The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

  Tobias had gone quiet behind me. I went in search of his hand. “Hey,” I said, tugging him closer. “What do you like?”

  “I like that one,” he said. He looked determined. “The one you had on. We’ll buy it.”

  “Tobias,” I said. I moved toward him and lowered my voice, trying to give us the illusion of privacy. “It’s way too much, come on.”

  “Isn’t the man supposed to buy the ring?” he asked me. But it wasn’t a question. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was tinged with aggression.

  “Yes, but baby, I don’t need that one. Let’s just pick something else, okay?”

  I rifled through the rings. There was a sweet one with small chips of diamonds and amethysts in an intricate gold pattern. “How much is this one?” I asked Ingrid.

  “Seven hundred,” she said. “It’s very sweet.”

  I slipped it on. It fit perfectly. “What do you think?” I asked Tobias.

  He barely looked down at my hand. “It’s fine,” he said.

  “Tobias,” I said. “Fine isn’t good enough. Do you want to keep looking?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, it’s really nice.” He picked up my hand gingerly. “It looks great on you.” He gave me a small smile I knew was taking a lot of effort.

  “I love it,” I said. I meant it, too. It wasn’t the first ring, but it felt good on my hand. I knew I wanted to leave it there.

  “We’ll take it,” Tobias said.

  I snuggled into him. He put his arm around me. We were trying at the moment. I wanted to recapture some of that playfulness I had felt when we first walked in.

  “It’s a wise choice,” Ingrid said. “It looks lovely on you.” She didn’t seem any more or less pleased that we were going with the ring that was five times cheaper, and I felt a rush of affection for her.

  We followed Ingrid back past the coatracks and into the main room. She stood behind the register and I watched Tobias take out his wallet. Seven hundred dollars was still a lot of money, money he didn’t have, and I knew it, but something told me not to offer to chip in. Tobias put a credit card down.

  We hugged Ingrid good-bye and climbed the stairs to the street. It was markedly cooler than when we’d gone down. “I love it,” I told him. I looked down at my hand—the ring was twinkling in the last rays of summer sunshine. “And I love you.”

  He pulled me toward him. “You sure you’re happy?” he said.

  I wanted him to add with the ring, but he didn’t.

  “Of course,” I said. “The happiest. I get to marry you.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He nodded a few times.

  I reached up and took his head in my hands. “This is all I need,” I said. “It’s all I’ll ever need.”

  He hugged me then so tightly I almost couldn’t breathe. We clung to each other on that late afternoon as if we saw what was coming.

  10:42 P.M.

  WHEN TOBIAS’S LIPS FINALLY LEAVE MINE it takes me a second to remember where we are. Dinner. The list. I touch my fingers to my lips and blink back out at the table. Audrey and Conrad are looking at us. Robert is busying himself with his soufflé, and Jessica has her arms crossed next to me.

  “I’m sure that fixed everything,” she deadpans.

  “I miss being kissed like that,” Audrey says. Her voice is low and breathy, and then she startles up and looks at Conrad. I imagine, under the table, they’ve brushed legs.

  Tobias is looking at me like he’s trying to gauge my reaction, but all I can think is that I want to know how he feels, what he’s thinking. I want to take his hand and run outside and take him home.

  “Sorry,” Tobias says to me. “I didn’t mean to…” Tobias looks to Jessica. “Did you want us to get married?”

  “Of course,” she says, but her words are unconvincing. “I wanted you guys to be happy. This isn’t about me.”

  “It kind of is, though,” Tobias says. “You won’t stop talking, and you’re here.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not kissing her. Plus, I’m alive.” Her face sneaks a smile, and Tobias notices.

  “Jess,” he says. “Conrad is very much alive, as are you, and Sabrina.”

  Jessica rolls her eyes, but the smile is still there.

  “We used to have fun together,” he says. He scoots his chair so he’s facing me, talking to her. “Remember the night we drew all over Sabby in Magic Marker and put toothpaste on her feet?”

