by Tom Perrotta
If I’d known you were coming, he said, I woulda worn my lululemons.
They went on their first date two nights later. The Hollywell Tavern was booked solid, so they ended up at Enzo, which was just as romantic as she remembered. Only a few months had passed since she’d gone there with Amanda, but it felt a lot longer than that, as if their ill-fated kiss in the parking lot belonged to the distant past, a youthful indiscretion she could look back on with grown-up, head-shaking nostalgia. It felt so much more solid—so much more real—to be sharing a meal with an eligible man close to her own age, a man with whom she was already, improbably, beginning to sense the possibility of a future.
George had dressed up for the occasion—khakis, Oxford shirt, tweed jacket—and the outfit gave him a surprisingly academic aura, especially when he put on his reading glasses to study the menu.
“You don’t look like a plumber,” she said, realizing even before the words were out of her mouth that it was a stupid and condescending thing to say.
“Thanks,” he said, though he didn’t sound especially grateful.
“I’m sorry.” Eve felt like a fool. “All I meant is that normally when I see you, you’re—”
“Filthy.”
“No, not filthy. Just not quite as handsome as you are right now.”
“I clean up nice,” he said, forcing a smile. “It’s a necessity in my line of work.”
He took a sip of the Chilean Malbec he’d selected after an in-depth consultation with the waiter. He clearly knew his way around a wine list, which was another thing Eve hadn’t expected. It was humbling and illuminating, coming face-to-face with her own snobbery.
“Actually,” he told her, “I’m thinking about retiring in a couple of years, as soon as Katie graduates. Just sell the business and be done with it. I’d like to travel a little, maybe live near the ocean. I’ve been doing the same thing for thirty years. I think that’s enough.”
He said he’d never really wanted to be a plumber in the first place. He’d gone to BU for Communications, but he liked partying a lot more than he liked studying, and had only lasted three semesters. He was nineteen years old, living at home, and of course he drifted into the family business, becoming his father’s apprentice, not so much choosing a trade as accepting his fate, which turned out to be not such a terrible way to go.
“The pay was good and I liked working with my dad. I bought a nice house, had a beautiful family. The years go by and all the sudden I’m the boss.” He bit the tip of his thumb, then took a moment to inspect the toothmark. “It all made sense until Lorraine got sick.”
Her illness was a four-year ordeal—diagnosis, surgery, chemo, radiation, fingers crossed. A brief period of hope, a bad scan, and the whole cycle all over again. His older daughter, Maeve, got married right out of college, moved to Denver with her husband. She was launched. It was Katie he worried about, a moody teenager, really close to her mom. She was a wreck. On top of all that, George’s own mother died, and all the crap started up with his father.
“This past year was a nightmare. I didn’t handle it very well. I was trying to keep the business running and take care of everybody else. I wasn’t sleeping too well, so I started drinking to slow my mind down, and you know how that goes. It got to be a problem.”
“It’s hard being a caregiver,” Eve told him. “You muddle through however you can.”
He said he’d had some difficulty controlling his emotions. He was angry all the time—at God, at himself, at the doctors, all of which was okay, as far as he was concerned. But he was also angry at his wife for being sick, which was unforgivable.
“You know what I was mad about? I was mad because I didn’t have a sex life anymore. Like she was inconveniencing me. The poor woman can’t eat, she’s in terrible pain, but what about me, you know?” He released a soft, bitter chuckle. “I watched a lotta porn while she was dying. I mean, a lot. My wife was upstairs, wasting away, and I’m down in the office watching Spring Break Hotties, or whatever they call it.” He delivered the bulk of this confession to the tablecloth, but now he looked up with a slightly bewildered expression. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
Eve was wondering the same thing. It wasn’t the kind of story you expected to hear on a first date. But she was touched by his trust, and relieved to know that their experiences had overlapped in this one peculiar arena, not that she would ever tell him about that.
“You’re a good man.” She reached across the table and patted the back of his hand. “You took care of your family when they needed you. I remember that day you came to the Center. I saw how much you loved your dad.”
He managed a weak smile. “I’m sorry if I was rude to you. That was probably the worst weekend of my life. Up to that point, anyway.”
“You don’t have to apologize. It was a sad situation. We all did the best we could.”
He cheered up after that, told her about the trip to Hawaii he’d been fantasizing about, if he could work up the courage to go alone. He thought he might like to learn how to scuba dive, even though it terrified him.
“It’s a whole other world down there. You’re like an astronaut on a spacewalk.”
She told him about Brendan and the rough patch he was going through, and talked a little about her Gender and Society class at ECC. George was more interested than she’d expected, explaining that Katie was big into all that stuff, queer this and trans that. She’d had a girlfriend her freshman year, but now she was dating a guy.
“She says she’s attracted to the person, not the gender. I guess it doubles your chances of getting lucky.”
“That’s a very enlightened way of looking at it.”
“Whatever makes her happy,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
He drove her home and walked her to her front door. He asked if he could kiss her and she said yes. It was a nice kiss, though a little more polite than it needed to be. Brendan was away that weekend, visiting Wade at UConn, and Eve decided to seize the day.
