“Arch, your son drew her into the family. She went on a date, and you couldn’t sleep until she got home. You let in three goals this morning because you can’t stop thinking about her. At whatpoint does the ‘best friend’ thing stop being a description and start being a lie you’re telling yourself?”
I zip up my bag and stand. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re going to walk away from this conversation?”
“I’m going to walk away from this conversation.”
“Fine. But none of this is going to go away because you refuse to talk about it.”
I walk away. He lets me go, which is the kindest thing Ollie has done for me in weeks.
That night, we end up on the couch again, and I can’t focus on anything.
She’s reading. Some memoir she bought—a woman on the cover standing at the edge of something, trees or mountains, I can’t tell from this angle. She’s curled into her corner of the sectional with her legs tucked up, barefoot, wearing leggings and one of my old t-shirts that she pulled from the clean laundry pile and hasn’t given back.
I’m pretending to watch TV. A documentary about something I couldn’t describe if someone held a gun to my head because I’m not watching it. I’m watching her.
She turns a page. Her hair falls across her face, and she tucks it behind her ear without looking up.
I’m still thinking about the date. About some guy she met who took her to dinner and got to sit across from her for two hours and look at her face in candlelight. I don’t know anything about this guy. I don’t know if he made her laugh or if he gave her a goodnight kiss at the end.
I don’t know if she’ll see him again. She hasn’t mentioned it. I haven’t asked.
Sydney is beautiful. I’ve always known this the way I know factual information—her eyes are brown, she’s five-two, she hasslight curves and a big smile. But knowing it and letting myself see it are different things, and somewhere in the last few weeks, the wall I built between those two categories has come down, and I can’t figure out how to put it back up. She’s absolutely beautiful, and it’s killing me.
She shifts on the couch, and her foot slides across the middle cushion to rest against my thigh. Just her toes, pressing lightly against the outside of my leg through the fabric of my sweatpants. A small, accidental touch that she doesn’t seem to notice.
I notice.
I notice because my entire body goes still, every nerve ending rerouting to the four square inches of my thigh where her foot is making contact, and I am now a man whose full attention is on a foot. Her foot. Her bare foot against my leg, warm and light.
She doesn’t move it. I don’t move it. The documentary plays. She turns another page.
We sit like that for twenty minutes. I want to touch her. Her foot. Maybe her ankle. I don’t do any of these things because I am a coward and can’t say the word that would change everything.
“I’m going to turn in,” she says, pulling her foot away, and the absence of it is a physical thing I feel in my chest.
“Goodnight, Syd.”
“Night.”
She goes upstairs with her book. I sit on the couch, listening to her footsteps overhead and then the guest room door closing, and the house goes quiet.
I turn off the TV and walk to the kitchen.
The drawing is still on the fridge. Five figures on blue construction paper. Daddy, Luke, Lily, Mommy, Auntie Syd. Bree on one side, the rest of us on the other, Luke’s careful starfish hands reaching for the people closest to him.
I stand there in the dark kitchen, the stove light throwing shadows across the floor, and I look at my son’s drawing.
Five people. His family, as he sees it. And the thing that wrecks me—the thing I can’t stop coming back to—isn’t that he put Sydney in the picture.
It’s that the drawing looks right.
It looks like the truth.
And I have no idea what to do with it.
Chapter Fifteen
