The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  “I can’t,” I told him. “It’s the first thing I have of you.”

  “Who cares?”

  “It was there in the beginning,” I said.

  “So were we.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Matty was in the kitchen, trying to make a meal of condiments. We’d ordered pizza every night that week; I was sure we would again. Tobias took me in his arms. “Who cares about a photograph when I have you?”

  “You never liked it,” I told him.

  He went back to arranging books on the shelf. “It wasn’t my favorite, and I had better work. I was nineteen years old. I sucked.”

  He didn’t understand. Who cared about the quality of the work? The point was the story. It was our bread crumb, maybe even our grail. I couldn’t lose it. I felt, for some reason, like losing it would mean something significant for our relationship—some bad omen. Like the photograph was our lucky charm and without it we’d be doomed.

  “Did you get rid of it?” I asked. “You can be honest with me.”

  “No,” he said. And left the room.

  That night, one of the first in our new place, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the photograph, about where it could be. About how, of all the things we moved over, all the useless, random appliances and furniture, that had to be the thing to go missing. I had been so careful with it. I took it down and wrapped it in that same paper—the sheets that had housed it for two years. I folded it and locked it with tape. What had happened to it?

  Tobias snored next to me, unconcerned. His head was on my chest and his curls tickled my neck. I thought about the boy who had taken that photograph. Who I had gone to see all those years ago. I didn’t find him then, but I found that photo, and for all the things I didn’t have, I still had that. Or had. That grainy man. I wondered if I had been holding on to the wrong thing.

  9:52 P.M.

  “TOBIAS IS DEAD.” NO SOONER HAS Jessica said it than I feel the crunch of metal through my body, the press of steel, the pounding pounding pounding of the cement chewing up my skin. When Tobias was hit, I felt it all, every last cracked rib and drop of blood. I’ve been trying to forget it happened. But of course it had. He’s gone.

  Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  Jessica is looking at me curiously, like she’s not sure what my reaction will be. Like I may overturn the table. I won’t, of course. It’s not like this comes as a surprise. He’s dead, I know. I was there.

  Conrad is wearing a look of concern, and Audrey keeps repeating “Oh dear” under her breath. Robert says nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” Tobias says. “I’m so sorry. I thought tonight—”

  “What?” Jessica interrupts, the fire in her voice back. “That you could turn back time?”

  For some reason, at that moment, we all look at Conrad. Maybe it’s that he’s a philosophy professor, maybe it’s that he’s been the authority at this table thus far. But I think it’s something else, too. Why are we here? How did this happen?

  He holds up his hands as if to keep us at bay.

  Audrey steps in then. “I think maybe we need a moment to digest this news.”

  Jessica digs the heels of her palms into her forehead. “With all due respect, we’ve been digesting this news for the last year.”

  The reality of his death crashes over me, the way it has so many times before. Those first few weeks, waking up gasping for air. The bolt of ice every morning realizing it wasn’t a dream, this is my reality, he’s gone.

  And yet for the first time in a year I feel a seed of something different, something bright, new. Because maybe …

  I reach for Tobias’s hand under the table, and this time I don’t let go, I hold it there. I feel his fingers curl through mine, the cool press of his palm. This is what I’ve been missing. This. Him. Flesh.

  I know Audrey isn’t coming back, or even my dad, but Tobias can. Tobias is mine. If it weren’t for our mistake, if it weren’t for what went wrong, he’d still be here. It’s my job to fix this.

  “What if that’s why we’re here,” I say. My voice is shaky and I see my hesitation reflected on the faces of my dinner mates.

  “I don’t know…” Robert begins.

  “No,” I say. This is it, it has to be. I feel like I’ve stumbled on the key. I’m not interested in another point of view. I want to take Tobias’s hand and lead him out of here, away from all these nonbelievers. “That’s what we’re doing here tonight. We’re going to be able to change things.”