  “She deserved it,” Jessica says. “She made us miss Book of Mormon.”

  “It was my birthday,” I say.

  “Yeah, twenty-fourth. You should have been able to handle your booze better.” Tobias needles me with his elbow, and Jessica laughs.

  “You were so pissed,” she says. “You didn’t speak to either of us all day.”

  “Correction,” I say. “I was puking all day.”

  “Still,” Tobias says. “That was us.”

  Jessica leans back and nods. “Yeah. It was. But that was a long time ago.”

  I feel the air charged around me. Like I’m the space between the positive and negative ions. The dense collection of yes and no trying to come together and apart, together and apart.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken me back,” Tobias says. He’s leaning forward with his hands clasped over his knees. “After L.A. Maybe you should have moved on then, stayed with Paul, I don’t know.”

  I think of saying no to that buzzer, of not letting him up and back into my life. But it was never a viable option. When Tobias came back, there was no alternative.

  “I never asked you to stay,” I say. Not even to him, to the whole table. “I couldn’t come to L.A. with you, but I never asked you to stay.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Audrey asks.

  “I was too proud. Or too afraid, I guess. That he’d say no. Or he’d say yes and then resent me.”

  “Would you have, Tobias?” Audrey’s voice floats in on the breeze. “Would you have stayed?”

  I want him to say no so badly I can practically taste it. It feels ripe in my mouth—a berry about to be plucked.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Or no. I guess the answer is no. She didn’t have to ask; I went. I hated it, but I had to.”

  “And you came back?” Audrey asks. “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t live without her.”

  The table hangs in silence. No one moves, not even to pick up a wineglass.

  I never questioned that Tobias was the one for me, but what if all this missed opportunity, strife, and heartbreak didn’t point to the epicness of our relationship but instead its precariousness? Its fragility. Maybe Jessica was right—we hadn’t grown up, we hadn’t taken responsibility. I somehow believed the universe would do it for us. I believed it tonight, still sitting here. But what if the work had been up to us all along? Timing is everything, Jessica told me when he left. And tonight, we are almost out of time entirely.

  TWENTY

  ONE DAY IN EARLY OCTOBER, Tobias came home to tell me he wanted to strike out on his own. The time had come. Things at the new gig had gotten worse and worse. Not only was he miserable, but he felt like he had taken ten steps backward since the course he’d been on in L.A.

  I knew he wanted to return to photographing what he loved, and I knew it was just a matter of time before he’d want to pursue another job or begin to build his solo résumé. The fact that it was at this juncture, when he was dead broke, when we were barely making rent and had just gotten engaged, didn’t seem to be troubling him. He was a ball of energy as soon as he walked in the door.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said, coming to sit with me on the couch. “But today it just hit me—why wait? I want to be able to focus on my own work.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Okay.” Living with someone who didn’t like his job, who I now knew felt resentful, wasn’t fun. I wanted him to be happy, and I wanted him to finally have the career I knew he wanted. But I also wanted to sleep indoors, and eat, and have a wedding. I tried to do
the math. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  I could feel his excitement, and I went to get us something to drink. I pulled a bottle of expensive champagne Matty had bought us as a housewarming gift when we moved in that we’d been saving. I brought it out with two glasses. If we had to talk about this, we’d talk about it with booze.

  “I’ll give my notice tomorrow, they’ll find someone, and I think Lane will probably fill in in the meantime.” Lane was another assistant who was part-time. Tobias liked her. “And then, first things first: I need to build a Web site.” Tobias was talking with his hands, the way he did when he was really animated. I popped the champagne and poured.

  “I’ll get Matty to help me on the tech stuff, and then I want to approach the clients I worked with in L.A. I don’t expect all of them will say yes, but maybe one or two.…”

  I handed him a glass. His eyes were shining. I had seen it so rarely those days. On the beach in Montauk, maybe not since. If what he was saying was true, if the work would come, I wanted to get behind him. Maybe this was our problem. His unhappiness with work had leaked over into our personal life. If he started getting happy there, he’d be happy here.

