“For what?” Sara slipped the moccasin back on her foot.
“A play, a play. What else is there?” Patrick grabbed a script from on top of the TV. It was flipped open to his audition scene. “Run lines with me?”
“No.”
“Run lines with me!”
“No.”
“Meet him, then.”
“Huh?”
“Joe. Come out with us. Meet him. You’ll like him.”
“I never like anyone you date.” And that was true. Sara always thought Patrick sold himself short.
“Joe’s different.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He is!”
“How?”
Patrick took a step closer. He knew they were in danger of becoming codependent. That after five years of friendship he couldn’t live without her and she couldn’t live without him. If they didn’t do something about it soon, it would alter the rest of their lives. “He thinks I’m a pain in the ass, too.”
* * *
Patrick emerged from the memory and looked at Sara’s children, alarmed, as if they had teleported into his hot tub from another time. But when? Where? How had almost twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye? “Your mom and I used to live together. In New York.”
“Were you almotht our daddy?”
“What?” Patrick swung around to Grant, nearly spilling his drink himself this time. “No. Of course not.” He and Sara had once drunkenly made out in their dorm building lounge, but it ended with both of them reduced to fits of laughter. “This was a long time ago. We had a little apartment in New York, in Chelsea. A one-bedroom, but I slept on the couch. You could do that then, find something rent-controlled in Manhattan and make it work. Nowadays I don’t know where we would live. Queens or even New Jersey.” Patrick adjusted the tub’s jets so he didn’t have to talk over them. “Want to hear about it?”
“Yes. Was Mommy pretty?” Maisie asked.
“Oh, very. Fashionable, too. She worked at a magazine. I don’t remember which one; not Vogue, not Cosmo . . . Marie Claire. Is that the name of a magazine or was she the first lady of France? No matter, the pay was garbage but she got a lot of free stuff. I went to auditions during the day and waited tables at night in an obscure Greek restaurant, but I was never very good at it. First of all, the consonant clusters are all fucked—t’s and z’s together? C’mon. And I never really was a people person and that was reflected in my tips, which, fortunately, I pooled with the rest of the staff’s to split at the end of the night. They didn’t like me much because of that, bringing the pool average down—but it worked out better for me. I don’t know. I wasn’t cut out for it. One night I accidentally set a woman on fire. Your mom said I came home every night smelling of lamb.” Until he met Joe and stopped coming home at all.
“You set a woman on fire?” The look of disbelief on Maisie’s face was comical.
“Accidentally.”
“Accidentally?”
“Did she burn to a kwisp?” Grant’s eyes bulged with excitement.
“There was this dish that was served with an open flame and a woman was wearing too much hairspray, and, well . . . it was the 1990s. No one burned to a crisp. I doused her with house water.”
“What’s house water?” Maisie asked.
“It’s what they made us call tap water.” Maisie’s expression could best be described as confused. “Yeah, I thought it was bullshit, too.” Patrick had done enough performing to know when he was losing his audience; the looks on the kids’ faces only underscored what he could already feel. “We laughed so much, all the time. Everything was funny. That’s what I remember most about that time. Your mother had the best laugh, that rich cackle that came from the very depths of her soul. We didn’t have any money to speak of, but when we would laugh like that, in the middle of New York, when the city would do everything in its immense power to keep you down, we felt rich as kings. I miss that time. It’s cliché, I know. But I think it was the happiest time in my life.”
Maisie’s curiosity was piqued. “Was it the happiest time in Mommy’s life?”
“What?” Patrick looked at his niece; this time he could effortlessly read her face. “No. No. Ultimately, we were different people that way.”
“When was her happiest time?” It was just like Maisie to worry that she might have been her mother’s regret.