Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (19 page)

Garret flipped open his phone, wondering if he'd missed a text from Jonathan. He hadn't. The only text he'd received so far was from a buddy he used to go to school with years ago:

At this rate, he wasn't sure he would make it to the party. Jonathan had yet to give him the signal that he and Thea were done talking. Anxious, with a strange knot in his gut, he shut his phone.

“Garret!” He looked up to see Irina jogging toward him. She wore loose green shorts and a white tee. Her hair was pulled back tight.

He stood, feeling the creak of his old knees, and he laughed a little to himself and shook his head. Once he'd been as serious as she was about soccer—if not more. He'd meant to devote his entire life to the sport, to play pro or at the very least become a gym teacher—anything to stay close to the game he loved. When he was her age, he was as certain of his future in soccer as he was of the necessity of breathing. But life had gone a different way.

“I was just gonna call you,” he said to Irina. “Sun's going down. We have to head in soon.” He tucked his phone into his pocket, still anxious to hear from Jonathan.

“No, Garret! Come kick a few balls at me. Please! I want to practice tending goal!”

“We really have to get going . . .”

“No, we don't,” she said. “Mom and Dad are going to be a while yet.”

“How do you know?”

“They always stay out late when they go out on dates.”

“I don't think they're on a date, Rina.”

She shrugged. “They're doing something together. It's probably a date.”

Garret, a professional conversationalist, an expert at small talk and evasion, had no idea what to say.

Irina braced the ball against her hip with her elbow. “Garret?”

“Mmm.”

“You know my parents are getting divorced?”

“I'd heard that. Yes.”

“And did you know that kids who come from broken families are more likely to do drugs?”

“Who told you that?”

“My teacher.” Her face was fraught with tension. In fact, if he didn't know better, he thought she might be about to cry. “I don't want to be a junkie.”

“That's ridiculous. Of course you won't.”

“It's not ridiculous.” She wiped at her face. She was crying now; there was no getting around the sniffling. Garret marveled that the tears had come on so quickly. He could only imagine what it was like to be a ten-year-old girl, going through such a hard time with her parents and suffering from emotional whiplash. “I saw on the television that kids whose parents get divorced do drugs. And my teacher—”

“Your teacher doesn't know that your uncle Garret would never let you do any drugs,” he said. He squeezed her closer and was oddly surprised when she let him. She was such a tomboy—so tough. He wasn't sure how to comfort her without making her feel pitied. “Being a junkie is out of the question.”

“What about being a teen mother?”

Garret tried to keep his face placid. “You don't have to be a teen mother as long as you, um—” He fumbled. Sex talks were advanced parenting, but he was still in babysitting 101. “There's ways of protecting yourself against becoming a teen mother.”

“Like what?”

“Like keeping your eye on the ball. Like deciding you want to be a teen soccer star instead.”

“Well, I already know that.” She grinned, and he thought he was out of the woods until she spoke again. “Why did they break up? They told you, didn't they? They never tell me anything.”

Garret sighed and led her to sit down on the bleachers. “It's not really my place to talk about it, Irina. You need to talk about it with your mom and dad.”

“But they won't talk to me.”

Garret rubbed at his face. He wasn't sure what to say. To his own ears, his voice sounded wooden—an adult trying to act like an adult for the benefit of a kid. He didn't want to talk down to Irina; she didn't deserve that. But he also didn't know how he could help or even explain.

“I think it's my mom's fault,” Irina went on. “I think she told him to leave.”

Garret leaned back so his elbows were on the seat behind him. In the far corners of the field, lightning bugs were beginning to sparkle greenish gold. He thought of Thea—of how a few weeks ago he would have sworn to anyone that Jonathan's infidelity was her fault, that she
must
have done something wrong. And yet the idea that everything was her fault . . . it no longer sat so comfortably. Before, he'd wanted his brother's breakup to be black and white—Thea was a terrible person, and it had simply taken Jonathan too long to find out. But now he knew that he could not make her into an enemy, no matter how much he wanted to.

“You know that both of your parents love you. That won't change.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Because it's true. You've got a family that would do anything for you, Irina. And you can include me in that too.”

She stood with a sigh that was far too worldly for a girl so young. She bumped the soccer ball with her knee, then pinned it with her foot to the ground. “You really mean that?”

“Would I lie?”

“Ha!” Her face lit up, and she kicked the ball to him. “Then I've got you. Legally you have to come kick a few balls for me. You said you would do
anything . . .
”

He laughed. “Great. Just what the family needs. Another attorney.”