  “Cheers,” I said. “I think this is a great idea.”

  “Yeah?” Tobias looked a way he very rarely did: sheepish. “I mean, I’d maybe need you to cover the entire rent for a month. Two, at the most. But then I’ll be making way more than I do now, and I’d pay it all back.…”

  My heart started to speed up in my chest, but I didn’t let it show. I put my hand over his. “Baby,” I said. “That’s fine. We’ll make it work.” I was little more than scraping by at Random, but I had some savings. My parents had bought bonds when I was born and sold them at my college graduation—the money amounted to about ten thousand dollars and had grown since. I’d use that. It was worth it to see him this happy.

  “I love you,” he said. He kissed me fiercely. “And I want to start talking about the wedding. We should do it in the spring. Why wait, right?”

  My heart seemed to expand out of my body. It grew so big that it encompassed us both. It thumped all around us.

  “Spring,” I said. “That sounds great.”

  “Or we could elope.” He took my glass out of my hand and set it down. He pulled me into his lap.

  “Like Vegas?” I asked. I put my hands on his face. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his chin was all stubble. It tickled my skin as I rubbed back and forth.

  “Like city hall,” he said. Tobias leaned in to kiss me and then pivoted me around until I was straddling him.

  “My mom would freak,” I said. I was breathless now. We still had sex often, but it had lost some of the intensity, the connection I used to feel before L.A. And here it was again, blazing between us on the couch.

  “Don’t forget Jessica,” Tobias said, working my neck. “She’d kill you.”

  “She’d kill you,” I corrected him.

  We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “Have you shown her the ring?” he asked.

  I had. We’d had dinner the week after, and she seemed happy. All she wanted to do was talk about the wedding—where we’d have it, what I’d wear. I let her. I had fallen more and more in love with the ring the more I wore it. I didn’t even take it off at night. I loved the small hint of gold, the way it picked up the sun.

  “Yes,” I said. “She said it was nontraditional. You know Jessica. She just needs to feel like things are her idea.”

  “Even me?”

  “Even you,” I said. I kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve learned some things from our sales and marketing departments,” I said. “You should make Twitter and Instagram accounts with your photos, and I’ll help you promote them.”

  He threw his head back in a show of disdain.

  “It’s important,” I said, needling him. “You need to create a presence.”

  “A presence.”

  “A presence.”

  “How do you think I’m doing right now?”

  “Decently,” I said. I raised my eyebrow at him, and then in one swift motion he picked me up and threw me over his shoulder.

  Tobias wasn’t much bigger than me—taller, maybe a touch sturdier, although barely since he’d gone vegetarian. He’d lost the muscle mass he’d returned from California with. I teetered on his shoulder as he stood up and wobbled to the bedroom. He clutched my legs tightly as he tossed me on the bed.

  “I think this is going to be good,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  I felt, if not convinced, then relieved, alleviated. There was something to focus on now. I felt like we had finally found the thing to solve, and the way to solve it.

  10:48 P.M.

  WE ARE DEEP INTO DESSERT. Ice cream will only hold its shape for so long.

  “I was never one for sweets,” Audrey says. “But this is delicious.”

  She lifts a bite of praline ice cream onto her spoon and feeds it to Conrad, who opens his mouth willingly.

  “Divine,” he says, licking his lips.

  “Incredible soufflé,” Robert says. “I used to try and make them, but I never quite got the rise right.”

  “The trick is not to overwhip the egg whites,” Audrey says.

  I try to imagine Robert in his kitchen, an apron on, a doting wife chopping up vegetables and two little girls at his feet. If he were a friend, I think, I’d have been happy for him.

  “So good,” Jessica says, her mouth full of a giant bite of soufflé.

