“He sounds like a good kid. Kid. I guess he’s more than a kid now, but it’s hard to get my head around it. And he was nervous, too, which was even weirder, because he…Well, he sounds a little like me when I’m rambling.”
I swallowed hard, holding Michael tighter, not daring to look into his eyes.
“And he wants to meet me. Well, us. All of us.” It was Michael’s turn to swallow, choking back sudden emotion. “He was kind of emphatic about that part, and he kept apologizing for whatever waves this was causing.”
“But did he say why?” I asked, finally getting up to walk back to the stove. The lid on the chicken pan was rattling, and I needed to turn down the heat. “I mean, why he’s getting in touch now?”
“He said there was a reason.” Michael loosened his tie and then slid it free of his collar. “He’d rather tell me—us—in person, though.”
I was moving the chicken breasts around in the pan to keep them from sticking, but my mind had already jumped ahead to the moment I would look this young man in the eye. The idea was overwhelming, and a host of other thoughts accompanied it. What if Sophia joined him? How was Emma going to react? How could we be sure that Drew was in fact Michael’s son?
“Tess?”
I must have frozen—I looked down to find the wooden spoon motionless and the pan lid in my other hand, suspended over the counter, dripping condensation.
“I’m sorry.” I finished with the chicken and wiped my hands on a kitchen towel. “It just struck me that…well, how do we know Drew is your son, biologically?”
Michael’s frown deepened, a worried slash above eyes gone still. “We don’t, not officially. But I don’t doubt it, Tess. And I can’t ask him to prove it, at least not until I’ve met him.”
Outside, a squirrel bounded through the yard, and Walter, parked at the screen door, barked his disapproval. I hushed him and turned back to the green beans, still piled on the cutting board.
“You’re right. It’s just that it’s so unbelievable,” I said, running water in another pot. “But too believable at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”
He was silent for a moment too long, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “You mean it’s too easy to believe that I slept with Sophia?”
I actually whirled around, for possibly the first time in my life, and water splashed over the rim of the pot, splattering my shirt. “No! No, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that this kind of thing does happen. You see it on TV and in the movies and on the news, but when it happens to you…I think you’d be the first to admit it’s a little surreal.”
He nodded, and then he was up and out of his chair, dabbing at my shirt with a tea towel, taking the pot from my hand and turning off the tap. His arms were encircling me, hard, his face in my hair, before I could say a word about Sophia’s call to me that morning.
Then Walter woofed at someone in greeting, and the screen door opened as Emma swung through it. Her backpack hit the table with a thud. “God, get a room, huh?”
She was leaning into the fridge a moment later, grabbing a can of diet soda before slouching against the counter. Michael and I separated with a sigh, and as Emma popped open the can, he kissed her forehead. She grunted “Daddy” in a tone of outraged humiliation, but he just shook his head and laughed.
“How was school?” I asked absently, adjusting the heat beneath the beans. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Did you have yearbook after?”
“Nope,” she said, hoisting herself up onto the counter, her sneakered feet swinging. “That’s tomorrow. I was doing costumes for the play.” She had inherited my mother’s love of fashion, and her facility with a sewing machine.
“What are they mangling this year?” Michael stepped back as Emma aimed a light kick at him.
“They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and they’re not mangling it at all,” she protested. “Or not much, anyway.”
The hair clip she’d been wearing this morning was gone, and the thick blond mass of her hair rested on her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed, and the tentative coat of mascara she’d been applying most mornings was long gone. She looked like my little girl again, and very much like Nell, I realized.
Would Drew look like Michael?
“What’s for dinner?” Emma said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “You two are probably hungry if you hung around here macking on each other all day.”
Michael snorted, but I hid my reaction by checking on the couscous steaming in another pot.
Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Didn’t all relationships begin that way, curiosity and infatuation making desire more potent, more immediate? After the first time that summer, we’d made love everywhere and anywhere we could, as often as we could, tangled together on the smelly old mattress up in my attic when everyone was asleep, reveling in the afternoon sun that streamed across Michael’s bed when his mother and sister were out. Everything was still new, still a discovery, every sigh or twitch of surprise a victory and a treasure.
Of course, twenty years down the road, we felt that particular urgency less often, and sex was sometimes more comfort and communication than passion. But it was still one of the threads that held us together—I’d treated that bond too lightly all those years ago. And the incredible news of a child of Michael’s wasn’t the only thing rattling me. It was wondering if Michael had believed then, or believed now, that I didn’t love him as completely as I knew I did.
AS I FINISHED MAKING DINNER, I thought back to those years so long ago when Michael and I were moving beyond the exhilarating newness of our relationship and into something solid, even with several states between us.
Surprising everyone, myself included, I’d applied to New York University during my senior year and been accepted. As a student whose grades had always been an afterthought compared with my form in pirouette, I’d managed to raise all my marks during the first half of my senior year—mostly because I had little to do but study, write letters to Michael and lie on my bed, moping and missing him. I’d given up the movie-theater job because the assistant manager was creepier than I could handle, especially when it was just the two of us behind the greasy concession counter on slow weeknights, and had taken a job at a bookstore downtown, instead. The owner was a wry, gentle man in his midfifties, and I was given just enough shifts to keep me busy a few afternoons a week and make some spending money.
Until Michael came home for the summer, nothing truly distracted me from the misery of being without him. When I moved into my Tenth Street dorm at NYU that September, though, it took a mere few minutes before I realized that this year distraction wasn’t going to be a problem.
The dorm was a converted hotel, and the rooms on my floor were former suites, with two generous bedrooms, a bath and several enormous closets. As dorm rooms went, it wasn’t the standard concrete-tiled cell I’d imagined, but I had four roommates. Living with four other girls was a shock of tempers, shower schedules, borrowed clothes and spontaneous bitch sessions about everything from boys to classes to the comparative number of calories in Famous Ray’s pizza versus Sbarro’s.
After a weeklong bout of what had to be estrogen shock, I loved it.
And I loved my classes, too, or at least most of them. The Psych 101 lecture at 8:00 a.m. wasn’t my favorite thing, but my other classes were just challenging enough to keep me interested, and life in the Village was exhilarating. Everywhere I went there were cafés, bars, vintage shops, newsstands, record stores and people. After years of trudging only into Penn Station and then uptown to Lincoln Center for ballet lessons, I found the Village