It had been just over eight years since I met Liam—at a chocolate festival, of all places. Ellie had coaxed me into going. She adored her fall traditions and forced everyone to go along, and she expected a smile and fun to be had. Genuine or forged, it didn’t matter. We were making memories, damn it. This was before kids. Apple picking, pumpkin farms—it was forced family fun that included just her and me back then. These days, though, wine tastings have morphed into hayrides full of sticky-fingered kids wielding pumpkin-shaped candy corns and seasonally wrapped Reese’s cups.
Last year, instead of getting buzzed off mulled wine, I spent the better part of an hour talking Hannah down from a candy-induced meltdown. Turns out if you try to explain to a kid that although Rudy Gutman stole your three-cent chocolate Milk Dud, you are still holding six pounds of even more valuable candy, they can’t be reasoned with. The economics of it was totally lost on a two-year-old who just released inconsolable, snotty howls until distracted by Ellie digging out an equally valueless, hairy Milk Dud from the bottom of her goody bag and saying, “Look.” That’s all it took, and I’d never once even considered that.
One of the first things that drew me to Liam was his position on kids. I had just turned thirty and was starting to get fatuous comments about “clocks ticking” just when Ellie was in a fit of baby fever. When two women at the festival stood dipping knots of bread under the chocolate fountain at one of the kiosks, I heard one of the women complain about her kids, and then say something like “but what is a home without children?” And uninvited, I answered, “quiet.” It was probably the chocolate wine speaking. They just looked at each other and shuffled themselves over to the chocolate macaroon castle.
Liam was sitting at a nearby table with a sampler of fruit and truffles, holding a pad and paper. He’d just started with the Tribune and was writing a piece on one of the chocolatiers. He made a joke about how people with toddlers refer to them in months, and stated that if they’re over a year old, you can just say “a year,” not fifteen months. They’re not aged cheese. I laughed. He offered me a strawberry wearing a chocolate tuxedo and gave me his card.
We fell in love hard and fast. We spent winter under comforters with takeout and whisky, sharing with each other our favorite music and movies, like college students—forcing one another to listen to a particular line in some angsty song that was reminiscent of the halcyon days of our youth, not so long ago.
It was barely a mile, we discovered, between my duplex in Wicker Park and his apartment in Ukrainian Village, so we’d walk to one another’s place after work and make love fiercely before going out to one of the infinite number of restaurants Liam had to show me. My freshly straightened, sandy hair hung long and neat down my back until he came over and pushed into the door when I opened it, and kissed me.
We’d stumble into the bedroom, or sometimes not even make it that far and end up on an area rug in the living room, hot and groaning, my once sleek hair now in damp curls clinging to my sweaty neck.
Then, weary from our day and exhausted from the sex, we just wanted to stay naked, interwoven in each other’s bodies and sleep, but there was a culinary world that had to be explored, so we’d always pile on layers and brave the cold night in search of a restaurant to impress us. Well, him. I was pretty impressed with every little haunt he took me to.
We’d stroll through evening snow flurries, through decidedly untrendy neighborhoods where he boasted we’d find the most authentic fare. He delighted in teaching me about food.
“This was an Irish Union working-class neighborhood,” he said to me on a frigid night as we ducked into an old pub for bangers and mash. “It may be gentrifying, but there are untouched gems where you can really see what an old family-run place should be.” We sat in old, wooden back booths sharing a bottle of wine or tiny cups of espresso, talking into the night, many nights. I had just started my postdoctoral placement in community mental health before getting my license and moving into private practice and I was working all the time, but the nights were all ours.
One night in November, we lay under the sheets with only the red flicker of the fireplace lighting our bodies. A Vito & Nick’s pizza box sat open on the floor beside the bed next to an empty bottle of d’Arenberg shiraz. He asked about my family, my childhood memories—the sort of insightful questions that made me fall in love with him. The amount of therapy one undergoes to become a therapist leaves very few past traumas unexamined, but I still found, to my surprise, that he was the first person besides my therapists to ask; talking about it in an intimate context brought up a flood of emotion I swallowed back, but was shocked to experience.
