Around six that night, while Nate was lying on the living room floor, stroking Cody’s thick coat and in major life assessment mode—Should I have fought for Amy to stay? What if Jennifer says she doesn’t want to marry me? What if I moved to Fresno?—Max and Carter knocked on his front door. They stood there bearing two bottles of wine, one red, one white, both smiling toothily. If Nate didn’t know better, he’d think they were a little stoned. Maybe he didn’t know better and they were.
It was their tenth wedding anniversary—or rather yesterday was—and they’d been sent a case of assorted wine from Max’s sisters in Tucson as a celebration gift. As the guys explained it, they were never at a loss for wine, and now was no exception, so they thought they’d share the surplus with their neighbor and, if he had a corkscrew, maybe they could all enjoy a glass and visit. Carter said it had been too long since they’d just sat and talked, though Nate honestly couldn’t remember any time they’d actually done that. Their conversations were usually in passing, unplanned, bumping into each other as they rolled out their trash bins for garbage day, or like that morning they’d almost collided on the Occidental campus. Maybe Carter was confusing it with the times they’d spent talking with Jim, who found the guys not only considerate neighbors but interesting and eclectic, which probably meant they’d read a lot of books.
Before Nate knew it, he and his visitors, lounging around the living room, had polished off the bottle of red—a tart but, Nate had to admit, tasty Italian Barolo—and were opening up a pale pinot grigio. A loose-lipped Max and Carter (they admitted they’d each popped an edible before coming by—aha!) recounted the highlights of their ten-year marital history for Nate, who learned far more about their lives than he’d ever think to ask a pair of, at best, casual friends. Acquaintances, really.
Turned out the couple had had their share of ups and downs—infidelities, commitment-phobia, competitiveness, crossed wires—during their dating years. But all that seemed to fade away once they tied the knot and got past the attendant anxieties and doubts. Their stories reminded Nate so much—too much—of the kinds of things that had plagued him and Jennifer (save the infidelities part, as far as he knew) and the new hope he found once he finally proposed, even if the outcome was still up in the air. Two men, man and woman, it didn’t seem to matter; human nature was human nature.
The guys’ openness—and the wine—made Nate unusually gabby and he told them the entire Jennifer saga right up to that morning’s exhilarating, bended-knee entreaty. Max and Carter, who’d met Jennifer briefly several times, couldn’t believe she didn’t immediately accept Nate’s proposal given how “spontaneously romantic” they thought it sounded. Nate didn’t agree or disagree—his neighbors were just being nice (and a bit happy-drunk)—although he’d be lying if he said he didn’t try to sneak a peek at his phone every few minutes to see if Jennifer had called or texted with an enthusiastic “yes!” She hadn’t.
Watching Max and Carter, who seemed so in sync as partners and people, with their good-natured digs, finishing of each other’s sentences, and generally shared warmth, Nate pictured where he and Jennifer could be a decade down the road—if married, that is. Yet unlike Max and Carter, who had chosen not to become dads (“We never say never!” Max declared, though from the look on Carter’s face, that particular train had left the station), Nate and Jennifer might have a few little ones racing around the living room. Which made him wonder: Would they even be living in this house in ten years? Would their old relocation fantasy become a reality? More importantly, would there be a “they?”
Despite—or maybe because of—Nate’s increasingly fuzzy head, he realized he should be banging down Jennifer’s guest house door for an answer instead of sitting in the safety of his living room getting soused with his neighbors, well-meaning as they were. But before he could make a move toward that goal, or even determine whether it was the sanest or most effective gesture at that very moment, Max launched into a discussion of Jim that kept Nate bolted to his cushion.
It seemed that Max and Carter spent many an early and sometimes later evening sharing a bottle of vino with their professorial neighbor accompanied by much deep discussion—and not just about great literature as Nate had predicted. If their chats often started off debating favorite authors (and, yes, they got an earful about Joan Didion), the trio would invariably segue into more personal matters. Not surprising, thought Nate: How much could even Jim talk about books? What was surprising, aside from the apparent frequency of these get-togethers, which Jim had rarely mentioned to Nate, was how revealing his father was to his neighbors—to hear them tell it, anyway.
“When we first moved in and got to know your dad,” Max recalled, “he seemed like the type who’d gotten by on looks and charm and an ability to talk to anyone about almost anything. I swear I said to Carter, ‘I really like that guy but I’ll bet he’s got a hella flip side.”
“You didn’t say ‘hella,’” countered Carter. “He never says ‘hella,’” he confirmed to Nate.
Max shot his husband a jaunty eye roll and continued: “Anyway, so this one night, I’m pouring us our first glass—your dad brought over a Grenache, I remember because we’d never had one before—and he bursts into tears.”
“I mean, big, sobby, end-of-the-world tears,” said Carter, draining his wine glass. “It was so unlike him. At least as far as we knew.”
“And then he hits us with ‘I have six months to live,’” Max revealed to Nate, who was dumbstruck to discover that his dad had told two relative strangers about his fatal condition long before he’d ever informed his own son. The guys could see how rankled Nate looked by that—and maybe why.
“Wait, when did he tell you?” Carter asked carefully.
“When he thought he had two months to live. So, y’know, do the math.” Nate felt a headache rolling into his skull. He put his drink down on the coffee table and slumped back in his chair. Cody, who’d been curled up in a corner of the living room since the first bottle was uncorked, trotted over to Nate and sat attentively at his side.
