for so long that sometimes he forgot to notice it.

He’d been thinking about it a lot lately, he told her. That they’d just slipped into marriage, maybe because it was a fantasy they’d had as kids.
But he hadn’t even had a ring. Why had she said yes? He always said he’d get her a nice ring one day, but he never had. She still wore that seventy-five-dollar band they bought on Bleecker Street. So he hadn’t properly asked her, not really.

If she’d married anyone else, that person would have planned the question as an event, would have presented her with a beautiful diamond. He wished he’d done that.

She listened from across the tea lights at the center of their table, and then she threw her head back and laughed.

“So you don’t regret marrying me, you just regret the way you asked? Oh, Peter, I can think of so many other things you should regret.”

“Yeah.” He looked down at his empty plate. “Probably.”

“Hey. Come back.” Kate covered his hands with hers. “If you regret it so much, ask me now. Ask again. Properly, this time.”

But what would she have said, truly, if there’d been a way for her to glimpse everything that was coming for them? For the second time that night, he felt something at his center go unsteady.

The waiter came, cleared their plates. Still, she didn’t look away.

“Things are better now, they feel like they’re getting better—don’t they? But there might be more coming. This might be the least of it. Have you thought about that? We knew nothing about what it meant to grow up, to be partners, parents, all of it. Nothing. And maybe we still don’t. Would you have said yes back then if you’d known?”

“But I know now. So ask me.”

But he couldn’t find the right words.

“I’ll give you a hint,” she said, squeezing his hands until he looked up to meet her eyes. “Then and now, I say yes.”

twenty-two

A
YEAR PASSED SINCE PETER
got home from rehab, since Anne drove away from Floral Park and headed back upstate. Anne didn’t have a phone, so she left them the number at the nursing home, just in case they wanted to reach her for anything. Every time she arrived for a shift she checked the messages at the nurses’ station. Peter called on Christmas Day and was surprised that she was there, working. She told him she was going to Christmas dinner at a friend’s house that evening. That she was just putting a few hours in but then she’d head over. She told him that she was in charge of bringing a vegetable. She told him the friend was named Bridget.

But then she didn’t hear from him again for months and months. Maybe she should have sent presents to the kids, but what would they have liked? She could have sent them each a twenty-dollar bill in a glittery card tucked inside a bright red envelope. Every year, when she sorted the Christmas mail for the residents, she got a pang seeing all those colorful cards, like ornaments sent through the postal system, and that year, just a few months after meeting her grandchildren, she received one: a green envelope that had gold leaf lining the inside. It was a picture of
the children and on the back, the dog. She would have liked a picture of Peter, too. She put the card on the fridge and kept the envelope open on the counter until mid-January because the light from the streetlamps glanced off that metallic liner even in the middle of the night.

She wanted to go back down there but now it would be different. She couldn’t just park and check up on him in secret. She’d have to go to the door, and doing that would be inviting herself, and maybe they didn’t want to see her now that the crisis had passed a little. It was hard to know what to do. Kate had asked for her help that time but she hadn’t really done anything, not really. Maybe Kate regretted asking.

Peter called again in May, just to check in, as he put it. He told her about the kids he was teaching, and about Frankie and Molly. Kate had written a very long paper and had gotten her master’s degree.

“Everything is going okay otherwise?” she asked, not wanting to push. “You feel good?”

“Yes,” he said. “And you?”

“Yes. Doing very well.”

Before hanging up he asked when they’d see her again, but she didn’t know if he was asking because he felt like he had to or if he really wanted to see her.

She knew he’d never tell her if things weren’t going well, not over the phone. And he hung up thinking the very same thing.

