“I don’t know,” John said, “it sounds pretty profound. For instance, what was the last day you were a child?”
“Oh, heavens. I don’t think you ever know. Certainly not at the time.” Dwayne looked up at the ceiling fan and watched it spin. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go back, though? To relive that day? One last perfect day of feeling completely safe. Creative. Free.”
“What?” Patrick was having none of it. He put his spritz on the coaster. “Who says your last day as a child was carefree?”
“Because if it wasn’t you’d already be partially grown up.”
“The day before my father died,” Eduardo blurted, and everyone fell quiet. Even Patrick, who was reaching for his drink, froze. “Everything changed after that.”
John scratched his chin, recalling a memory. “My bicycle was stolen when I was in the sixth grade. It sounds trivial now, but I loved riding that bike. I never rode a bicycle again and I don’t know why. Or trusted people the same, for that matter. I don’t think I’ve ridden a bike since.”
“I hear you never forget,” Patrick offered, referring to John’s riding a bike, but perhaps equally about trusting people—a thought that made him shudder.
“That’s it,” Eduardo said, finally breaking the silence. “We’re getting you a bike for your birthday.”
Dwayne agreed and John’s eyes actually watered, and suddenly it was lovely, watching the three of them. For a loner like himself, Patrick often thought of their relationship as the nightmare scenario. Someone always in the kitchen annoyingly standing in front of the spoons, the bar soap in the shower covered in the residue of too many body parts, hands reaching for you from every angle like you were walking through a carnival horror house. But he could see now there was a loveliness to it, too.
“What about you, Patrick?” John asked.
Patrick took a long, slow sip of his drink and savored the biting sweetness. He liked Aperol; he’d read a flavor profile once that described it as approachably bitter （as opposed to say Campari, which was—like himself—inaccessibly acerbic）， and it went down easy in the desert heat.
How to answer the question. When was the last day he felt like a child? He used to love to sing “On Top of Spaghetti,” to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey,” in its entirety. Now he couldn’t even remember the words. （Someone sneezed on a meatball? That seemed wholly unsanitary.） Should he say that? Or was it when he threw out his last pair of Velcro sneakers, or that other pair with the pockets that made him feel like a kangaroo? Was it the day he first saw Scotty Savoy take a shower after gym? That was an awakening, sure, but the end of his childhood? Perhaps just the end of his innocence—but was that the same thing? In the end he settled on the truth. “I think last week.”
To the uninitiated, it would seem like a throwaway answer, a joke, the kind Patrick had long employed to avoid sharing anything real, but JED took it as intended. Specific to Patrick, or not, there was something about being responsible for children that clearly delineated your adulthood from any notion that you were still a child.
“See?” John said. “Profound.”
“What about the kids?” Dwayne asked. “Do you think this marks the end of their childhood?”
“No,” Patrick said instinctually. This morning he found a blanket on the floor of his bedroom. It wasn’t there when he had gone to bed, but there it was at the foot of his bed when he woke up. Someone was sneaking into his room to sleep. To feel safe. That someone was definitely a child. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”
They all looked at their drinks, Patrick hoping he hadn’t soured their afternoon.
“You know the New York Times just published an editorial stating the Aperol spritz was no good?” Dwayne commented.
“I didn’t realize Campari was on the New York Times editorial board,” Patrick stated, and they laughed until the room grew still. He watched some dust floating in a ray of sunlight.
“Top you off?” Eduardo finally asked. “I could make one more round.”
“No. No. I should really get back.” The kids were probably fine, but he had already shared too much.
EIGHT
The knock on the door wasn’t a surprise, it happened from time to time. It was the manner in which Maisie answered that caught Patrick off guard. “What,” she said to the UPS deliveryman, like a crotchety old woman in curlers. A week had passed, and despite a continued struggle with the food he served not being—for whatever reason—quite right, they’d settled into a comfortable rhythm of days by the pool and a nightly routine that had Patrick telling stories in bed with them until they passed out from exhaustion and too much sun. Twice he swore he heard them sneak into his room with their blankets and pillows after they thought he was asleep, but if they spent the night, they retreated before dawn. He decided not to make an issue of it. If the kids were getting comfortable in his home, that could only be a good thing.