He spun Rosa around again, then kissed her, resoundingly, on her cheek. “Thank you,” he said, and hugged her hard. “Thank you.”
When he pulled away, Rosa was crying. “Do you forgive me?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Eli. He took her hands. “Yes, Rosa, I forgive you,” he said. “And look. You might have started things with me for your own reasons, but I was a willing participant.” He gave a scoffing laugh. “An extremely willing participant. If there’s bad behavior, it was on both of our parts. Maybe I deserved to go through a little hell for what I did.”
She nodded, sniffling. Tears were still sliding down her cheeks. “I’ve told Gabe his whole life I don’t know who his father is, when I do.” She paused. “I raised him without a father, when he could have had one.” She bent her head. “I don’t know what kind of father Benji would have been, but he would have been better than nothing. And that’s what I gave my son. Nothing. I was selfish,” she said, very quietly. “The truth is, I wasn’t good enough to make it as a singer, and I wanted something that would just be mine. I wanted Gabe all for myself.”
“You did the best you could,” Eli began, but Rosa was shaking her head.
“No. I knew it would be better for him if I at least tried. If I’d told his real father the truth; if I’d given him the chance to be part of Gabriel’s life, instead of doing…” She gestured toward him, and said, in a muted voice, “Instead of doing what I did.”
“Gabriel’s a young man,” Eli said. “It isn’t too late for you to reach out to his real father. And I can tell you, I’m honored to be his father-in-law.”
Rosa bent her head. “Thank you.”
“I should go see how Ruby’s doing,” Eli said.
Rosa nodded, her eyes on the sand. “And I should go talk to my son.”
Sarah
Most mornings in Brooklyn, Sarah was up by six o’clock, six thirty at the latest. She’d enjoy a half hour of solitude in the kitchen before she’d need to start chivvying the boys out of bed, serving breakfasts, and assembling lunches and checking that homework assignments made it into backpacks. On the Cape, fretting over Owen, and her mother’s revelation, must have taken a toll. When she opened her eyes on Friday morning, it was almost eight o’clock. Eli’s side of the bed was empty. His suitcase yawned open on the dresser; yesterday’s dirty clothes had been kicked into a corner of the bedroom. In the bathroom, his toothbrush was resting on the side of the sink, and a strand of floss dangled over the side of the wastebasket like a thin albino snake, but Eli wasn’t upstairs in the kitchen, or out by the pool, and when she checked her phone for texts, the only new ones she saw were from Owen. I’m here. Can I see you? Call me.
Sarah poured coffee into one of the pottery mugs her dad had made. After a career as a lawyer, Lee Weinberg surprised his wife and children by enrolling in an Introduction to Pottery class at the Castle Hill Arts Center, and discovering what he would loftily refer to as “unsuspected artistic depths.” He’d become proficient enough to make plates and bowls and a dozen mugs, generously sized, with a pleasant heft and a purplish-blue glaze.
Sarah added cream to her cup, slid the screen door open, and walked, barefoot, onto the dew-glistening deck. A breeze lifted her hair, and the hem of her robe. She set her mug on the railing and leaned over, looking down at the beach. A jogger in hot-pink shorts plodded along the shoreline; a group of six walkers with eight dogs, large and small, came from the other direction. Sarah watched as the frolicking dog pack swarmed toward the jogger, jumping and prancing. The jogger, clearly used to their welcome, unzipped her fanny pack and made each dog sit for a treat. The waves came curling and foaming up onto the shore; out past the sandbar, a pair of clammers waded through the shallows, working their rakes through the sand. Sarah took in the familiar scent of salt and seaweed and wild roses. In spite of her confusion and her heartache, and her mother’s confession, which Sarah had barely begun to think through, she felt a sense of comfort and rightness, the security that came from having her family nearby and in this place, the repository of so many happy memories, from knowing her boys were safe, still sleeping in the children’s room on the ground floor. She imagined she could feel her father here, his comforting, steadfast presence. He’d been an early riser, too. Sometimes, they’d find one another in the kitchen just after sunrise, and her dad would coax her into a walk on the shore or a bike ride to Provincetown, just the two of them. All will be well, she told herself, just as her cup, which had been resting securely on the ledge, rolled off and down into the overgrown thicket of rose hips and what was probably poison ivy, bouncing off the deck and splashing coffee onto her feet on its way down.