“Angelina named him after your grandfather?” The idea is shocking enough to be suspicious.
“Not exactly,” John says. “I never knew my grandfather, and my own father was an alcoholic. But all through my childhood, my good-for-nothing dad would tell me stories of his own amazing father, the fishing trips and poignant life advice he’d given. I told Angelina that I’d grown up with only the mythology of a father and that any good in me probably came from that man who I had never met.”
“So she named her son after what good there was in you,” I finish for him.
He nods. “Perhaps she thought her son was the only good that was going to come from me. I knew when I saw the name on the court papers that Angelina was being poetic, not malicious.”
“And after your daughter was born, you couldn’t lie to yourself anymore?” I don’t want us to lose focus on his failings.
“No, I couldn’t.” He fiddles with the martini glass on the table but doesn’t take another drink. “But he was almost fourteen, and I thought that it was probably too late. I went into a depression. I bought him that car the year after that…”
We pause then, reflecting on that little red car, the car he had loved and that had been at the scene of his death. That little car where I had stared at his profile in the dashboard light and wanted so much to whisper those three words that would have changed our lives.
As you wish.
“Are you all right?” John asks.
My vision is blurry from unspilled tears. I take a steadying breath that sounds more like it’s going to become a sob instead of calm me.
“For the record,” I whisper, “he loved that stupid fucking car.”
“At least I did one thing right,” he says.
My laugh makes the tears spill but also stops more from forming. I touch my fingertips to my eyes for the sake of my mascara and look back at John. The gentle concern on his face almost melts my resolve to continue to hold him to the fire.
“I know there’s still so much to talk about, but can I ask you how you’re feeling? Is everything going okay with the…”
“Tomorrow is the big ultrasound,” I say. “The one where they make sure the baby has everything it needs to be viable.”
“Are you going to find out the sex?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.” I remember that information like this is supposed to be part of a financial agreement between us, and I try to get us back on track. “So in addition to the car, every time you felt guilty, you were putting money away in Finny’s name?”
“Yes. I have documents here with me if you want to look over—”
“Last Thanksgiving, you had Finny over to meet your wife and daughter, but then you disappeared again. What happened with that?”
“He didn’t tell you anything about it?” he asks.
“No. Somehow I’d known the hurt was too much for me to touch, and so I’d never asked.”
This time, John takes a big gulp of his drink before he answers me.
“My ex-wife had always known about Phineas. I think she thought of him as an amusing anecdote from my playboy days. But when she saw us together, it became real to her.”
I can only imagine the shock it would have been to see Finny and John standing together, to see a youthful version of her husband sitting at her table, next to her daughter who she’d thought of as an only child.
“What happened?”
“She was”—he takes another small sip from his glass and sets it back down on the tablecloth—“cold to him is I suppose the way to describe it. She went out of her way to word things so it was understood that she and Stella and I were the real family. And I did nothing, Autumn.” His gaze is firm as he admits it. “I should have done or said something, at least to him alone. But the marriage was already half-dead, and I was envisioning losing my second child by trying to reconnect with my first, and I—”
The waitress appears with our salads. Mine is seaweed and shavings of cucumber, which looks like a pile of green spaghetti. John’s salad is red somehow. I find myself ordering both steak and lobster and wondering if the waitress will faint if I ask for a doggy bag at the end of the meal. Before she leaves, she asks John if he would like another martini. He hesitates and says no but to ask again after the entrées have arrived.
After she leaves, we look at each other. Our conversation was interrupted at a point where it does not need to be continued. We both know how he abandoned Finny again. We both know he didn’t attend graduation or reach out all summer. We both know how the story ends.