“Why wouldn’t you care about being smart?”
“Well, I probably care about it even more in one sense. You get older, you want the people you’re with to know just as much about the world as you do so that you can make your jokes and send your links. Or women do. We don’t, you know, get off on teaching other grown-ups. But being smart isn’t the only quality.”
“You’ve always been such a thoughtful person.”
I stared into his Captain America eyes, which were obscured by his cheeks because he was smiling. His assessment of me as thoughtful filled me with sadness. I didn’t deserve it, not when I didn’t care about his opinion when it mattered.
“Listen,” I said, “this may be weird, but now that you’re in front of me, I just wanted to say sorry I was so shitty to you.”
Willis screwed up his eyes.
“You weren’t shitty to me, not ever.”
“Willis. I was. Constantly.”
“Aww,” he said, ruffling my hair, as I stood there, stock-still, letting him. “You were just being yourself.”
I studied his face. Was it possible he’d dismissed my egregious behavior as the customs of a different world? In New York, we browbeat our men, mock their gifts, and tell them their ideas are sophomoric. Willis had applied the platitudes of hero videos to his personal life. He had rewritten history so that all his struggles were necessary in order to get him to the finish line—to his wife, to his girls, to his dog. I was a human sandpit.
“But, well,” I said, studying the ceiling, “I’m sorry about the abortion. Not, like, sorry for you. Not for the act. Just, you know, in general.”
“If you’re determined to apologize for something, apologize for never taking your air-conditioning unit out.”
“I’m serious.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, shutting the conversation down. “Another life.”
It was not another life for me, it was still my life. All mine. I sometimes thought about what our child would have looked like and if it would have hated me by now. What if it had gotten Mommy’s muscle mass and Daddy’s brains? But after Willis and I split, he had not thought about any of those things. He had pulled up the anchor. All this time, I thought I had turned him into cocktail fodder when I was the cocktail fodder. There was no life experience too big to fit into Willis’s tidy box, including that one time we semi-killed a semi-baby. His wife probably had her own box. Maybe a sorority hazing gone wrong. Maybe a whole rape that she thought of as a “date rape” if she thought of it at all. Just one idiot.
One of the tie-wearing men at Willis’s table waved in his direction.
“Duty calls,” he said again. “The call of duty. So cool to see you, Lola.”
Willis smiled broadly, skipping back to his life. Then he turned around and practically shouted across the restaurant: “What are the chances?!”
People looked up from their meals.
“I don’t know!” I shouted back.
What were the chances? Or the odds?
Modern Psychology had once devoted the back page to “luck language.” The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.” Hopeful people, of which Willis was one, used “chances” in the same spots where skeptical people used “odds.” I was an odds person.
Eliza approached with my bag in hand. She had the look of a mother who’d been forced to change diapers while her husband played solitaire on the toilet. But I was not the one who insisted we come to the restaurant with the unhinged kid in the kitchen.
“Why did you pick this place?”
“I told you.”
She seemed exasperated with me as she pulled her hair back, an elastic in her teeth.
“I mean, how long has Brody been working here? Was he working here the last time you came to visit?”
“Yeah, I think so. Hopefully, he’ll still be working here after that spectacle tonight.”
That spectacle. Crying in public. I looked at our now vacant table.
“Is he okay?”
“I mean, no. I don’t think he’s ever meant to be okay.”
“It’s late, I’m sorry. Are you ready?”
“You’re the one who’s been glued to the floor of this place.”