SHE WASN’T PARTICULARLY paying attention or anything, but it didn’t escape Via’s notice that neither Sebastian nor Matty came to school on Monday or Tuesday. She wasn’t surprised, figuring that Matty was still under the weather and Sebastian would obviously choose to stay at home with him. But Wednesday rolled around, and it was Tyler who brought Matty to school.
Via noticed as she jogged through the school parking lot toward the front entrance, but she was so late for a classroom observation session that she hadn’t had time to do more than wave. She certainly didn’t have time to go over there and ask him where Sebastian was.
Via was racing from one appointment to the next all morning, two of which were about Sarah Tate and her father, and it wasn’t until the last fifteen minutes of her lunch break that she even got a second to think about the fact that Sebastian was MIA for the third day in a row.
She unlocked her cell phone and entered into a text strand before she exited out and called Evan instead.
He answered on the third ring.
“Hey.”
“Hi. Just eating lunch, thought I’d call.”
“Cool. I’m eating, too.”
“Still think you’ll be home on Sunday?”
There was a pause, where she heard him open a can of soda and scrape a chair across the floor. “No, I’m thinking I’ll drive back down on Saturday instead. I miss you.”
She furrowed her brow. “You’re gonna rent a car to drive home? Isn’t it just an hour on the train?”
“Crap. I spoiled the surprise. I wanted to tell you in person.”
Via set down her sandwich and rubbed her sweaty palm against her gray pencil slacks. “What is it?”
“Well, I got a car.”
“What?”
The weight of car insurance and parking tickets and repairs instantly tumbled down over Via, so fast she felt like she couldn’t have stood up if she’d tried.
“It’s great, you’re gonna love it. A silver Lexus. Four-door. Parking will be a bitch on my block, but I can keep it parked by your house, that’ll probably be easier. I spend so much time at your house anyway.”
“Ev, a car is an enormous expense. How did you afford it?”
“My parents gave it to me.”
“Your parents bought you a car,” she repeated blankly.
“No.” He was irritated now. He’d obviously wanted her to be more excited than she was. “They didn’t buy it for me. So save the judgment. They gave it to me. My mom just got a new one, and they gave me hers. It’s used.”
She said nothing and he barreled on. “And don’t get up my ass about all the expenses. They said they’re gonna keep it under her name, and they just added me to her insurance. They said they have no problem paying for it until I’m back on my feet.”
“Back on your feet.” Again, the words were lifeless coming out of her mouth. She was basically parroting them back to him.
“Yeah. That’s why they gave it to me. Because I explained how fricking hard it is to get around the city on public transportation. They thought it would help me to make it to all my job interviews.”
“Job interviews?” she asked weakly.
“Yeah, my dad’s friend lined up two paralegal interviews for me for next week. They’re downtown. Near Federal Hall.”
Instead of elation and relief that Evan had two legit job interviews coming up, the only thing that was going through Via’s head was how easy it was to get to Federal Hall from almost anywhere in the city.
Evan and his parents had decided that he needed a car for that?
To spare him from two twenty-minute train rides at a whopping $2.75 apiece? In her opinion, driving would be significantly harder. He’d have to fight traffic and find parking.
But, she realized as she dropped her forehead into her hand, that wasn’t the point. The point was that Evan had wanted a car and, snap your fingers, he got a car. Like a toddler whining for a juice box.
He was saying something in that deep, familiar voice of his, the one that usually made her toes curl, but she couldn’t even make out the words.
Via felt half of herself grip the edge of a door buried deep inside her. She wanted to slam it closed. With some attitude. She wanted the door to shake on its damn hinges. But the other half of her had two palms on that door, holding it open with all her strength.
She still wasn’t listening to him. How could she? She was just. so. tired.
The landline on her desk rang, jolting her straight up and making her realize how far down she’d slouched.
“Ev? I have to call you back. My lunch hour is up.”
She said goodbye and hung up with him.
“Via DeRosa,” she answered her phone, her voice sounding strangely wooden.
“Via! Hi! I hope it’s all right I called you at work.”
“Ah, who am I speaking with?”
“Oh!” A bright, bubbling laugh came through the line. “Sorry. This is Mary Trace. Sebastian’s friend? We met this weekend?”
“Of course, sure. Hi, Mary. What can I do for you?”
“Well, actually, I was calling to ask a favor.”
“Oh?” Via had really liked Mary when she met her. The woman was friendly and sweet and obviously wanted to get to know Via and Fin. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a little surprised to be getting a phone call from her in the middle of the workday.
“So Seb is home sick—he got what Matty had, did you hear that?”
“Oh shoot. No. I mean, I suspected when he wasn’t in school but that sucks. Strep is terrible.”
“I know. And I was supposed to pick up Matty and bring him home today, but my shop assistant is a no-show, and I really don’t want to close down this afternoon.”
“You want me to walk Matty home?”
“Would you? I’d owe you a million favors. Or maybe just the friends and family discount at my store?”
“I would have done it for free, but now that you’ve offered it, I’m holding you to that. I’ve been eyeing those brass-and-marble coasters for damn near a year.”
Mary laughed that bubbly laugh again. “They’re yours.”
