She looked at Jason, studying his face as if for the first time. “I don’t want to make a mistake on something this big.”
“Me neither.”
“I need to know we can do it right.”
He leaned over and kissed her tenderly on the lips, laying his hand on the smooth bare skin of her inner thigh. Then he walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened her door. Kneeling on the asphalt, he took Vicki’s hand. “Victoria Repetto,” he said with the same gallantry he had shown the night they had met. “Will you marry me?”
She closed her eyes and gripped his hand tightly. It took her several moments to answer, and when she did, tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes still closed.
JASON ROSE, slammed the door of Rafe’s room and hurried through the apartment. She had taken everything of hers: clothes, vanity, the small card table they shared as a computer table, towels, linens, plates, silverware, pots, posters from the wall. The thoroughness of it was vintage Vicki, but somehow he had never seen it coming.
He found the phone beneath a pile of papers beside the bed. He wanted to call the friends she might have fled to but didn’t have the numbers. He thought of calling his own friends, but based on what he’d seen at practice, who’d give a damn? He never felt so alone in his life. Even in Alaska, in the darkest days of winter, he’d had his mother — and the hope, if not the reality, of his father coming home.
He opened the refrigerator and was shocked to see Rafe’s food still there. Three jars of half-eaten organic vegetables; a quart of soy milk; a package of Zwieback crackers; a plastic container with tiny pieces of pot roast he had left for Rafe’s dinner the day before; a six pack of Juicy Juice; an unopened can of mandarin orange slices. Rafe loved orange food — squash, apricots, yams, cantaloupe. Jason had called the pediatrician, concerned that he was eating too much of one kind of food, but she said it was fine. She suggested that he cook real vegetables and see how he liked them. Rafe not only liked them, he loved them: zucchini, broccoli, green beans. He was what moms at the park called a “good eater.” In the Stanford clubhouse, they’d call him an animal.
He closed the refrigerator. It was completely dark now but he was afraid to turn on the lights. As long as it was dark, he couldn’t see what was missing. The neighbors’ voices leaked through the wall, frighteningly clear. Jesus, had they been able to hear all their arguments as easily as this?
The buzzer rang. He lunged across the room and slammed the intercom. “Vicki?”
“It’s me, Vuco.”
Jason leaned against the wall and gathered himself, then pressed the button again. “I’m sorry about walking out. She took off with my kid — ”
“Buzz me in, for Christsakes!”
Vuco carried a six pack of Red Tail Ale and a Round Table pizza. He set them on the kitchen table and peered through the darkness.
“She take the light bulbs?”
Jason flicked on the kitchen light and stood self-consciously by the door, still wearing only his baseball pants. “Vuco, I know you think — ”
Vucovich tossed the papers Jason had left in the clubhouse onto the table. “Get dressed, will you?”
When Jason returned he found a bottle of Red Tail ale and a slice of pizza waiting. “My mama always said when you get a shock, you should sit down and eat,” Vuco said. He clinked his beer against Jason’s. They ate in silence, two large men at a small table that once held a family. “Do you know where she went?” Vuco finally asked.
Jason shook his head. “She took everything. It’s like they were never here.”
“Makes it easier to move on.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She gets the kid, you get to play baseball.”
“Jesus, Vuco, she took my fucking kid — you were there!”
“You gonna try and get her back?”
“Get her back? I just want my kid.”
“Get a lawyer,” Vuco said.
Jason looked at him oddly. Having to hire a lawyer seemed strange, after helping his wife become one. “I think we can work it out.”
Vuco gestured around the stripped apartment. “Doesn’t look like somebody who wants to work things out.”
Jason noticed that Vicki had missed the bookshelf wedged beside the refrigerator, full of the parenting books he had collected over the past two years. He took a sip of the beer. “I’m not going to let her do this, Vuco. She can’t just take him like that.” He studied his coach’s face but there was nothing to read. Should he tell Vuco how much he liked caring for Rafe? How good it felt to watch his son screw the lid off a jar, pound a plastic peg into his Playskool board, catch and throw a ball, burrow to sleep in the warm folds of his bed? His boy was becoming who he was because of him. He hadn’t done what a lot of people expected him to do — run away. How could he ever run away from his own son?
He drank some more and with each sip felt more in control. “Have you ever watched a kid for a whole day — just watched him?” Vucovich shook his head as if he’d been asked if he’d ever eaten a frog or worn a dress. “Whatsa, whatsa, whatsa?” Jason jabbed with his finger. “What’s a fork? What’s a napkin? What’s that oil on your pizza? Everything — everything — is brand new, like the Earth was created a minute ago.” Vucovich watched him, speechless. “Everything’s so innocent,” Jason continued. “How the fuck do we go from that … to this?” He gestured around the stripped apartment.
“What’s your point?” Vuco asked.
“This is my son! Like we were somebody’s son. I mean, what are fathers for? My dad wasn’t there for me — ”
“Christ, man, none of our dads were there,” Vucovich bellowed. “I’m not there for my kids! That’s what mothers are for!”
Jason shook his head. That night in Galveston playing catch with his dad came back as clear as a movie on a screen. He wished he had said more to him. Maybe, ‘I’m going to miss you,’ or ‘I hope it’s not long.’ Or — but that was ridiculous, no one in his family would ever say such a thing — ‘I love you.’
His father had left the next morning at dawn in a company van to Houston, where he caught a flight to New York and on to Oslo. He went to work on an oil platform in the middle of the Barents Sea and started to send checks home the size of which they had never seen before. After seventeen years in the field, he finally had worked his way up to foreman. He had the privilege of sleeping in a bigger bed and eating at a smaller table and getting time off on shore. And if he brought in his quota, there would be enough money to buy the liquor store he wanted and make another start and spend that time with his kid, like he promised. But he died first, along with twenty-nine other men, in a spectacular blaze that lit up the Arctic sky for days. For a long time Jason had blamed himself. If his father had had any idea of how much he wanted him to stay, he never would have gone. All that Jack Thibodeaux left behind, besides the money he sent home and death benefit checks from the oil company, was his unspoken promise to be a better father.
Vucovich wiped his hands on his napkin and stood. “Practice at nine-thirty tomorrow,” he said. “I’d suggest you be there on time — and alone.” Jason nodded. He was vaguely aware of how this looked from the outside, but that’s not where he was. It had seemed like the right thing to do, taking the year off. But now it was all gone — his kid, his wife, the respect of his manager. He stood helplessly at the door.
“Get some sleep,” Vuco said. Then he, too, was gone.