His questions about my father prompted me to see flashes of incomplete, disjointed thoughts and memories that had no right showing up in that moment. I thought of a Barbie doll I had when I was very young and how I had swallowed both of her tiny pink shoes for no reason at all. I thought of my mother’s instant coffee, of the sharp garlic smell of marinara sauce on the stove on days when the sun set long before it was ready to be nighttime, the sound of canned laughter from a sitcom played down the hall from my room where, without looking, I could see my mother on our yellow couch looking past the television at something so far away that I would never see.
I told him about my childhood home. I saw it clearly although I hadn’t been home in years—the blistered paint and tawdry wicker furniture on the slanted balcony of the shitty apartment building. The rusty, archaic Radio Flyer that housed weary soil and dead plants, the years of unhappiness there. My mother was probably still spending her days sleeping in the back bedroom with a box of wine on the bedside table. My father was long gone.
I told Liam about my reasons for specializing in domestic abuse—the time my mother drove through the rain in our Pontiac Bonneville, searching all the bars in town for my father. She sat me on an overturned milk crate inside the front door of our apartment and handed me the Remington shotgun that she kept under the kitchen sink next to a bottle of Ajax and a pile of molded steel wool. She told me if he came back, warn him once to leave, and then shoot. I was eight.
She planned on finding him first and shooting him with the handgun she kept in her purse. It wasn’t because the night before, he had forced her to lie on the bathroom floor and stomped the back of her head into the herringbone tiles, causing her to lose two teeth, and who knows what sort of head injury she’d sustained. He did this often. Maybe he was careful to use just the right amount of force to not cause life-altering wounds. More likely, though, it was so he wouldn’t get stuck raising me and my sister. No, it wasn’t retaliation for that. That, she didn’t seem to react to anymore. In fact, she’d have two over-hard eggs and a bacon smiley face on his plate at breakfast the next morning after waking up on the bathroom floor. This particular night, she’d heard that he was seen with a hand up LeAnne Butler’s skirt down at Shorty’s bar.
When they came home in the small hours of the morning, together, I was asleep in the front hall with the Remington clasped in my arms. I don’t know why I was surprised when they laughed at the sight of me and stumbled past me to the back bedroom. I didn’t feel particularly protective of my mother, all told. She never protected me.
“Jesus,” Liam said, stroking my hair mindlessly as I lay on his chest. “You don’t still talk to the son of a bitch, do you?”
“No.” I reached for a piece of pizza and sat cross-legged in a T-shirt and underwear, ready to be done with the conversation. It was making me more anxious than I had anticipated.
“Your mom?” he continued.
“Well, not really. She still lives in the same place. I guess I see her every few years by accident. She showed up at Ellie’s wedding, uninvited and hammered,” I laughed, humorlessly.
“God, Faith. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“When’s the last time you saw your dad?” he asked, genuine care in his eyes.
“A long time. I wish I could say my mom finally grew a set and left, but he worked as a trucker, and met some ‘bimbo in Missouri and moved into her trailer and just never came back.’ That’s the way my mom tells it, anyway.” Even though I’d mentioned once, in a similar late-night conversation over wine, that I’d worked through all of my shit, so not to worry. It was in a joking context. I was a little worried, though, that he’d see the piles of baggage I came with and I’d be regretful for opening up, but he just took the pizza out of my hand and dropped it in its box. He slipped off my T-shirt and kissed up my body, and although I was aware of the immeasurable gesture of unconditional love this was meant to be, although we’d only dropped the L-word a few weeks earlier in the infancy of our romance, I still hid the flood of tears streaming down my face as we made love. I turned over and pushed my face into the pillow to hide it as I felt him press his body into my back and kiss my neck. What the hell was wrong with me? That was a million years ago.
The concerned, loving Liam I saw in him that night was the Liam I got every day. It wasn’t a best-foot-forward facade I got for a few months until the newness wore off and I’d begin to discover a gambling addiction, or that he was a closet smoker, or that he usually spent five hours playing Grand Theft Auto when he got home from work. There was no temper lying dormant, no looking over my shoulder at a prettier girl. He even found my 1930s jazz obsession “sort of adorable” and hummed along to Ella Fitzgerald when I had it singing from my laptop while we cooked together. When my dog, Potato, was still with us, he baked him a birthday cake. Could there really be such a thing as a perfect man?