“I’ll grab him after class and take him straight home.”
“You’re a lifesaver. I’ll text Seb and let him know the change in plans.”
“Tell him that Sadie will be with us, too,” Via added impulsively. She had no plans with Sadie that afternoon, but suddenly, walking Matty home from school and checking on a sick Sebastian felt really intimate. She didn’t need a chaperone per se. But yeah. The thought of one of her colleagues seeing her walk Matty home by herself and assuming something... It made her stomach flip uncomfortably.
“Sure. Thanks again.”
MATTY WAS APPARENTLY overjoyed to be the kid who got walked home from school by not one, but two teachers.
“You’re strutting like a rock star.” Via smiled down at him.
“Am not!” Matty insisted, then screwed his face up into a little twist. “Which rock star?”
Via and Sadie laughed as Via straightened his backpack on his shoulders.
“Maybe Prince?” Via supplied.
“Definitely Prince,” Sadie agreed. She had a huge smile on her face. “Just look at those little hips.”
“My dad really likes Prince,” Matty said, absently reaching up and lacing his fingers with Via’s. “Sometimes on Sunday mornings we have raspberry pancakes and listen to ‘Raspberry Beret.’”
Sadie and Via both threw their heads back and laughed. Hard. The image of huge, barrel-chested Sebastian making fruit pancakes and dancing to Prince with his son was too much for Via. She got that strange door open/closed feeling again, and it had her catching her breath.
“So he’s pretty sick, huh?” Via asked, ignoring the tight feeling inside of her.
“Yup.” Matty dipped the toe of his sneaker into a shoe print that had been pressed into the wet concrete decades ago. “I got him sick. But he says it’s okay because it was an accident. And that dads understand that sometimes they get sick when their boys get sick.”
Sadie made a little gasping noise and pressed her hand to her heart. Via understood perfectly.
“He should be better in no time,” Sadie reassured Matty. “He only had to miss a few days.”
“That’s true,” Matty said thoughtfully. “But it’s not quite fair because when I got sick, I only had to miss school, but he had to miss fun stuff.”
“Like what?” Sadie asked.
“Well, he had to miss nachos day in the cafeteria today, which is his favorite. And also he had to cancel two dates.”
Via missed a step when her toe caught on a crack in the sidewalk, but Sadie didn’t even notice. The redhead’s eyes were narrowed in on Matty’s face, an insane light in her eyes. She was finally getting a little Fabulous Mr. Dorner gossip, and she apparently didn’t give a rat’s ass about the integrity of the source.
“Your dad goes on dates?” Sadie asked innocently, shamelessly.
“Sadie!” Via hissed. It was so inappropriate to ask Matty this that she felt heat all the way to the roots of her hair.
Matty didn’t seem to notice or understand the impropriety of the question. The six-year-old played with the toggle on his backpack strap and nodded fervently, almost viciously. “Yeah. Moms and dads can go on dates!” His face was knit with both certainty and confusion. Via got the distinct impression that he’d had this same argument with a classmate. “Well, I don’t really know about moms. But dads can. My dad goes on dates all the time.”
Sadie inhaled, swallowing wrong in her excitement and coughing out her next words. “Really? He tells you about it?”
Matty nodded, like the answer was so obvious he was surprised he even had to explain it. “He always tells me where he’s going and who he’s going to be with. He says it’s fair because I have to do that for him. But he goes on dates with ladies, and I go on playdates.”
“Ladies?” Sadie asked, prying for more Mr. Dorner gossip. “Like lots of different women?”
Via was mortified, utterly mortified. They were prying into this man’s private life. And for nothing more than gossip.
“Sadie,” she murmured. She was going to take the first opportunity that they were alone to make sure Sadie knew that none of this could be shared with a single other soul.
But apparently Matty didn’t care. “Yeah. Lots. But he says he hasn’t met his match.” Matty kicked a stone down the sidewalk in front of them and the movement had him tugging down on Via’s hand. Sadie didn’t even have to fish for more information; the kid was on a roll. “Daddy says that a lady can’t be a match for him if she doesn’t want to be a mommy. But that I shouldn’t hope too much because that’s really hard to find.” Matty squinted up at the two women walking him home. “But I don’t get it because there are tons of mommies. So I don’t understand why he can’t find one.”
Sadie’s expression instantly became chagrined. She’d been pushing in a fun way, but it was so clear that this wasn’t a silly, salacious matter. This was Sebastian’s life. Matty’s life. This was a man who was trying to tread carefully enough that his son wouldn’t get caught in the crosshairs.
“Well, you know,” Via started. She was gonna give this her best shot. And then she was going to tell Sebastian everything, so that he could decide if more explanation was warranted. She owed him that. This wasn’t a game. The man was a parent. And Matty was a person with feelings. “Finding the right person isn’t easy. Because people meet each other all the time, but they don’t always fall in love. Falling in love is a little bit magic. And you know how rare magic is.”
“What do you mean, it’s magic? Magic like Serafine’s magic?”
Via weighed her head side to side. “Maybe. Honestly, I don’t know. It’s still a little bit of a mystery to me. But I guess what I’m saying is that the best thing you can do is just be happy you have a daddy who loves you so much that he wants to find the perfect person to fit in with your lives.”
