“Thank you.” She put the card in her purse, gave him a wavering smile, and touched his hand. “You’re a good guy.”
I’m not, he thought. I definitely am not.
She’d turned, walking away, the ruffled red skirt of her dress swishing against her thighs. Eli watched her go, feeling almost faint again as he thought, I got away with it. I think I actually got away with it.
And after that, Eli had been good. He’d kept to his promise never to stray again. As the summer went on, he’d go hours without thinking of Jane, or whatever her real name was. Then hours became days, days became weeks, then months of not thinking of what he’d done. And then, on the subway, he’d see a flash of long, wavy hair or he’d see a woman in a red dress with a leather jacket on the sidewalk, or, standing in line at the coffee shop, he’d catch a whiff of a familiar perfume, floral and musk, and the memories would come slamming back into his body, leaving him feeling battered and breathless. Maybe he’d been possessed, he’d think, shaking his head, or maybe it had just been something he’d needed to get out of his system, a poison he’d had to expel before he could settle into being a good husband, a good father, a good man.
Annette had left when Ruby was just six months old. Eli had been a single father, and then he’d met Sarah, and had fallen in love, and they’d become a family of three, then four, then five. He’d blinked, and had become, somehow, middle-aged, with silver hairs in his beard and a bald spot he couldn’t see but, still, knew was there. He’d lived decades of his life believing he’d gotten away with those few nights of madness. He’d been thoughtlessly happy, with no sense of a sword hanging over his head. Then the pandemic had arrived, and Ruby had come home. And she’d brought Gabe.
Eli would never forget the afternoon he’d met his daughter’s intended. He’d been coming down the stairs to make himself a snack, and he’d walked into the kitchen and seen a dark, sleek head leaning against his daughter’s curls. The young man had looked up, and he’d had exactly the same slant to his eyebrows that Eli remembered, precisely the same tilt to the corners of his lips, and the same wide, dark eyes. For a moment, it was like time had spun itself backward, and he was twenty-nine again, gangly and clueless, a married man, but still mostly a boy. Eli stood, paralyzed, in front of the refrigerator. He could barely move, could barely breathe.
“Daddy, this is Gabe,” Ruby had said. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”
The boy had walked over to him, hand extended. Even his fingernails were the same shape as the nails of that long-ago woman. A dozen tiny, ineffable things that all added up to a single, inescapable conclusion.
The mug that Eli had grabbed, one with the words WORLD’S BEST DAD hand-painted on its side, fell out of his hands to shatter on the terra-cotta floor. Ruby had made that mug for him, years ago. Sarah had taken her to one of the paint-your-own-pottery shops that had been popular back then, to help her make a Father’s Day gift for Eli. Hashtag irony, Eli thought dimly.
“Oops!” he said, his voice too loud.
“Oh, no!” Ruby had cried, and bent down to gather the shards. Gabe had given Eli a friendly smile. Eli made himself shake the boy’s hand.
“So, Gabe, where are you from?”
“Los Angeles,” he said.
I’ll take care of it at home. Back in California. Eli kept himself motionless, remembering that Jane, or whatever her name really was, had been set on having an abortion. He couldn’t be sure. Even if, through some terrible coincidence or joke of Fate, this boy really was her son, that didn’t necessarily mean that Eli was his father.
“And how are you finding New York City?”
“I love it here.” The boy gave his daughter a fond look. “It hasn’t broken my heart yet, Ruby says.”
Ruby took Gabe’s hand and came to stand beside him, so that they were hip to hip and thigh to thigh. Eli swallowed hard. “Gabe did The Bacchae with me last fall. And he sings in an indie rock band.”
Eli nodded. Eli smiled. He felt like a windup toy, going through the motions he had to make, behaving the way he knew he had to behave.
“So are you a senior? Like Ruby?”
“Yep. Not at Tisch, though. I’m in CAS. The College of Arts and Sciences.”
“So you’re twenty-one?”
“Yep.” He gave Ruby a squeeze. “Ruby’s five months older than I am. My old lady,” he said, and kissed Ruby’s forehead, right above her glasses.