“Couple days after you told me.” He stacked a blanket atop the armrest. I helped him with the big quilt, lining up the corners and then folding them up to meet the others in his hands.
“And she took it well? Didn’t think I was trying to con your family out of your generational wealth?”
He gave his little Barry scowl.
“She is delightful. And guileless. My mother couldn’t think you were trying to con me even if you actually were.”
I didn’t know what guileless meant, other than something from the bible I think? But I tried to just pick up the context clues and move on. Everything he’d said about his family made his mother sound like a completely pleasant woman, plus a woman after my own heart with the Find My Friends and showing up at a loved-one’s house without invitation.
“And their wealth isn’t generational. My mom’s a surgeon, my dad an anesthesiologist. They met when she was finishing med school.” Barry didn’t sound mad when he said this, just matter of fact.
“And their son is a professional hockey player, so that helps the family net worth at large.”
“Doesn’t hurt it,” he agreed while making his way into the kitchen to start putting away clean dishes from the rack. “I told her I’d go out with her for dinner, but she said she had these vitamins to bring me and didn’t want to wait another minute to see me.”
“Sweet of her.” I hung up my keys on their respective hook next to Barry’s. “And what kind of vitamins? Like a bottle of biotin? Has she seen all the vitamins you take?”
I organized our stack of shoes by the back door, his expensive tennis shoes and a nicer pair of basketball shoes he wore with hiswalk-up outfits sometimes. His shoes always made me want to know how many more shoes he had at his apartment. Surely he had a massive closet and it was probably full of sneakers, right? Did he collect expensive basketball shoes? That’s a thing people do, and Barry liked—loved—basketball. When he wasn’t watching hockey clips to prepare for games, he was often checking stats about his favorite team on his phone, wincing or exclaiming through the games.
I placed the shoes on the little metal rack, which I seldom used in favor of The Pile. I put my old tennis shoes on the top rack, his on the lower one and wondered idly how his stuff had gotten so quickly mixed in with mine.
“I have a nutritionist, but Mom got me this subscription of Best For supplements for my birthday,” he called over the sink.
“Best for what?” I shouted back and heard him laugh.
“No, the company is called Best For. You take a quiz and it tells you what vitamins you need. So biotin may be in there, I guess, if it was the best for me.”
“Sounds fancy,” I said. Kate would lose her shit for something like that. Maybe I could get it for her for Christmas. “When was your birthday?” I reached past him for the sponge to quickly wipe down the counter.
“November twelfth,” he said after a pause.
“How old did you turn again? Forty?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Ah.” I winked at him, then immediately felt like an idiot. Barry probably looked cool winking, but I hazarded a guess that I did not.
Reasonably, thirty-two was not that much older than me. Seven years. But thinking about it still made me blush. There was something so “hot older guy” about thirty-two that wouldn’t exist so much if he was just thirty, or even thirty-one. Barry was quiet as he cleaned a few dishes I’d left in the sink. I wiped crumbs off the island, careful not to disturb the five-hundred-piece puzzle Kate and I had started after shopping.
“Isn’t that hockey ancient?” I asked.
Hetsked. “Brat.”
November twelfth, though, was last month, almost a month exactly.
I stood up, doing some mental math, then walked to the calendar tracked my index finger backward.
“Hold on, the day I ran into you was your birthday?”
“It was.” The back of his neck was pink, and I almost walked over and put my palm there just to see how warm it was. I busied my hands with a towel instead, sidling next to him at the sink to dry the dishes he washed. A few glass containers from meals he left me, two plates, three forks, all six of my spoons, one glass cup, one pink coffee mug, Junior’s food dish.
I watched his hands in the soapy water as he scrubbed a plate I’d eaten a slice of grocery store cherry pie on that morning. He handed it to me in the second sink and pulled the water plug to drain the warm water, leaving only suds behind.
A trade to a new team and a surprise pregnancy from a girl he hadn’t seen in months was probably as shitty a birthday present as it could get.
“I’m sorry you had to find out like that.” I slid the last plate into the cupboard and leaned against the counter. I looked at the ultrasound photos on the fridge beneath a Statue of Liberty magnet. “On your birthday.”
“Don’t be,” he said.