“Okay,” Matty said, his eyes squinting across the street at a lady walking her poodle. He’d reached capacity for adult conversation. “You think that dog is Crabby’s mom? Because Crabby is half poodle, but we didn’t know who his parents were ’cuz we never met them.”
“Could be.” Via gave his sweaty little hand a squeeze.
“Who is Crabby?” Sadie asked, putting enough attitude in her question that Matty laughed.
“My dog!” Matty let go of Via’s hand and sprinted up the last half a block, apparently very excited to get home.
He was banging on the front door and bouncing on his heels when Via and Sadie caught up. The two women stayed down on the sidewalk as they looked up to the front porch.
The locks slid and the door swung open to reveal a very tousled, very pale Sebastian yanking a T-shirt into place.
“Dad!” Matty lunged forward and hugged Sebastian around one thigh before he dropped to his knees and let himself get completely tackled by Crabby. The ecstatic dog trounced the kid, covering him all over in licks and face rubs. Sebastian weakly smiled at the boy’s wild yelps of delight and sagged against the doorjamb as he looked down at the two ladies.
“Hi.”
“You look awful,” Sadie said candidly, taking a step backward like she could catch germs from ten feet away.
“I feel awful. I just took another round of medicine. I can’t believe this was how Matty was feeling. I give him a lot of credit.”
Sebastian’s eyes found Via’s and she found herself stepping up the stairs to the porch. His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale, there was a sheen of sweat covering all the skin she could see. He really did look awful.
“Seb, maybe I should take Matty out for dinner. Give you a few more hours on your own to rest?”
Matty looked up. “But it’s my cheese night! I wanna go but only if I can get mac and cheese and a grilled cheese and a cheese stick like I would have here.”
Sebastian groaned and leaned his clammy forehead against the door. “Matty, you’re not supposed to tell people about cheese night.” He looked up with one cracked eye, his hair sticking up in a hundred directions. “I swear we eat vegetables on every other night.”
Via couldn’t help but laugh. But her mirth dissolved when Sebastian wiped the sweat off his forehead with one shoulder and looked exhausted at the simple motion.
“No judgment about cheese night. But, Matty, I make a mean grilled cheese. I really think I should help.”
Sebastian looked like he was going to argue, and Via took another step up the stairs.
“Come on, Seb. It’s no trouble. And don’t act like Mary wasn’t going to stick around and help for a few hours. Let me fill in for her, okay?”
“Looks like you guys have it covered!” Sadie called from twenty feet away. Apparently, she’d been slowly backing away from the house of plague this entire time. “I’m gonna hit the road but, Via, just call me if you need something, okay? See you tomorrow, Matty! Feel better, Sebastian!”
With a brisk wave and a backward skip or two, Sadie was jetting down the sidewalk toward the school.
Sebastian lifted his eyebrows and gave a little chuffing laugh. “I look that bad, huh?”
“You’ve looked better,” Via observed dryly. “Come on, Seb. Let me help.”
He gave a deep sigh and stepped backward, letting her come in. “You’re right. I need a hand. Matty, you wanna show Via your puzzle collection? I’ll be right back out.”
He closed the door behind Via and she hung her bag and coat on the hooks in the front hall. She noticed they were his copper-and-wood signature style. Sebastian disappeared down the hall, and she took the opportunity to really look around.
The last time she was in his house she’d been so tightly strung. Nervous and off-kilter. She hadn’t expected Mary to be so pretty; she hadn’t wanted to butt in on his quasi-date with Serafine. She’d been worried about Matty. She just hadn’t gotten comfortable at all. But now, with Sebastian in the other room and nobody around but Matty, Via let her eyes take it all in.
It was a very warm space. Every wall was painted, all slate grays and a few accent walls of royal blue. There were countless picture frames, photos of Matty at every age, Seb in a few places. And a gorgeous blond woman who Via could only guess was Matty’s mom. Via made her way down the hallway toward the living room and paused to grin at a picture of a very young Seb and Tyler, not older than Matty, missing teeth and dirty, arms around each other’s shoulders.
The living room, with its plush couch and armchairs, had a big, colorful rug and a spray of toys that Matty had already hauled out of a big tin chest in the corner.
“You have a puzzle collection?”
“Yeah! I love puzzles. No, Crabby!” Matty attempted to box out his dog who was boisterously nuzzling at the boy’s hands. “Dad says I have to do them at the dinner table, though, or else the pieces end up mysteriously lost.”
Via grinned and took Crabby by the collar so that Matty could pass by unhindered. “Do you want a snack before dinner?”
It was only 4:30. She figured she had an hour before she had to start making dinner.
“Yeah.”
“Run that back, kid.” Sebastian’s voice came from over her shoulder and Matty froze in place, turning back to Via with a sheepish look on his face.
“Um. Yes, please, Miss DeRosa.”
She hid her smile. “You got it. Why don’t you get started on your puzzle and I’ll bring it to you, okay?”
