“It’s a big promise to break,” Theo agreed.
“He blew off my graduation, too. Never responded to the invite. I didn’t hear from him until that day you saw us at the Reef Room.”
“What, a couple of weeks ago?” I nodded. “Ouch.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Did he ever tell you what happened? Like, why he suddenly couldn’t pay?”
I shook my head. “Now I know his marriage was falling apart. But he never gave that as a reason. He can’t even talk about it, period. The couple of times the subject of college has come up, even fleetingly, he looks like he might implode or something.”
A pause. Then he said, “Man. He’s probably embarrassed.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How do you figure?”
“It makes sense,” he said. “This is a guy who had never lived up to his obligation as a parent, right? Finally here’s his chance. He’s going to help you get into college and pay for it. Does it make up for everything? No. But it is Columbia. A dream come true, right?”
It wasn’t my dream, though, I thought. But I didn’t say this.
“But then,” he continued, “he screws that up, too. Talk about humiliating. Man.”
It was taking me a minute to catch up with this reasoning; there was a delay, like on live broadcasts. Finally I said, “But I was fine with going to East U, even after all we’d done. I didn’t care about Columbia. I would have told him that, if he’d just stuck around and been honest with me.”
“Maybe. But I bet for him, it wasn’t just about getting you into any old school,” Theo told me. “This was a chance he could give you that no one else in your life could. Something that could change everything. He was so close to redeeming himself. Which made it even worse when he didn’t.”
“It wasn’t about him, though.”
“True. But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.” He leaned forward a bit, looking more closely at me. “Look, I’m not saying he handled the whole thing well. I’m just saying . . . maybe there was more to it than you think.”
By this point, I felt unsettled, like my view of something I’d taken as fact was suddenly being shifted, and in doing so was skewing everything else I believed as well. Beneath all that, barely but still there, something else. This tiny feeling that maybe, just maybe, he might be right.
“If that’s what he was feeling, he should have said as much,” I managed finally. “He’s a grown-up. He can use his words.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Again: not handled well. But he’s here now, right? Maybe he wants to make amends somehow.”
“Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.”
He ate a shrimp puff. “Sorry. My optimism can be very annoying.”
Hearing this, I again had a flash of Benji, telling me he was hard to entertain. Now that I thought about it, they were pretty similar, at least by the numbers: parent professions, where they were raised. There was probably something meaningful to them both converging on me simultaneously. Not that I was in the mood, right then, to figure out what it was.
“It’s not annoying,” I told him. “Just different. Like the Cheez Doodle thing.”
He smiled at me, then got up, coming over to where I was sitting, his glass in hand. He held it out, and I did the same. “To optimism. And junk food.”
We clinked glasses and drank. Then he leaned down, cupping my chin in his hand, and kissed me. I closed my eyes, letting myself forget where I was and what I was doing, temporarily, to just sink into it. It was almost easy to do, except for the fine grains of sand I felt blow up and over us every now and again. Light and drifting, tiny granules you couldn’t even see. But as always, they were there.
* * *
The next morning, when I woke up, someone was moving the furniture.
I could hear it immediately, the sound of large objects being pushed and pulled. I pressed my pillow over my ears, trying to dip back into dreaming, but no luck. Saturday morning, seven thirty. I was up.
More scraping, more dragging, followed by a large thud as something hit the floor. I threw off the covers, got out of bed, and went to investigate. When I pushed open my door, however, it moved only about an inch before meeting something solid and refusing to go farther.
I tried again. No luck. Finally, by using my entire body weight, I managed to get it open enough to see out, only to find myself facing the glass doors of the breakfront from our dining room.
“What the hell?” I said, to my own face, dimly reflected back at me. It wasn’t just the china cabinet that had relocated; there was also the coffee table, the dining room table, several chairs, and my dad’s beloved recliner—all packed into the narrow hall outside my bedroom, as if, en masse, they were making a run for it.
“Hello?” I called down the hallway towards the stairs. With all the noise, though, nobody heard me. I considered just staying put until whatever project was going on was finished, but then my tendency towards claustrophobia hit. I tried the door again. It moved another millimeter. The window it was.
There is probably something more humiliating than climbing out of your own bedroom window in full view of the neighbors early on a weekend morning. But really, I was hard-pressed to think of what it might be as I wriggled through, landed on my behind in the damp grass in my pajamas, and turned to see that Mr. Varance, the elderly widower to our right, had caught the whole show. He raised up his rose clippers in greeting; I waved back. Then I got to my feet and went around the house to the back door.