WHO LIKES SUNSHINE?”
Emily closes the front door, unlatches the chain, opens the door. Feels the bristle brush of damp air.
“You’re a persistent one,” she says.
“You think I’m persistent. What about this fog?”
Emily takes in this new friend, met, what, ten days ago, two weeks? One date, a few phone calls. Charming, sure, walking a very careful line between being too aggressive and trying to communicate his interest. That’s not novel for Emily. She’s a magnet, even though she doesn’t fully recognize it in herself. But she’s usually a magnet for the wounded and angry, the eventual drug user who will lose a job and spend a year packing fat bowls on the couch, not this self-possessed, put-together entrepreneur. There’s not a speck of dirt inside his car, the CDs arranged in the middle compartment alphabetically, as if he showers twice a day and then gets professionally vacuumed—him and his car.
And then there’s Jeremy’s warning about him, about how his jacket didn’t match his shoes. Probably envy, right? Probably just Jeremy taking a shot. But, the thing is, Emily knows that what makes Jeremy so dangerous, so potent, is that even his offhand jabs are based on a whiff of truth. It’s like the best comedy; it’s funny because it’s true. When Jeremy insults the guy behind the counter of the pharmacy, or at the café, he’s articulating something frank and fair, even if it’s totally socially awkward, wholly inappropriate. Like a child, like Kent, trying to get his mother’s attention. And Jeremy saw something bad in this guy. Jealousy, truth, or both?
It makes her think, secondarily, about how much she misses Jeremy. This suitor, this slightly odd, nice guy, feels so inauthentic by comparison.
“You can make the fog go away?” Emily asks him.
He laughs. “I can put it in the rearview mirror. I took the audacious risk of packing a picnic lunch for the three of us. There’s a spot on the other side of the bridge where the Marin County supervisors have outlawed fog.”
She almost laughs. “You’re serious.”
“Kent’s not in school today, so I thou—”
She cuts him off. “Deal, Liam.”
He smiles.
“Do me a favor. I could really use a cup of coffee, and I’d like to get Kent ready, which will require some reorientation of his expectation that we’re spending the day playing board games in the fog. Would you mind picking me up a coffee on the corner, and some sugar snack for Kent?”
“Ten minutes enough time for you?”
She smiles and shuts the door.
She moves to the window, watches this suave caller walk up the street, hands stuffed in his jean-jacket pockets, so nonchalant.
She thinks about Jeremy’s hysterical messages. Almost rants. Get out of town. And, again, about her ex-lover’s instincts about her new suitor. She turns and looks at a picture frame over the mantel. The frame is empty. Until three weeks ago, it held a picture of Jeremy and Kent, the pair of them caught smiling together, an unposed, even haphazard image taken on a hike on the cliff above Seal Rock.
She sighs. She walks back into Kent’s bedroom, finds the boy on the floor encircled by puzzle pieces. Standing beside him, a multicolored robot, whose arms move by remote control, something she picked up at a secondhand store on Geary.
“You’re dressed. Good.”
“It’s cold.”
“Sweetie, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Kent looks up skeptically. His sandy brown hair flops over his eyes and she shoves away a feeling of such love it might crush her insides.
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
He reluctantly rises. “Is it a pony?” An inside joke.
She leads him down the stairs, into the ratty garage, past the musty old mattress and the cans of paint. She opens the back door. “You’re wearing your pajamas,” he says.
She pushes him out the back and shuts the door.
“Can you climb the fence, Kent?”
“Mom, what—”
“We’re climbing the fence, Kent. Do you understand me?”
Kent blinks, recognizing something like terror on the face of his mother.