  “Sabrina,” Audrey says, and it’s the first time she’s addressed me by name. “I do not think that is such a wise notion.”

  “Why not?” I’m feeling defiant, wild. Because what else matters, really, other than having him back? “You said yourself we’re here to figure out what happened.” I turn to Conrad.

  “I did,” he says. “I didn’t say change it.”

  “Maybe you can make peace,” Robert says. “I know it sounds—”

  “No,” I say. “Stop, please, all of you.” Their voices feel harsh, loud, like the cement drilling outside the apartment on Tenth at seven A.M. on a Saturday. I want it to stop.

  I look to Tobias, and his eyes are filled with the kind of hope I feel, and I drop down into that—that shared space between the two of us. The place we resorted to time and time again over the last ten years—where we needed only each other. The one that smoothed over our toughest moments, that drew us back together.

  “We can try to change, can’t we?” Tobias says.

  “I can’t stay for this,” Jessica says. “I can’t. I can’t see you…” She stands, and then Audrey stands, too.

  “Sit down,” Audrey says.

  Jessica looks taken aback. She pulls her blazer more tightly around her. “I will not.”

  “I said sit down,” she repeats, even more forcefully this time. Conrad puts a hand on Audrey’s arm. “This is Sabrina’s dinner, you remember? Jessica, please.”

  Jessica shakes her head. Then she plunks back into the chair. “That’s easy for you all to say. When it doesn’t work, I’m the only one who’s going to have to stick around. You’ll all go back, but I’ll have to hear about how it didn’t work, how it feels like she lost him all over again.…” Jessica’s voice cracks, and she sucks in her bottom lip.

  “Jess,” I say. I’m still holding Tobias’s hand. “I’m sorry; I have to.”

  “You want me to just sit here?” she says. She wipes the back of her hand against her face.

  “No,” I say. “No one here knows me as well as you do.”

  “That’s not true,” she says. “He does.”

  “No,” I say. “He doesn’t.”

  Tobias and I knew each other in big ways, sweeping ways, ways that felt eternal and unchanging. Fate. Destiny. The current of life pulling pulling pulling. But in the minutiae, in the day-to-day, in the coffee and poppy-seed bagel and Friends reruns and ballpoint over felt tip, it’s her. She’s always been my in-case-of-emergency person. I never wrote Tobias’s name down. It was always Jessica.

  “Please,” I say. “I need you. And I need you to stay.”

  She looks at me. Her eyes tell me that she’s tired, that she doesn’t want to do this, that she knows it’s a mistake, that we’ll never figure our way back out. But she nods. “Fine,” she says. “It’s your dinner.”

  I feel Tobias’s hand squeeze mine.

  Conrad clears his throat. “You were telling us about how he came back from L.A.,” he says.

  “We were happy,” I say. I pause, because for the first time I don’t just want to relive my experience, I want to hear his, too. I want to know what this was like for him, all of it. “Weren’t we?”

  Tobias looks at me suddenly, almost violently. “Of course,” he says. “How can you even ask me that?”

  “Many things can be true at the same time,” Jessica says.

  FOURTEEN

  THAT SUMMER AFTER HE CAME BACK, when we were living on Ei
ghth Street, rivaled our first year together for our happiest stretch of time. We rode around the city on bikes, ate ice cream from Big Gay on the High Line, spent whole afternoons on a blanket under the shade of a tree in Prospect Park. When I look back on it now, it’s as if we were alone in the city, but of course that wasn’t true. I had my job, and I was starting to find that children’s publishing might be where I belonged. I had pushed for a middle-grade manuscript about an eleven-year-old Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, that my boss had bought and fast-tracked. I felt like maybe I had a knack for it.

  Matty was dating a grad student at the New School, a writer by the name of Beth Sterns, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. She had an odd obsession with sunflower seeds. She was never without them. Subways, museums, even restaurants. There was a trail of shells wherever she went. She was nice. Whip-smart, too. Matty was still at the bank and was now considering a turn at a hedge fund, a pivot Tobias was, of course, against. But he had begun to share his thoughts less and less with Matty. “He doesn’t want to hear it,” he’d say after voicing a concern.