Max and Carter traded a look as Nate simmered. “If it’s any consolation,” Max offered, “he was terrified to tell you.”
“So, he told you and Carter first? Like, what, as a trial run?” Nate grabbed his glass and took a hit of the pinot. It didn’t help. Cody parked his head on Nate’s lap. That helped. Nate massaged the hound’s ears.
Carter continued in his measured tone. “Okay, look, we stepped in it here and we’re really sorry—”
“Really sorry,” added Max. “We weren’t thinking. We always just assumed he must have told you right after—like right after—he spilled it to us.”
“And it’s none of our business but, well, your dad loved the shit outta you,” said Carter. “The last thing he wanted to do was hurt you. In any way.”
Nate softened, resting a hand atop Cody’s head. “Did he tell you that, too?”
“He didn’t have to,” answered Max. “The way he used to talk about you? Like you hung the moon.” He leaned back on the couch pillow. Carter took his hand.
The gesture moved Nate. His eyes filled. “Did my dad mention that he lied about who my real mother was? For my entire life?” It occurred to Nate that Max and Carter knew nothing about Amy, certainly not from him. And why would they? It was too big a story to simply drop in passing, and they’d never run into her on Escarpa. Hell, she’d only been there twice—and once she never left her car.
Max and Carter took in that thunderbolt of news silently, poker-faced, as if deciding how—or if—to respond. Their awkward reserve made Nate think maybe Jim had let it slip about Amy during some drunken meet-up with the boys next door. Some dark night of the soul thing. And revealing that to Nate now, on top of their last admission, would be too much for him to handle.
“Holy crap. Seriously?” Carter finally asked, eyes widening, mouth agape. If he was faking his reaction, he was doing a pretty decent acting job.
“This sounds kind of juicy,” Max said, as he topped off their wine glasses, emptying the second bottle in the process. “Who is—was—your mother, anyway?”
“Is,” Nate answered. And, convinced that his dad hadn’t disclosed that explosive piece of family history to his neighbors, he felt an urgent, uncharacteristic need to share the facts with Max and Carter. So he did, chapter and verse, in even greater detail than the recount he’d given them of his relationship with Jennifer. It felt especially important and timely: it helped Nate frame his wildly disparate feelings about his mother, which had been tested and torpedoed earlier that day when he discovered she was leaving L.A.
Max and Carter, well-oiled as they may have been, were excellent listeners and, based on their startled questions and seemingly spontaneous comments, reconfirmed Nate’s sense that this story was falling on virgin ears. Replaying the tale start to finish like that, to people he knew relatively little about and vice versa, made Nate feel guilty that he’d held back confiding in Jennifer and Danny as soon as he’d found out about his mother. That it took another stranger—his therapist, Mira—to get it out of his head and off his chest wasn’t something Nate was proud of, though, sitting there with his neighbors, he was proud of the progress he knew he’d made. If only his maybe fiancée-to-be felt the same.
Turnabout being fair play, Max told Nate about his own mother, who died in a car crash when he was in college. “You’ve been handed a fucking gift, man,” Max said, a catch in his voice. “I’d give anything to have my mom back—to have a mom. And here it happened to you, just like that.” Nate shot him a dubious look. “Okay, not ‘just like that,’ but look, it happened. And you like her, right? You said she’s a good person?”
Nate nodded. He understood where Max was coming from; he couldn’t argue with him, even though their circumstances, vis-à-vis mothers, were totally different.
“And did you know that I was adopted?” asked Carter, as if not to be outdone. Nate shook his head; how could he have known? “She raised me practically on her own. She and my father split when I was a kid and, well, he tried, but he was a pretty absentee dad for a lot of my life. I owe everything to her.” Carter held back a tear and took a long slug of his pinot. “I don’t care how old we are, we need a parent.”
In one graceful move, Cody slid from a seated to a prone position on the hardwood floor. It freed up Nate’s hand to retrieve his wine glass for a final gulp as Carter’s words hit home. Nate had had the chance to have a parent nearby, to offset some of the crucial years they’d lost, to bond as mother and son on a day-to-day basis. But he’d let it slip away. He’d let anger and confusion, instead of logic and wisdom—and let’s not forget maturity—rule his choices and actions. Nate didn’t need Mira to tell him that, in the end, he hadn’t wanted it to work with Amy. And now, instead of a mother, he was left with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Max and Carter could tell how wrecked Nate seemed and they apologized again for opening any floodgates. Nate took a deep and cleansing breath and invited the guys on a tour of all the work he’d done on the inside of the house, partly inspired, he told them, by the pristine state of their home. Max and Carter were surprised and flattered.
Nate brightened considerably as he showed his neighbors all he’d repainted, refaced, refinished, and reconfigured. They were especially impressed by his efforts in the kitchen—Nate had eventually regrouted and polished the backsplash tile, making it look good as new.
Revisiting all his renovations in one fell swoop made Nate feel the same sense of accomplishment as when he finished a big landscaping job. He’d done good; even Jim, for all his blasé neglect of home and hearth, would have heartily approved. But Nate knew one thing for sure: a bigger sense of accomplishment was waiting for him outside that door, and first thing in the morning, he was going to tie up two super important loose ends.