He scampered into the dining room to start the puzzle, and she turned to Sebastian. Something went smooth and soft in her belly. He’d changed into jeans and a fresh T-shirt, and his face and hairline were damp from where he’d splashed water over them. He still looked like microwaved death, though.
“Sebastian, why don’t you go lie down?”
“I’m sick of my bedroom.” He took on an ornery, stubborn expression that was especially prevalent in elementary schools.
For the second time in as many minutes, Via hid her smile from a Dorner boy. “All right, well at least go and lie down on the living room couch.”
He looked for a second like he might argue with her, but it wasn’t long before he ambled into the other room.
Via kept an eye on Matty in the dining room as she slapped together some peanut butter crackers and a handful of grapes. “Matty,” she said in a warning tone, “does your dad let you climb all the way onto the table when you do your puzzles?”
“Sometimes!” he insisted with the defiance of a kid who got caught in wrongdoing. His neck went a little red and he slid back into his chair, eyeing the plate that Via set down. “Can I have water, too?”
Via grabbed him some and then went back into the kitchen, checking to make sure that they had everything she needed to make dinner for Matty. She noticed a few other things in the fridge and pulled them out.
She found a pot and the rest of the ingredients she needed and started chopping vegetables. It wasn’t twenty minutes before she had the soup on the stove and she washed her hands. Via and Matty got a good jump on the puzzle, working on it for half an hour before she had him washing his hands and helping her make his dinner. He carefully buttered the bread and laid out the cheese slices for the grilled cheese. And then he studiously stirred the cheese mixture for the mac and cheese.
She grinned at his solemn little face as he cooked. Like it was a science experiment that might explode out of the beaker if he put in one drop too much milk. She wondered if Sebastian ever had Matty cook with him.
“Do you cook very often?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Only sometimes with Grandma Sullivan.”
“I used to cook all the time when I was your age.”
“Really?”
“Yup. My parents were from Italy, and cooking and eating is a really big deal in their country. So even when I was a kid, I already knew how to make marinara sauce and pasta from scratch. All sorts of things. Stew and bread, all kinds of pastries.”
“Do you still cook?”
“Every day,” she told him. “I love it. It calms me down. I like to cook the way you like to do puzzles.”
“Yeah, but you can’t eat puzzles.” Matty cracked up at his own joke.
“And you can’t spread out macaroni and cheese all over your dining room table.”
He laughed harder. “Well, you could. But then Dad would get really frustrated and make me clean it up.”
She checked on Sebastian, who was snoozing on the couch, curled on his side with a blanket up to his shoulders.
She and Matty carefully shoved the jigsaw puzzle down to one end of the table and she sat with him while he ate. He really was a very competent conversationalist. He always had been, even when he was in her pre-K class, but it was easy to forget that he was just six years old. After dinner he brought his plate to the dishwasher, but he needed reminding to wash his hands and face.
“It’s not bedtime yet,” he told Via, just in case she got any crazy ideas.
She nodded solemnly. “Of course not. It’s only 6:30. But I think we should go easy on your dad. Do you ever play outside after dinner?”
“Yeah. Lots of times. But not really when it’s dark out.” He peered out the sliding porch doors and grimaced at the glowing blue twilight creeping over the trees.
“You can play a video game, buddy!” Sebastian called from the other room with a voice that sounded like he’d swallowed some rough grit sandpaper.
Matty was in the living room like a shot, and Via followed after. Sebastian was just pulling himself up to a sit and clicking on the lamp next to the couch.
“Can I use volume, Daddy?”
“Only if you wear the headphones.”
Matty was busy pressing buttons and plugging in jacks and putting disks in slots. He was a whir of digital-age action until he popped the giant headphones on, grabbed up the controller and plunked his butt down in front of the TV. Via was relieved to see that he was playing a soccer video game, not a fighting one.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Sebastian said, still lying partway down, his gray eyes squinting.
“I’m happy to do it.” She lingered in the doorway. She knew it was probably time to go home, but she found herself wanting to stay until Matty’s bedtime so that Seb wouldn’t have to worry about it.
“What smells so good?”
“I made you some Italian cabbage soup. My mother always made it when I was sick. It’ll keep for a few days so you can eat it whenever you want.”
Sebastian pushed off the blanket and moved to stand.
“Oh! You want some now?” she asked. “I’ll get it.”
“You don’t have to do that, Via.”
“No, no!” She waved her hands in the air and was already darting out of the living room toward the kitchen. “Let me! Please, it’s half the fun of making food for someone.”
She served him a bowl and filled up a tall glass of ice water. She figured he’d feel awkward if she didn’t take some for herself as well, so she put an identical serving on a tray and carried the whole thing out to the living room.
Sebastian’s eyes were closed when she stepped toward the couch but as soon as she set the food down, he was sitting back straight, scraping a hand over his face.
“Are you sure you’re up for eating?”
“Honestly, my throat is killing me, but I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
She tsked and nudged his bowl forward. “I hope you don’t mind that I raided your kitchen to make all this.”
“Mind? Please. I’d been side-eyeing that cabbage since the weekend, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with it.”
She laughed. “You bought it without a recipe in mind?”