  “I know he’s disappointed in me,” Matty said to me one night in August. We were in the kitchen of Matty’s apartment, a new place in Midtown with sleek appliances and a wide view. He held the trash bin up as I shoveled empty takeout containers into it. Beth and Tobias were in the living room, setting up a board game.

  “He’s not,” I said. “You know Tobias, he has impossible expectations.”

  Matty nodded. “It’s not like he’s out there on his own. He’s doing ads for air freshener.”

  I winced. I hated being reminded of the reality of Tobias’s career. The one where he was sacrificing his artistic merit to be here, to be with me.

  “I worry about him sometimes,” Matty said. Some curry had gotten on my hand, and I went to the sink to run water over it and to put some space between Matty and me. We were still in that perfect summer. I didn’t want to know what he saw. The dinner I’d shared with Matty nearly two years ago flashed in my mind. How proud he’d looked. How he’d told me that maybe it was for the best.

  “He’s good,” I said, my back still turned. “The job is temporary.” I believed that it was. Tobias was too talented. Something else would come along, and this time, it would be here. I shut the water off. “Beth is great.”

  The pivot was not lost on Matty, who sighed deeply and handed me a dish towel. “Yeah,” he said. “She is. Kinda wish she’d switch to almonds, though.” We both laughed.

  Matty and I went back to the living room. Tobias had joined Beth, and the two were black-toothed and grinning.

  My friend Kendra, at work, was doing even better. She hadn’t yet found the next Harry Potter, but she had brought over a British series by an author who had previously (and famously) refused to publish in the States. She had been promoted on the spot for it to Associate Editor. She had an office now, and although I missed her in the bullpen, the office came in handy for us.

  It was a Thursday. Kendra and her boyfriend had a summer share in the Hamptons—or rather, he did. Our publishing salaries barely covered rent, let alone a beach house. She was dating a finance guy named Greg who seemed like an odd fit for her—I had met him, once, at a work BBQ our boss hosted at her house in Westchester, which had a proper backyard and grill. He rarely got off his phone the entire time.

  “I need to lose ten pounds,” Kendra said. We were in her office eating our lunches. It occurred to me that Kendra was, in fact, at least ten pounds thinner than she had been that past winter. Since she’d gotten with Greg, she barely ate anymore. I had lived in the city long enough to understand that WASPy finance guys often liked stick-thin pretty blond girls. Kendra was none of those things, and it seemed to me that if that’s what Greg wanted, he would have gone out and found himself that. I didn’t understand Kendra’s spontaneous obsession with changing.

  “I just don’t want to be thirty and single,” she said to me when I asked her about it. “I mean, do you?”

  Having Tobias in the atmosphere since I was barely nineteen meant I didn’t think about being single. I knew, as long as he was on this earth, I wouldn’t be, not really.

  “Have you guys talked about getting married?” Kendra pushed on.

  I looked down at my wilted greens. We hadn’t. We talked about the future. We wanted to travel. Sometimes we fantasized about a kid—his hair, my sense of balance. It was always hypothetical.

  “We’re just enjoying where we are now,” I said to Kendra. “We’re not in any rush.”

  But the truth was, of course, I had been thinking about it—alone, in secret. Tobias coming back felt significant in a way I wanted to make real. Marriage didn’t mean any promise of togetherness. I had learned that lesson young from my mother. But even so, I wanted it to be official. I wanted to stand up and make known those commitments to each other, in front of the people who mattered. There was paperwork and a community, a shared life. I wanted that tether to him. And Jessica had been on me lately. You’ve basically been together for five years, she’d say. What’s his plan?

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t feel I should ask. I wanted to believe he’d make it, that we’d someday have money to do the things our friends were starting to do, but he’d left his job to be with me. I wasn’t going to start in on him now.

