"I just wasn't always good at the rest of it."
"Yeah."
"I know. I'm working on it."
We talked a while longer, easier stuff, his studio class, a professor he liked, Libby's family wanting to meet everyone at Thanksgiving. Before we hung up he said, "Hey, Dad? Whatever you're planning. Because I know you're planning something." He laughed. "Make it something she wants. Not something you'd want to give her. There's a difference."
My son. Twenty years old and he already understood the thing it took me forty-five to work out.
"I'm on it," I said.
* * *
I sat in the guest room after and thought about what she wanted.
Not what would look good. Not the kind of thing I was good at, something that Ruby actually wanted that had nothing to do with me. Jeremy was right about that, and so was Adam. The flowers and the dinner, those were fine, those were a start, but half of them were still for me.
I thought about what she actually wanted, the things she'd said out loud that I'd let go past me. And it was right there. It had been right there for months, for years. She told me in the limo the night of the Jubilee and I said mm-hm. She told Jeremy, who told me, and I called it a you-and-your-mom thing. She'd wanted it her whole life and I'd spent that whole life finding reasons it was somebody else's trip to take.
Fallingwater.
A house built out over a waterfall by the one architect she'd have crossed the country to stand inside of. Five hours west. She'd been asking to go since before we were married, and every time it came up I'd made the same joke about the leak, and every time the joke landed a little flatter, and I never once heard myself say it.
I was going to take her. Not send her with Jeremy. Take her, myself, and stand in the rooms she'd been dreaming about and listen to her talk about the man who built them, and not check my phone, and not wonder how long we'd be, and not make a single joke about the water.
I got my laptop and started looking at the calendar. There was a stretch the following week, after the Ocean City paperwork cleared, when I could get us both free for a few days. I found the tour times. I found a place to stay nearby, an inn, nothing enormous, the kind of quiet she liked.
I didn't book it yet. I sat there with it all pulled up, and I understood that the trip wasn't the thing. The trip was easy. The thing was every ordinary day after it, the Tuesdays Adam talked about, the years of them, where nobody was watching and there was nothing to prove and I had to keep choosing her anyway.
But the trip was where I'd start.
I booked it.
Chapter 17
Ruby
He was already in the kitchen when I came down, and something was cooking.
There was a plate at my place at the table. Eggs, the way I like them, and toast, and my tea already steeping, and the little dish of cut strawberries he knew I liked and never bothered making for myself. He set a fork down next to the plate and stepped back like he wasn't sure how it would go over.
"Sit," he said. "Eat, before it gets cold."
I sat. I was wary of it, if I'm honest. A breakfast was easy. I had learned by now to watch what came after the easy thing.
"I want to take you somewhere," he said, sitting down across from me with his coffee. "Next week. I already looked at the calendar, the Ocean City paperwork clears Tuesday, so we're free after that."
"Take me where?"
"Fallingwater."
I put my fork down.
For a second I didn't say anything. I had wanted to go to Fallingwater since I was nineteen years old. I had brought it up more times than I could count, and every single time it haddied in the air between us, waved off, joked away, turned into something Jeremy and I could do sometime.
"Oscar." I heard the flatness come into my own voice, the protective thing. "You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't."