Sebastian shrugged, taking a bite of soup and wincing. “My throat,” he told her when he caught her eye. “Tastes so good, though. Yeah, I always try to buy a bunch of vegetables and then figure out what the heck to do with them. Cora used to do all the cooking, so I was pretty lost for a while after she passed. But I can make a fair stir-fry. Smoothies in the morning. Pancakes. Frittata. Tacos. Toward the end of the week, I’ll make a huge kitchen sink omelette and just toss in everything we have left.”
For some reason, that made Via smile around her soupspoon. “Smart.”
He shrugged again, and she could see how sick he really was, purple under his eyes and his face lined.
She glanced at Matty. “Can he hear us?”
Sebastian shook his head. “He’s dead to the world right now. Freaks me out sometimes. Like, I could get murdered by aliens and he wouldn’t even know.”
Via laughed and set her soup aside. Her stomach flipped. Hard.
“Everything all right?” he asked, his voice a little less gritty after the hot soup had loosened up his throat.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you something.” She plunged right in, even though she felt terribly awkward. “While Sadie and I were walking home, Matty told us about, ah, your dating life a bit.” She could feel her color rising. “And he mentioned that he didn’t understand why you couldn’t find someone who wanted to be a mother. And I told him that finding the right person was harder than it sounded and required a little magic. And I just wanted you to know that that was how I handled it, in case you want to talk to him more later. I just didn’t want him to tell you what I said and then feel super weird.”
She was sure her face was bright red by now as Sebastian stared at her, his spoon in the air. After a second, he took another bite of soup.
“As an education professional,” he asked carefully, “did you get the impression that he was talking about it because he feels confused and needed to run it past you?”
“Ah.” Via went even redder. “No. I think he’s pretty clear on most of it.”
“Then why was he talking about it?”
Oh God. Thanks, Sadie, you nosy ass! “Well, Sadie might have been fishing for some details on the Fabulous Mr. Dorner.”
He face-palmed. “Oh, for the love of God, tell me that nobody actually calls me that.”
“You can’t blame the flamingos for being curious about the lion.”
He laughed and then winced, bringing his hand to his throat. He set his soup aside and took a few grateful swigs of ice water. “Can I ask what Matty said?”
Via cleared her throat. “Just that you were always honest with him about your dates, where you were going and who you were going to see. And that you’d had to cancel a few dates because you were sick.”
Sebastian nodded and she wondered if it was the lighting or if his cheeks had gone a little pink. “Yeah.” He traced a hand over his hair. “I’m trying to get back out there.”
She started to tell him that he didn’t need to feel obligated to explain anything but then he just kept right on talking.
“It’s hard, you know? Being a single dad and, ah, a widower. Both things can kind of be conversation stoppers on a first date. I guess I’m sort of casting a wide net these days.”
Via knitted her brow and took a big gulp of her water. It made her so sad to think that Sebastian was spending time with women who pulled away from him because of who he was, his situation. What a bummer. She didn’t like the thought of him looking so hard for companionship and just getting lonelier in the process.
“No promising prospects?” she asked in a friendly way, although her voice sounded weirdly gruff to her own ears.
He shrugged and then looked up quickly. “I hope you don’t feel weird that Serafine and I aren’t a love match. We texted yesterday and both agreed.”
“Oh really?” Via felt a strange tug in her stomach. She had been worried about Fin and Sebastian dating, sure, but at least she’d known that Fin would be sweet to him. And that he would be respectful of Fin.
“Yeah. She’s lovely. And beautiful. But in the end, she’s just too young for me.”
Sebastian’s eyes were on the video game when he said it, and Via was glad, because his words jolted her. Too young? It had honestly not occurred to her that Sebastian would think of himself as significantly older than she and Fin. Sure, he was obviously very mature and in a very settled stage of his life. But just looking at him, he didn’t seem that old. Sure, he had some gray hairs, and no hint of boyishness at all.
Evan had wide shoulders but slim hips and always kept his face shaved smooth. Sebastian had the more gruff, substantial look of a man who was done growing. He was simply...adding. Muscle, mass, beard.
She thought he was probably in his late thirties. Or maybe early forties. She considered asking, but the words wouldn’t come. She took another gulp of ice water and let her eyes drift to the photos on the wall.
There was a series of photos of baby Matty squishing his cheek against the face of that same stunning woman in most of the other pictures. She looked like a Swedish princess. Long blond hair and sky blue eyes.
“What was your wife like?”
The question was a surprise to both of them. But Via asked it with the candor and matter-of-fact-ness that could only come from having lost people close to her as well. She knew what it was like to have people cringe away from your grief, your loss, and it had meant that she’d kept it bottled up for years longer than she should have. She hadn’t planned on asking him the question, but she didn’t particularly regret it once she had.
Sebastian cocked his head to one side and pulled the blanket back over his lap. Via tossed him a pillow and he jammed it behind his head as he shimmied down to a half sit. The soup had given him a little color back but she could still see the fatigue in his eyes.
“Cora was...very intense. Very particular. The only one like her. She had this feeling about her. Like licking a battery.” He sort of laughed to himself. “She was loud and crass and people had very specific reactions to her. You were either laughing the second she came into the room or groaning. For instance, Ty never really warmed to her. She stressed him out. But Mary and she were best friends. Mary thought she was the funniest person alive.”