“You want to come in for a drink?”
George wrinkled his brow like she’d asked him to solve a tricky riddle.
“I’d like to. But I think maybe we should take it slow.”
He kissed her a second time, an apologetic peck on the cheek, and then headed back to his car. Eve went inside, feeling like she’d somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and poured herself a glass of consolation wine. She’d only taken one sip when her phone chimed, a text that made her close her eyes and thank a God she didn’t believe in.
Is it too late to change my mind?
*
Things moved quickly after that. Why shouldn’t they spend their weekends together? And why wouldn’t he drop by for dinner on a Tuesday night, and maybe stick around and watch some TV? And if he got a little sleepy on the couch, which he tended to do, who said he had to go home? Her bed was a queen, and she discovered that she slept a lot better with him lying next to her, snoring very softly, as if he were making an unconscious effort not to disturb her.
Everything was better when George was around. Even Brendan liked him, which was the biggest surprise of all, given how grumpy and territorial her son could be. They bantered easily, employing a half-affectionate, half-mocking style that Brendan had previously reserved for his favorite teammates and closest buddies.
“Oh shit,” he’d say, returning home from CrossFit. “This guy again? Don’t you have a TV at home?”
“I have a nice one,” George would say. “Lot nicer than this piece of crap. But your mom has Netflix and she’s really pretty.”
“Whatever, dude. I just hope you left me some food this time.”
“I finished off the steak, but I left you lots of that zucchini you like.”
Eve was deeply frustrated with Brendan in those days—he was the problem she couldn’t solve—but George insisted her son was just going through a rough patch, that tricky transition between high school and the r
eal world.
“He’ll be fine, Eve. Not everyone’s a Rhodes Scholar.”
“I’m not asking him to be a Rhodes Scholar. I’m just asking him to do his homework every once in a while.”
They’d probably had a dozen versions of this conversation before the night George laid his hand on her stomach and said, “You know, he can always come work for me. Just for the summer. If he doesn’t like it, no big deal. He can try something else.”
Eve was silent for a while, trying on the idea of her son holding a big wrench, wearing dirty Carhartt pants. It wasn’t a life she’d ever imagined for him, but it seemed oddly plausible, certainly easier to picture than Brendan as a financial analyst or CPA. And she knew George would be a good boss and a patient teacher.
“You should talk to him,” she said.
A week later, Brendan withdrew from ECC and started working full-time as a plumber’s apprentice. He took to it right away. He enjoyed the physicality of the work, the tools and the terminology, the sense of accomplishment he felt at the end of the day. It could definitely be gross, but he said you got used to that pretty quick. The starting pay wasn’t bad—way better than minimum wage—and it would get a lot better in a few years, after he passed his exams and got his journeyman’s license. A six-figure salary by the time he was thirty was definitely not out of the question. It was even possible that he could someday take over the business, be the Son in Rafferty & Son.
Eve told him not to get ahead of himself, to just take things one step at a time. She was disappointed by his decision to give up on his education, but she was relieved to see him so upbeat and purposeful, with some of his old confidence restored. It was a huge improvement on the sullen, beaten-down version of her son she’d gotten used to living with over the past winter and much of the spring.
* * *
I was hungover pretty bad on the day of my mom’s wedding, but at least I had a good excuse. After the rehearsal dinner, I went to George’s house and stayed up really late, drinking vodka shots with his daughter Katie and her boyfriend, Gareth, this tall, skinny dude who seemed about ninety-five percent gay.
“We’re gonna be stepsiblings,” Katie said. “Might as well get to know each other.”
It was weird that I’d never met her until the night before the wedding, considering how much time I’d spent with her father, way more time than I spent with my own. George and I were like family already. But she’d been living in Ithaca for the summer, tutoring underserved youth, and it was too long a drive to just pop home for the weekend.
“I don’t know.” She glanced around the living room, which was full of family pictures that included her dead mother, and gave a little shudder. “It’s just really hard to be here. I feel like crying every time I walk through the door.”
“It’s a grief museum,” muttered Gareth. He had a goth thing going on, hair that was really short on one side and really long on the other. The long side just kinda flopped over his face, covering one eye.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
“Thanks.” Katie tried to smile. She showed me the inside of her forearm, her mother’s name tattooed in graceful cursive letters. “She was a great person. You would’ve liked her. Though I guess if she was alive, you two would never have met.”
“Probably not,” I said.
Gareth poured shots and we all drank to Katie’s mom.
“It’s kind of amazing,” she said. “She hasn’t even been gone for a year, and here’s my dad getting married again.”
I asked if that bothered her, and she shook her head, no hesitation at all.
“I was worried about him over the winter. He was a real mess. But he’s been a lot better since he met your mom. I think he just needs a woman to take care of him. He doesn’t do that well on his own.”