And then, the week after Thanksgiving 2017, a Tuesday mid-morning, she stood at the window of her apartment and decided that she
would
send the children a card that year, each their own, so she wouldn’t have to choose whose name to write first. City workers were outside on cherry pickers, hanging wreaths on the tops of lampposts. She’d write in their cards that she’d like them to pick a date to visit, but how would she put it so that it would feel welcoming but also let them know that her place was too small and they’d have to stay in a hotel? And in the very same second that she wondered whether it was safe to send cash through the mail, the super of her building knocked on her door and, when she
answered, handed over a thick yellow envelope that was too big for the mailman to cram in her mailbox.

“What is it?” Anne asked.

The return address was a place in Georgia that Anne had never heard of, and above the address it read: “Attorneys at Law.”

“Gotta open it to find out,” the super said.

Georgia, Anne considered. Brian had once asked Anne if she knew there were little islands off the coast of Georgia. The Golden Isles, she remembered. He wanted to go there after the baby was born because they hadn’t had time for a honeymoon. But then they lost the baby.

She placed the envelope on the counter and looked at it while the water in the teakettle began to thrum. He was either divorcing her, finally, or he was dead.

“Well,” she said aloud to her empty apartment once she was ready.

After reading the documents through, she picked up her keys from the counter and drove over to the nursing home, the papers on the passenger seat. Once, before they got married, they’d agreed to meet up on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. She got there first and watched the throngs of people pass by. She didn’t know what direction he’d be coming from and then she saw him, so far away he was only a human shape bobbing along with so many others—their coats and scarves flapping, their bags weighing them down—but there was something about the way his particular shape moved that she knew it was him, long before she could make out his face. That one is mine, she thought that day.

And when she remembered that, she was surprised. She had loved him. Maybe intermittently. Maybe not very well. But she had. She tried to remember what it felt like to put her key in a door and know there might be someone on the other side.

When she got to work she told the charge nurse that she knew it was her day off but she had a family emergency, so she was going into the private meeting room to make a call and she didn’t know how long she’d be. If the phone call turned up on the bill as quite expensive, Anne would gladly pay for it. Someone just had to let her know how much it had cost. She’d read the documents through at home, but there were questions the documents didn’t answer. How had he died, for example? She did the math—he would have been only sixty-five. There were sixty-five-year-olds who regularly visited their ninety-year-old mothers at the nursing home. Maybe that was skewing her sense of who was old and who was young. He’d died a whole month ago. She was listed as wife and beneficiary.

She dialed the number on the cover letter and asked for a Mr. Ford Diviny. The receptionist put her right through.

One problem was—and Anne caught from his tone that this was just one of many problems Brian had caused—what Brian had was a simple will. He should have had a complex will with disclaimers, codicils. He’d been living with a woman for going on ten years, but he’d left her not even one dime.

“He wasn’t cruel,” Mr. Diviny said. “It was just the sort of thing he didn’t think about.” He needed personal care these last few years, and that woman had provided it. He was a diabetic, and every single day she’d checked his feet and legs for discoloration, for cracks and wounds. She got him special socks. She rubbed cornstarch between his toes. Still, Brian’s left foot had to be amputated in 2013. Did Anne know that? And he wasn’t careful, even after the amputation. With his sugars and such. Anne thought that was a nice way of putting it.

“You seem to have known him well,” Anne said. “Were you his attorney for a long time?”

“I wasn’t his attorney at all,” Mr. Diviny said. “I was his friend. We went to Louisville a few times. For the derby. Met him at a place down here called the Trade Winds. You been here?”

“No,” Anne said.

Mr. Diviny went on. “I didn’t know about you or about your son until he insisted I draw up that will for him, and by then I’d known him near twenty years. I know Suzie a little, so I felt bad about that. I had a feeling she didn’t know a thing about you all and I was right.”

It was looking like his other foot would have to be amputated when he died. Brian owned a home and Suzie lived in it, but Brian’s was the only name on the deed and he left the house to Anne, and to his son, to be split fifty-fifty. He’d also left a sum of money and some personal items to Mr. George Stanhope, his brother. He left personal items to Mr. Francis Gleeson, too.

Anne dropped her head to her hands. “How much could he have had? I don’t think he was even forty years old when he retired.”