Sebastian stretched out on the couch, and his feet came within six inches of Via’s leg. He stared at the ceiling as he talked. “To Cora, the world was very A plus B. She liked things to fall in an order. A line. She liked controlling whatever she could control. Especially for Matty and for me. I hated that part when she was alive and missed it so bad when she was gone.”
He brushed the back of his hand over his eyes and something came wildly loose inside of Via when she realized that he was crying.
“But she was also really fun,” he continued. “It was like she spent so much time inside the lines that like once every two months she just had to cut loose and lose her mind. She’d party hard, not drinking, but like, at a water park or bowling or wherever. A one-woman party.” He wiped his eyes again. “She loved peanuts.”
Via felt something inside of her fold over, once and then twice. She kept waiting for him to describe Cora physically. She’d obviously been so gorgeous. But he didn’t. He spoke about her as a person. A mother. A wife. And it touched Via. She felt tender, both with affection for Sebastian and, surprisingly, sadness that she hadn’t known this woman.
“She was such a good mom. Honestly, it kind of surprised me. Because she was such a harsh lady. She didn’t suffer any fools. She didn’t bother with whiners of any kind. But she was so sweet with Matty. Rigid. Lots of rules. But so sweet. They had such a good thing going. He was lucky to have her. Some people go their entire lives without getting loved that hard. And he had it for the first three and a half years of his life.”
“She died in a car accident?” Via asked, though she already knew it was the case. Just like her parents. She wondered for a second if Seb hated the phrase car accident as much as she did. Something about the word accident made it all seem so whoopsy daisy. Like they weren’t people alive and well with lives and kids one second and then dead on the blacktop the next second.
She felt so small there on the couch with a hand-knit afghan over her lap. Like a child snuggled in for a scary story. She wanted to be able to comfort this man who was sitting there, looking so tired. So dreadfully sick. So sad he couldn’t quite control the words coming out of his mouth.
“Yeah. Drunk driver. A college kid. He was all right, but his life was over, too. I met him once. Last year. He’s doing time for manslaughter. I visited him in prison and wished I hadn’t. He lost everything that day. Matty and I? We still have each other. But that kid’s life is just over.”
“Daddy, can I play one more?” Matty was turning around and pulling the giant headphones to one side. He looked like Princess Leia.
“No, it’s time to start getting ready for bed.”
Matty looked for a second like he was going to argue but he glanced over at Via, all tucked in on the couch, and he obviously scented an opportunity. “Can Miss DeRosa put me to bed tonight? Since you’re sick, Daddy?” The second half of his statement proved just how much of a smooth talker this kid was.
“I’m sure Miss DeRosa has places to be,” Sebastian said.
“Of course I can,” Via said at the same time. She turned to Sebastian. “Really. I’d love to. You rest.”
She didn’t mind a bedtime story with a sweet, sleepy kid, but she was also very appreciative of a moment to gather her wits. That thing that had folded inside her stomach wasn’t unfolding. If anything it was stubbornly pulling denser and denser. Watching him talk about Cora had been a moment filled with motion and transition. It was almost as if he knew she had put him in a certain box and he’d stubbornly picked himself up and plunked right down into another.
The lamp lighting his face from one side. The stubborn tears that he’d wiped at first and then just let glint in the green-and-blue light from the television. Christ. The look in his eye as he’d just said whatever had come to mind next.
It had been honest. More honest than she was used to from almost anyone. She thought that probably Fin was the only other person who would have told so much truth.
“Miss DeRosa, are you cold?” Matty asked as she ran the bath for him, readying his shampoo and a washcloth.
“No, why?”
“Your hands are shaking,” the little boy observed.
And so they were. Actually, all of her was shaking as that thing inside her just kept folding down tighter and tighter. Soon it would be microscopic, and dense as the entire world smashed into the head of a pin. Tiny as it was, there was no room for this inside her. There was no room for this in her life.
“I’m all right.” It was a bald-faced lie. “Sometimes that just happens.”
She held out a hand to Matty, and naked and shameless, he climbed into the tub. “I can be by myself in here as long as you check me.”
She nodded, handing him his soap, and went into his bedroom to turn down the covers on his bed and choose a few books to read together. She took a deep breath. She needed to hold it together for another hour, and then she could go home. She could go home and call Fin and figure out what the hell had lodged itself somewhere between her lungs. Every time she breathed, her heart rubbed against this dense, sharp little intruder.
Via picked some pajamas from the drawer and headed back to the bathroom. She couldn’t help but smile at Matty’s beard of bubbles and the matchbox car he was racing down the highway of his own shin bone. She slicked electric blue toothpaste onto his red Cars toothbrush and grabbed his Kermit towel off the hook.
“I assume this is yours and not your dad’s?” she asked, knowing it would make him laugh.
“Daddy’s is the blue one. You can tell because it’s Daddy-size.” He smacked his hand to his chin and made the bubble beard explode in every which way.
Via ignored the way that knot between her lungs did a little pulse at the mention of Sebastian’s size and held the towel out like a cape for a prince. “Your Majesty.”
