“How about chocolate? That’s your favorite, right?” he asked his daughter. “Chocolate cake with chocolate icing?”
“Yes, Dad,” Ruby said, rolling her eyes. “When I was six.”
Eli frowned. “You don’t like chocolate anymore?”
“Let’s try this one,” said Diana, reaching for fresh forks. The poor woman, Sarah thought. She’d probably navigated through hundreds of dysfunctional family quarrels. Then the thought hit her like a poisoned dart. Were they a dysfunctional family? She’d never thought of them that way. Blended, yes. Dysfunctional, absolutely not. She felt herself drooping and tried to sit up straight, to look cheerful, to smile, for Ruby’s sake. “Here we are,” Diana said. “Lemon pound cake with a raspberry buttercream filling and coconut frosting.”
They ate their samples, sipped ice water, debated the merits of fondant versus buttercream, and discussed how many layers made sense. Or, rather, Sarah and Diana and Ruby debated and discussed. Eli kept his eyes down, shoveling cake into his mouth like he was being paid by the forkful, chewing and swallowing and barely saying a word. “They’re all good,” he said, when Ruby asked, and he didn’t seem to notice her wounded expression, which, of course, made Sarah want to hurt him. Ruby is your only daughter, and, God willing, this will be her only wedding. How can you do this to her? After fifteen minutes, he pulled out his phone, poked at its screen, and muttered something about an emergency root canal. “Sorry,” he said, reaching for his briefcase. “Time and toothaches wait for no man!”
Sarah and Ruby watched as he walked to the door. When Diana gathered the forks and plates and whisked them away, Ruby looked at her stepmother.
“Is something going on with Dad?”
Again, Sarah made herself smile. She wouldn’t worry Ruby, not with her wedding so soon. “He’s watching his little girl grow up,” she said. “I think all fathers struggle with that.”
Ruby nodded sagely. “Gotcha,” she said. She gave Sarah another hug, shook Diana’s hand, and went bouncing back to the subway.
Sarah walked slowly uptown, back to work, trying to put the unpleasantness with Eli out of her mind. Outside the school, she pulled on her mask and walked up the stairs, past a class of preschoolers carefully making their way down, one step at a time. Every day the building was full of little kids from nearby preschools who’d come to bang on bongos and shake maracas and rain sticks, dance and stomp and learn about rhythm and melody and how to make music. Sarah was glad to have them back; was lucky to be there herself. After a year of dealing with the difficulties of virtual lessons—the glitchy platforms, the overloaded internet, the digitally clueless instructors, and the kids who had to share their tablets or smartphones with parents or siblings, everyone had been delighted to resume in-person study, even if it meant uncomfortable masks, endless hand-washing, and sanitizing the keys on twenty pianos eight times a day. I’m lucky, Sarah told herself. No one in her family had gotten sick. She hadn’t had to watch a loved one being hospitalized or, God forbid, dying. Everyone was healthy, and there was a wedding coming up. Lucky, she thought, and walked inside.
At five o’clock, Sarah was walking to the subway, with her mask looped around her wrist. Part of her mind was on an upcoming （please God in-person） fundraiser, which would be held outdoors in Gramercy Park. One of their wealthy donors had a key. Part of her was, as always, trying to solve the puzzle of what was wrong with Eli, simmering with anger that he wouldn’t just tell her. Yet another part was trying to figure out how she could smuggle a new dress for Ruby’s wedding into the house without attracting Eli’s attention or censure （“More clothes? Really? You’ve got so many dresses!”）。 It was so unfair, she was thinking, when she heard someone come up behind her, and a familiar voice calling her name.
“Sarah? My God. Sarah Weinberg?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she just stopped, right in the middle of the sidewalk, and closed her eyes. It seemed that her body had recognized his voice before her brain did; as if something deep inside of her, on a molecular level, remembered it. Remembered him. For a minute, she didn’t want to turn around. She didn’t want to look and see what twenty years had done to her first love. She didn’t want him seeing what those years had done to her.
She heard him moving toward her; that familiar, sure-footed tread. When she’d known him, the summer they were both eighteen, Owen had been an athlete, a standout soccer and lacrosse player. Once, she’d dared him to swim butterfly across the length of Slough Pond. She’d tread water in the shallows, watching the graceful rise and fall of his torso and arms. He’d been maybe fifty yards from the shore when he’d taken a deep breath and slipped beneath the surface. She remembered his dark head popping out of the water, his wet hair clinging sleekly to his skull, his face, beaded with water, inches from her own.