  “You’re so confident,” Kendra said. She was dabbing at her eyes with some smoky charcoal pencil she now carried around. “I wish we had that in common.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel confident. Most of the time I felt completely unsure. But I loved him, and he loved me. That had to be enough.

  That night, a week after the night at Matty’s apartment, Tobias and I cooked pasta and ate in bed. It was dripping hot outside and the air conditioner only worked in the bedroom. The rest of the apartment hung at a cool ninety degrees. I never knew if having the windows open or closed made it worse.

  “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked Tobias.

  He burst out laughing. His fork went flying and hit the pillow. A smattering of tomato sauce looked like a mini crime scene.

  “Here.” I dipped a dishcloth in my water glass and handed it to him. “I’m serious.”

  “With you,” he said, sensing what this was about.

  “I know,” I said. “And work?”

  Tobias scrubbed at the pillow. “I don’t know. This gig is fine. Why are we playing this game?”

  I took a breath. I plucked up the courage. “Because Kendra asked me today if we’re getting married, and I didn’t know what to tell her.”

  Tobias didn’t stop scrubbing. “Tell her it’s none of her business.”

  “But it’s mine,” I said. “Jessica asks me, too. Shouldn’t we at least talk about it?”

  Tobias stopped and looked at me. “Do you want to?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He seemed to consider this for a moment. A change of plans, a subway reroute, a rainstorm in the forecast for a summer picnic.

  “That’s good to know,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Tobias sighed. “It means what it means. It’s good to know. I didn’t know marriage was so important to you, and now I do.”

  “I didn’t say it was so important. I just said we should talk about it. That’s what couples do when they’ve been together as long as we have.”

  Tobias set his plate down on the nightstand. “By all means, tell me what other couples do. We should take notes! How are we even surviving on our own?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No, that’s exactly what you meant. You’re never okay with us being us. You always need to make sure we’re falling in line.” He was getting angry. The vein on his forehead twitched when he was worked up.

  “Is it so terrible for me to want what other people have? Jessica and Sumir—”

  “Because they’re the picture of happiness?”

  Tobias liked Sumir, but they were nothin
g alike, and I knew, although he’d never said it, that as Jessica had judgments about our life, Tobias’s lack of steady income, our nuclear ways, Tobias had his feelings about theirs. Being stuck, being normalized—those were the things that kept him up at night.

  “What’s so wrong with them?” I was yelling now. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. The pasta shifted dangerously in my lap.

  “That’s really the life you want? To move to Connecticut? You don’t even see her anymore. They’ll never travel. They’ll be stuck in that house and then a bigger one and then a bigger one…”

  “Yeah, well, at least they’ll be together.” And there it was—the thing that was always underneath the surface of our fights. You could leave again.

  “Do you trust me?” Tobias asked. The energy was out of his voice.

  “Yes,” I said. I exhaled all the air I had been holding. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you need me to marry you to prove I love you?”

  “No,” I said. I hung my head and looked at the mess of pasta on my plate. It seemed so stupid now that we were downshifting. I had been whipped into a frenzy by Kendra—why?

  “You know there are no guarantees in life, and that I can’t promise you anything for certain, just like you can’t promise me anything for certain.”

  “But I can,” I said. “I can promise you.” I took his hand. “I love you so much.”

  His green eyes looked into mine. He tucked some hair behind my ear. “I love you, too,” he said. “It’s gross how much. You know that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you to be happy.”

  “Five,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Hot,” he said.

  I moved his hand to my chest.

  “I was talking about outside, but this, too.” He gave my boob a light squeeze.

  “Neck.” He kissed me there. “Promises.”

  “Really?” My voice had an edge to it, he could tell.

  He tilted my face up with his hand. “Sabby, if what you really want is to get married, we can go to the courthouse right now. Anytime. I want you to be happy.”