Matty pinched his nose between two fingers and collapsed backward underwater, rinsing himself clean. He rose from the tub and Via wrapped him up like a little boy burrito. She handed him the toothbrush, and he brushed while a tiny lake formed at his feet.
“Are you feeling all the way better from being sick or just most of the way better?”
“All the way. Except right now I feel a little sick.”
“Really?” She automatically reached out and felt his forehead with the back of her hand. He was hot, but he was also medium roasted from a hot bath.
“Yeah. In my eyes. They’re scratchy.”
“Ah.” He was just tired then. That quelled her worry. “Get your jammies on, and then we can read a few books.”
His eyes lit up and he spit toothpaste into the sink, tapping the toothbrush on the side to get the residue off in a way that made Via smile. She could imagine Sebastian and Matty brushing their teeth side by side, the son imitating the father.
Via handed over the pajamas and it was just a few minutes later that Matty came scampering back from saying good night to his dad.
“Miss DeRosa?”
“Hmm?” Via sat across Matty’s bed and leaned against the wall.
“Do you think my dad will be better tomorrow?”
“I hope so. But it might be the next day.”
“Okay.” Matty inserted himself between her and the book with enough force to make her say “oof.”
“Oh!” Matty was back up like a shot and rifling through one drawer of his craft table. “I almost forgot, but I made this for you. Because you visited me when I was sick.” He held out a lanyard with all sorts of colored beads on it. He’d even carefully braided part of it. “It’s a key chain.”
“I love it,” she told him, completely honestly. “I’ll put it on my keys right away. Thank you!”
“Welcome,” he told her and snuggled back in to her side.
She’d chosen three books, but she folded and read him a fourth and by the last page, his eyes were glassy and blinking with all the speed of a tortoise crossing a highway.
She wished him good night and didn’t get much of a response as she pulled the covers up to his chin. He immediately kicked his legs out one side of the covers and pillowed his hands under one cheek. Via closed the door halfway and headed back out to the living room.
Sebastian’s eyes were closed, his breaths even and deep. She quietly picked up the dishes and started carrying them out of the room. It was his voice, low and so heartbreakingly serious, that stopped her. She turned back around to him. Set down the dishes.
“We wouldn’t have made it,” he said hoarsely. His eyes were fevered slits. She wondered if he even knew what he was saying right now. “Me and Cora. I know I’m dumping this on you and that it’s probably not fair, but you’re the only one who has asked about her in almost two years. Everyone I talk to about her knew her already. They saw us married. They think of her as my wife. Even saying that now, I feel like such a—”
He cut off, almost violently.
Sebastian leaned forward and she saw that he’d sweat through his T-shirt. His hair was sticking up and he’d tossed the afghan over the back of the couch. He was feverish. She could basically feel his heat from three feet away. He was leaning forward on his knees. His eyes bright and dark at the same time. A look on his face told her he’d been trying, so hard, for years, but right now, he just needed to be broken.
“What do you mean?” she asked softly, knowing that he just needed to know that she was listening still. That it was okay to talk right now. To say everything he needed to get out.
“I mean that we weren’t gonna make it as a husband and wife, I don’t think. As a couple. If she were alive, I don’t think she’d still be my wife.” His face somehow tightened and crumbled at the same time. Via knew when someone was saying something out loud for the very first time. When the words were so raw they were almost a prayer. When a feeling that had been curling and spiking and growing inside you finally, finally found its way to the outside. To the world.
“There wasn’t enough love there,” he admitted, tracing a hand through his sweaty hair. He grimaced when he swallowed. “There was respect, but no affection. We got married when she got pregnant. We’d only known each other a few months. Because there’s just no other way. For me. I had to marry the mother of my kid. I was so scared of being a dad. I guess I thought getting married, having a wife, living with my kid day in and day out would somehow make fatherhood a little easier. A little more paint by numbers and less white-knuckling the steering wheel.” Sebastian laughed at a joke only he got. “But it wasn’t. Being a dad was just as scary as I’d thought it would be and marrying Cora only made it worse because she carried my weight. We both knew I was shitty at it. Only there for the good shit, gone in a flash for the hard shit. She carried me. I let her.”
Sebastian’s head lolled to one side, his cheeks flushed and the dark sweat on the back of his shirt blooming. Via fished for his ice water that he’d set on the floor beside the couch and handed it over to him. He gratefully swigged it back and sucked an ice cube.
“Seb, you might not want to hear this, but you’re an incredible father. Devoted, hardworking, loving, firm. It’s your business whether or not you congratulate yourself, but you have to admit, empirically, you’re a good father.”
He nodded, but she wasn’t convinced he really believed her. Or if he was even able to hear her words through the haze of his fever. He rested sideways on the arm of the couch. He slowly lifted his feet up, and when they caught on the big cushion, Via reached down and hefted them right up onto the couch beside her. “Sometimes I think that makes it worse. That I learned how to do it only after she was gone. I wish she could have seen the kind of father I am now. It would have made her proud of me. I loved it when she was proud of me. And it didn’t happen very often in those last few years.”
His eyes pinched closed and he pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, obviously fighting a headache.