That made sense to me. I remembered how George had just kinda showed up at our house in the spring and made himself a fixture. Right from the start, it seemed like he belonged there, like he filled an empty space in our lives. But I guess we’d done the same for him.
“You know what?” Gareth said, as if an idea had just occurred to him. “Fuck cancer.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Katie said, and we did.
Cancer was too depressing to think about, so I asked them how long they’d been together. They traded a quick look, like maybe this was a more complicated question than it appeared to be.
“We’re, uh . . . not really together together,” Gareth said.
“Yes we are.” Katie sounded a little annoyed. “We live together.”
“Yeah,” Gareth conceded. “But we don’t have sex.”
Katie nodded, maybe a little sadly.
“Gareth is an ace,” she told me.
“A what?”
“Asexual,” he explained. “I want to be with people. I just don’t want to do anything with them.” He made a face, like he was thinking about a food that grossed him out. “I never got what all the fuss was about.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “To each his own.”
We drank a shot to that, to people being whatever the fuck they wanted. I was feeling pretty loose by then, so I looked at Katie.
“So . . . are you like that, too? Asexual?”
“Only with Gareth,” she said. “If I’m attracted to a person, I tend to mold myself to whatever they are.”
They were sitting together on the couch, and she dropped her head affectionately on his shoulder. After a few seconds, he reached up with his hand and started rubbing her back in a circular motion, kind of like he was cleaning a window.
“We do a lot of cuddling,” Katie told me. “That’s the best part anyway.”
She was prettier than I’d expected—in the pictures I’d seen, she looked kinda plain—with her red hair and freckles, and kind of a soft, earth-mother body. Actually, she reminded me a lot of Amber, which was weird, because Amber had just sent me a long email a couple of days earlier, totally out of the blue. It was the first time I’d heard from her since I’d come home in the fall.
She said she’d just gotten back from Haiti, where she’d spent her summer volunteering in a women’s shelter in the capital city. It had been an amazing and humbling experience, trying to help women who were so much braver and more resilient than she could ever be. Women who had so little to begin with, and had to struggle just to survive—to feed their kids, to keep them healthy, and, maybe, if they were very lucky, to send them to school so they could learn to read and write and maybe someday have a shot at a better life. It was a transformative experience for her, an experience that made her realize how trivial her own life had been, especially her life at college.
She said she was dreading the thought of going back to BSU, getting sucked into that meaningless vortex again—the parties, the softball team, the social media, the dining halls, with all that food getting thrown away every day.
She said she’d been meaning to write to me for a few months, but kept putting it off, because part of her had wanted to apologize and part of her thought that other part was insane. She certainly didn’t want to apologize for anything she’d done—not for punching me, which I’d totally deserved, or kicking me out of her room, or ignoring the messages I’d sent her—but only for Cat’s painting, which didn’t accurately reflect her own feelings.
I’m not saying you weren’t a disappointment to me, Brendan. But so many guys have disappointed me, I don’t think it’s fair to single you out.
Also, if you were going to be up on that wall, I should have been up there with you. Because I’m the one who gave you the power to disappoint me. In that sense, I disappointed myself, which is just as bad, if not worse.
I’m not going to let that happen again.
I hope you had an okay summer,
Amber
I didn’t really know what to make of the email, though I guess it was somewhat comforting to know that she didn’t hate me as much as I’d thought she did. I was tempted to tell Kat
ie the whole story, just to hear what she had to say. I had a feeling she was somebody you could turn to for advice in situations like that. But Gareth had started to give her a neck massage, and she was totally distracted by how good it felt, wincing and groaning like a porn star as he kneaded her traps.
“So Brendan,” he said, squinting at me while he worked his magic fingers. “Are you really gonna be a plumber?”
“I’m just an apprentice,” I told him. “It takes a long time to get your license.”
Katie opened her eyes. “My dad says you might take over the business someday.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Unless I decide to go back to school.”
It was weird—until I said those words, I hadn’t even realized that I was thinking about maybe giving college another try. But I’d been feeling kinda down these past few weeks, listening to Wade and Troy and all my other buddies talk about how excited they were to get back to their dorms, back to their friends and their classes and the parties. It was hard to believe they’d just pack up their shit and leave me stranded in Haddington, doomed to a lifetime of installing water heaters and fixing leaky U-joints.
“You should definitely go back,” Gareth said. “I transferred three times before I got to Ithaca. You just gotta find the right fit.”
“I don’t know what my dad tells you,” Katie said, “but he never liked his job. He always said that he wished he’d gotten his bachelor’s.”
“Maybe I’ll fill out some applications,” I said. “Just to see what happens.”
“You’ll get in somewhere decent,” Katie said, and we all drank to that, and then to some other stuff, and we kept going until the bottle was empty and everything was pretty much a blur.
* * *
The guests continued to smile at Eve, beaming that united front of love and approval, but some confusion had begun to creep into their expressions, a collective unspoken question: Is something wrong? The Gray-Aires had been singing for a while now, so why wasn’t she moving? Why was she still standing on the patio, strangling that bouquet with her fists? What was she waiting for?