Eventually Annette had surfaced in New Orleans, where she’d moved in with a tattoo artist named Phred. When Eli proposed joint custody, he heard his soon-to-be-ex-wife sigh from over a thousand miles away. “Ruby can spend time in the summers with me,” Annette finally said. “But, Eli, let’s be honest. You were the one who wanted kids. Not me.”
Eli opened his mouth, ready to ask Annette what was wrong with her, how it was possible for her not to love the baby they’d made together, how anyone could not want Ruby. Then he closed it. Annette wouldn’t have any answers. At least, not answers that would satisfy him.
“I’ll never understand you,” he let himself say, and, again, he heard Annette sighing.
“I know,” she said, and ended the call.
For the next seven years, except for one month a summer, it was just Eli and Ruby, in a one-bedroom apartment financed, at first, by his parents, on the Upper West Side. When Eli started working he could handle the expense, plus private school for Ruby. Eli might have failed at marriage, but he was determined not to fail at fatherhood. He arranged his schedule so that he could be home for as many of Ruby’s waking hours as possible. His mom came to the city twice a week, and he’d found a wonderful nanny to stay with Ruby when neither of them could do it. He mastered a variety of hairstyles and kid-friendly meals; he hosted playdates and sleepovers; he never missed a single choir concert or parent-teacher conference. At every school play or class picnic or nondenominational holiday assembly, Eli was there, camera in hand, cheering for his girl.
Ruby had been seven years old when she’d decided that she wanted to learn to play the drums. Eli had enrolled her in music school, and that was where they’d met Sarah. He’d seen her while he waited for Ruby, a woman of medium height and build with shoulder-length dark-blonde hair; a woman who walked fast and had a determined jut to her chin. She wore crisp blouses and creased pants, or colorful print dresses and high-heeled boots. The kids called her Miss Sarah, and all of them adored her. She seemed calm and good-humored, utterly unflappable whether she was dealing with a parent unhappy about how quickly her kid was progressing or a preschooler who’d thrown up in the middle of drum circle. He’d planned to do nothing more than admire Sarah Weinberg from afar, especially because he sensed that bringing a new woman into Ruby’s life would be disruptive. By the end of her first month in second grade, he’d been called to the school twice because Ruby’s teachers had overheard her making up wild stories to explain her mother’s absence. “I have to give her points for creativity, but the trouble with telling the other kids that her mother was a lion tamer who was eaten by one of her lions is that now they think it’ll happen to their moms, too,” said Mrs. Levinson. Eli promised he’d have a talk with Ruby, which had been just as excruciating as he’d known it would be. “Honey, you know your mom isn’t in the circus,” he’d said gently, and Ruby, her face twisted, her eyes full of tears, had said, “Why won’t she come back?” And what answer could Eli give her?
Eli did what he could to make up for Annette’s absence, and Ruby was a generally good-humored girl, but sometimes she got quiet, her mood turning mournful. At her birthday parties and around Chanukah, he’d catch his daughter looking at the door, like she was hoping Annette would come through it, arms full of presents, heart full of regret. “That woman really did a number on poor Ruby,” said his mother, who’d refused to so much as speak Annette’s name once Annette had gone and referred to Eli’s ex-wife only as “that woman.”
Eli was loath to start a new relationship, because introducing a new person would be difficult, and having another woman leave would be even worse. His daughter had already been abandoned by the most important woman in her life. He wasn’t going to risk letting it happen again. He wouldn’t complicate things for Ruby for the sake of his own happiness. As far as he was concerned, parents forfeited their rights to make their own pleasure a priority as soon as a baby arrived （Annette, of course, would still probably be putting herself first when she was seventy years old, even if she’d had a dozen kids by then）。 But Ruby had taken matters into her own hands.
“Miss Sarah, do you like grilled cheese?” she’d asked, in her most winsome voice, after determining that Miss Sarah was single.
“I do!” Sarah had answered with a smile. “It’s one of my very favorite sandwiches.”
“My dad makes the very best grilled cheese in the world,” Ruby said. “I think you should come to our house so he can make us grilled cheese.”