“Where’s your medicine?”
“Kitchen cabinet next to the sink.”
Via rose and brought the dishes into the kitchen. She selected some Motrin and one of his antibiotics, just in case it was time. She quickly chucked the dishes into the dishwasher so that he wouldn’t wake up to a dirty kitchen. While she performed the task, she thought of the very first version of Sebastian that she had met. Disheveled, lost, terse, destroyed. He’d loved Matty, that had always been palpable, but he hadn’t known right from left.
She’d thought at the time that it was just the shock of the loss he was enduring. But she realized now that perhaps he’d been just that clueless as well, when it came to taking care of his kid. She’d been witness to all manner of parenting styles. Often there was a primary parent and a secondary parent. That worked for some families. It wasn’t necessarily something that he needed to be feeling epic shame over.
She filled a fresh glass of ice water, rooted around in the freezer for an ice pack and grabbed the medicine. “Is it time for your antibiotic as well?”
He cracked an eye and nodded, gratefully accepting the pills and the ice water. He hissed when she slid the ice pack between the couch pillow and the back of his neck, but he didn’t move it.
“Via,” he started, and she knew he was about to apologize for everything he’d just said. She didn’t want him to.
“When my parents died,” she cut him off, knowing exactly what she was risking—that drafty space opening up inside her, but for Seb, for this moment, she would risk it, “I was lost, Seb. Gone. I’ve never found that part of me again. She’s gone. I came out the other side a different kid. It changes you. The event changes you, of course. I’ll never forget that day. But the grief changes you, too. The long, awful, up-mountain trek of grief, it changes who you are. I don’t know that you should feel shame for being a different person after you endured the loss of Matty’s mom.”
He nodded and kept his eyes closed as he knuckled one eye and then the other. His face was lined and exhausted. He should be sleeping. She almost rose, to leave him in peace, when he rolled to one side and stretched out his legs. His feet slid over her lap and all the way to the other end of the couch. The heavy weight of his calves penned her in. He groaned just a little bit and cast a forearm over his eyes. If she could have reached the lamp, she would have dimmed it.
“Yeah, but what do you do, as a person, when grief changes you for the better? God, I feel so much shame for it. She died and I became a better man. It makes me sick with myself. I’m such a bastard. Why did it take that for me to be who I am now? Why couldn’t I have done that when she was here?”
His arm was heavy over his eyes and his mouth was tightly clamped shut, his jaw square and dusted with more errant stubble than she’d ever seen him with before. His T-shirt was fully soaked through. If so many things were different, she’d go get him a fresh one, throw the sweaty one in the wash.
But as it was, all she could do was ignore the microscopic needle between her lungs and say the thing she’d wished someone had said to her. She had to keep going. For the first time, she wanted to keep going. The drafty feeling was absent, maybe because there was something else occupying her chest right now. Or maybe because that drafty wind couldn’t blow her away when she was being pinned in place by that hot needle inside of her.
“What do you do when grief changes you for the better? Seb, you say thank-you to the world for being the world.”
His forearm lifted off his eyes at her tone. He’d probably never heard her speak with such authority before, but she was an expert on this subject. The metamorphosis of grief. And he was her friend. And she was going to drag him out of the swamp if it was the last thing she did.
“You be grateful,” she continued. “Grateful that you’re here. That your little boy has a good, loving, competent father. A father who leaps a fence to sprint him to the ER and makes Raspberry Beret pancakes and tells him the truth about the dates he goes on.” Somehow one of her hands landed on his calf and she gripped the warm jeans there, as if she could pin him down and make him listen. Make him hear her.
His eyes flashed to her hand but then back to her face like he was being nailed in place by a cosmic hammer.
“And you stop doing this math equation that’s killing you. In one hand you have your wife’s death, and in the other hand you have all the progress you’ve made over the years. But, Seb, A plus B doesn’t equal shit in this case. You can’t add or subtract those two things. They’re a completely different language. And holding yourself hostage with your wife’s death is false math that’s designed to punish yourself. That’s a way of turning your grief back in on you, to keep it trapped and circling.”
He made a sound. Just a quick grunt, like she was pulling stitches out of a mostly healed wound.
“So, just stop doing that.” She laughed at herself, at how bossy she sounded. “I know it’s not easy, but you have to let it out. You’re a good man who is grieving because his wife died. And no one, no one, no one ever feels simple after someone they love dies. Everyone feels complicated as hell, all loose strings and sloppy endings and regrets. That’s life. That’s the world. The same world where you get to make furniture and tuck your son in at night and walk him to school. You can’t get one part without the other. It’s just not the way it works.”
This time, Sebastian didn’t squeeze his eyes closed. He looked her square in the face while two feverish, determined rivers carved their way down his face.
A tight, tense feeling rose up in Via’s throat, and her lips pursed at the same second a track of tears spilled out of her own eyes. They just stared at one another, dim gold in the lamplight, two people who’d been broken and were learning to live all patched up.
She knew that he might look at her and realize, terribly, that it never ended, the patching yourself up after you get so viscerally destroyed. But she also hoped that he’d look at her and realize that it was worth it. Every dirty, ugly, scraping step forward was worth it.