  Tobias sips his espresso. He turns to me. “I never regretted coming back,” he says. “Sometimes I was upset that the work stuff wasn’t turning out the way it had in L.A. But it wasn’t your fault, and I should never have made you feel like it was.”

  “We were getting married,” I say.

  “We were,” he says. It’s sad; he’s sad.

  “I was never sure you really wanted to,” I say.

  “I did,” he says. “When I asked you to marry me, I meant it.”

  “And after?”

  He runs a hand around the side of his neck. “I don’t know,” he says. “I wanted to be with you, but I wanted a lot of things. I wanted a lot for you, too, if you’ll believe that.”

  “I do,” I tell him.

  “So you never got married?” Robert asks. “I notice you’re not wearing a ring.”

  He sits up a little straighter and does a flourish with his hands when he asks, like he’s fixing some sort of invisible tie.

  “No,” Tobias says. “We didn’t.”

  “You were close, though,” Robert says. His voice is sad. “It must have been so tragic. So much unfinished business.”

  Tobias hangs his head. “We had set a date, yeah,” he says. “But the accident…”

  “We weren’t together, exactly,” I say. “We got in a big fight, we hadn’t spoken in over a month.”

  I hear Conrad’s fork clatter down on his plate. “You were broken up when he died?”

  I feel the tears well up within me. I’m afraid if I speak I’ll never be able to stop crying.

  “It’s okay,” Robert says. “It’s not even eleven yet.” He looks at me, and the hope on his face, the belief, splits me right down the middle. And all at once I know the thing I want to ask him, the question at the heart of the why.

  “Would you want to change things if you could?” I ask Robert.

  I see him weigh it in his mind. His wife, the children. The baking and bruised knees and school drop-offs. The years he filled with them.

  “Yes,” he says. His voice is scratchy. It catches on the one word. “If I could make things right with you—yes.”

  “Even if it would change everything?”

  Robert clears his throat. “The one thing you can never rationalize is the loss of a child. Everything else. People become paraplegics and they find God. They lose all their money and they say it brought them a deeper level of peace, that they discovered what’s really important in life. I have heard peo
ple say the worst of things happened for the best. But no one ever says that about losing a child.”

  Conrad makes a noise at the other end of the table. “Well,” he says, but that’s all.

  I look at Robert. He’d want to go back, if he could. Undo all the life that was lived after. But that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a little girl—for him to prioritize me, for him to care, for him to return. But hearing him say it now, I know it wouldn’t be right. I’m not the only thing that mattered in his life. There was a family that needed him, too, that deserved to exist, and being my father, now, at this point, would undo all that.

  Robert is looking at me with what I can only describe as love. Nervous love, timid love, love that does not know its place or where or how it will be received—but love all the same. And I think that maybe that’s enough. For now, at this table, that’s enough.

  TWENTY-ONE

  TOBIAS QUIT HIS JOB THE NEXT WEEK and was out of his office in three days. Not that he’d had much by way of a desk. He came home with a box filled with prints—all of which he’d brought there to begin with.

  “Is Lane taking the gig?” I asked him.

  “For now,” he said in that way that let me know he didn’t want to talk further about it. That was Tobias—he could be brash about things. When he made up his mind, that was that.

  “That’s great,” I said. “We should celebrate.”

  We went to our favorite taco place in Park Slope. We ordered margaritas and gorged on free chips and guacamole. I pulled out a box and set it on the table.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A belated birthday present,” I said. His birthday had passed with little fanfare the previous month. He had said he didn’t want a present (just a cake, a card, and me with nearly no clothes on), and I’d listened, but I’d been wanting to give him this for a while.

  “Sabby,” he said. “I told you not to.”

  “Still.”

  He opened it. Inside was a pocket watch I had from my father. My mother had given it to me years ago—I couldn’t even remember when. It was gold, with a tiny thread of silver around the perimeter.