She ran toward the goal, and when he stepped away from the bleachers to follow, she let out a happy
woo-hoo!
So much of Irina's life had gone by, and Garret was only now getting to know her. For a while—especially over the last few years—he'd begun to doubt that he'd ever truly liked kids. Other people's children were needy and snotty and loud. They were conversation pieces for small talk but little else. He'd started to think it was a good thing that he'd escaped being saddled with parenthood.

But Irina wasn't just someone else's kid, interchangeable with a hundred other kids. She was a person, her own person—and what's more, he
liked
her. She was pushy and funny and so, so vulnerable sometimes that he knew if she tried to sell him the Golden Gate Bridge he would get out his wallet without batting an eye.

“Come on!” Irina shouted. She stood at the end of the soccer field, haloed by the net behind her. Garret kicked a ball in her direction, just inches to her left. He cheered when she caught it.

“Oh, Uncle Garret,” she said. “You're gonna have to do better than that.”

 

 

That night, after she'd heard all about Irina's evening with Garret, Thea made herself a cup of decaf tea—plum with a bit of valerian root to soothe tired nerves—and climbed into the attic for an old box of photographs she'd been meaning to organize for some time. Tonight, they'd called to her. She sat on the floor of the spare room, surround by a hundred pictures of herself from the past, each picture a judge with a hundred things to say:

She sat, looking into her empty hands.

She couldn't let herself think that she'd made the wrong choice in marrying Jonathan. They'd done their best. They'd tried, like two dedicated workers, to build a life together as if laying out bricks and mortar would be enough. No—she would never for a moment regret the years spent with him.

But when she looked at the pictures of herself spread out around her, the woman she saw was the same woman in every picture—from high school graduation until today she had not, in even the smallest sense, changed a bit. Maybe Claudine and the other baristas were right—maybe she hadn't taken enough risks or tried enough new things.

What, she wondered, would she do with herself now that she had such an unsought opportunity—a second chance she didn't quite know she'd needed until now?

 

 

In a seat on Jamie Rigby's small yacht, Garret opened another beer and tipped his head back to drink it. The hazy lights of Newport wharves in the distance obscured most of the constellations, but a few stars poked through, crisp against the dark sky. The boat bobbed gently on the swells, hip-hop playing from built-in speakers, Jamie and his friends flirting recklessly with a couple of undergraduate girls.

Garret leaned the back of his head against the side of the boat, pensive. He didn't like this feeling—the indescribable sensation of being empty but not being able to put his finger on why. He never felt this way, so self-pitying and lonely. So what on earth was making him feel that way now?

“Hey. What's up?” Jamie gave him a quick punch on the arm and sprawled in a chair beside him. He wore orange Bermuda shorts and a hemp necklace, as if Newport was some New England Malibu.

Garret looked around at the partiers, some familiar, others not. Those he'd been closest to five years ago were nearly all absent, replaced by a different crowd. “Is it just me, or is everyone getting younger?”

Jamie laughed and held up his beer for a toast. “The fountain of youth, bro.”

“Really. Where is everybody? Where's Stubs? Where's Rocco? Where are those guys?”

Jamie shook his head. “It's over for them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Married. All of them. They're probably off at a dinner party or something equally lame. Maybe they're playing Scrabble. Stubs's wife is pregnant with their second kid.”

“Jeez,”
Garret said, not surprised to hear that they all had married but surprised at the pang of jealousy that ripped through him head to toe.

“Tell me about it. Now if you want to have a good time, you've got to pick your friends up in town and bring them back here. Which is my preferred method.”

“Which is why your friends are hot single women.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

Garret leaned his head back again, feeling old and out of place. Most of the men he worked with had been married for such a long time it seemed their anniversaries could be measured in geological periods. Once, Garret had every intention of getting married and having children. He'd thought those desires had been burned out of him long ago; he understood now that they'd been forgotten but not gone.

“Hey. Perk up,” Jamie said. “Life's good, man. You're not married yet. Go work the crowd. Seriously. They're mostly from out of town.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“No maybe about it. Or are you doing the celibate thing again, like when we were in school?”

Garret flinched inwardly. “Definitely not.”

“So . . . ?”

Garret watched a cute redhead push away one of Jamie's younger brothers—she was hot. He had to give Jamie that. “We'll see,” Garret said. But inwardly he still wished he was back on the terra firma of the soccer field with Irina, kicking the ball around while the sun went down.