Page 72 of Old Flames

“I was sure you thought me beneath you.”

“Never,” he said in a sharp whisper. “Don’t ever say that.”

Jules twisted a fork into the container of pasta. “What was the fight with your parents about?”

“The award.”

“Thirty Under Thirty?” It wasn’t that prestigious. It had only seemed so at the time. The PR team had worked to promote it as the literary event of the decade. “I don’t understand. Weren’t they proud?”

“Not my dad. He was envious.”

“How small of him.” She tried to take it back. “I didn’t mean—”

“You’re right,” he said. “I committed an unpardonable sin—living his dream.”

“Your dad is a writer?” Jules asked between mouthfuls of pasta.

“It never panned out.”

Jules’s mother had come to the city to find work in the theater district as a costume designer, or at the very least, a costume designer’s assistant. That hadn’t panned out, either. She earned a living providing tailoring services at the corner dry cleaner. What a blessing, however, that she and her mother had had distinct dreams with no overlap, nothing to trigger worrisome competition. Her mother had always been her first reader, and her biggest fan, but her own dreams had died at The Sun Dial Dry Cleaning.

“People would kill to have our careers,” she said. “We’re lucky.”

That was how Jules had felt the night of the gala dinner. She would’ve killed, him specifically, to trade places. But to dwell on this was to ignore the bigger picture. Their lives had splintered and cracked that night in ways that only they understood. They’d lost their families. His relationship with his parents ended, and her mother had begun her decline. She went from the ER to the intensive care unit in a matter of days. Maybe that was the reason they clung to the memory; it held the DNA of the people they were before the tragedy. What if their meet-cute wasn’t the start of a sappy love story, but something more useful and constructive? They could heal one another without the promise of a burdensome ever after.

“Leo,” she said, sitting up straight, “tell me about that night and the fight with your parents.”

It was his turn to reach for pasta. “I already did.”

“No. I mean everything, every detail, every crumb. The hurtful words, the low blows, everything you can think of. Like talk therapy.”

Leo qualified his answer. “You’d have to do the same.”

“Of course,” she said. “This is something only we can do for each other. No one else would understand.”

He was warming up to the idea. “Will you tell me about your mother?”

“Yes,” she said. “No one knows what I’ve been through. Vicky was with me the whole time, but I felt I had to be strong and kept my true feelings locked up. I wouldn’t dare fall apart around her.”

Leo reached out and brushed her bangs to the side. “You’d trust me to put you back together if you fell apart?”

She leaned back and caught his eyes. “This trust exercise goes both ways.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Jules opened a bottle of water and waited for him to start.

“My dad worked the same job for thirty years. Every night he’d come home, lock himself in his study, and work on a novel. When I was ten or so, he got an agent. This was a big deal. We went out to dinner to celebrate. Dad ordered dessert. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. He wasn’t a big spender. Either the agent was a con man or the manuscript didn’t sell. I couldn’t tell you either way. He never spoke of it again.”

Jules felt for his dad. For every aspiring writer there were ten vultures ready to profit off their dreams.

“My dad grew up in Queens,” he said. “He attended junior college and got a job at a law firm, managing accounts. It’s as dull as it sounds. But it paid well. Mom quit her job when I was born. They bought a house and saved up to send me to college. I’m an only child. My parents tried to have more kids but couldn’t. Everything they had was for me. As it turned out, I didn’t need anything from them. I got a free ride to an Ivy League school. You got a grant just for breathing. That’s how he put it. I had to be the only kid in America to earn a scholarship and feel like crap about it. After graduation, I moved to the city. That was a slight, too. I had a rent-stabilized apartment and low but steady income. To hear him tell it, I was lazy and coasting through life. Suddenly, writing wasn’t a real job. It didn’t require forty-hour weeks that stretched to sixty, climbing a ladder, kissing ass, and whatever else office culture requires of you. Never mind that he’d tried to get published for years. If you think he wouldn’t have quit his job, you’re mistaken. I let him talk shit because I knew where it was coming from—a deep-seated sense of failure. I felt like a failure, too. No matter what I accomplished, my parents frowned upon it, disapproved.” He paused. “Bored yet?”

“No! Go on.”

“With time I started to see them differently. One day I confided to a friend, a guy in the neighborhood. I’d come home for the holidays. We were hanging out, smoking. He kept saying how lucky I was to have gotten a scholarship. He was paying back loans and angry about it. Without his father’s help, he would’ve gone under. I told him about my parents’ attitude about the scholarships, and he wasn’t having it. He said no matter what he did, no matter how small the accomplishment, his grandmother would cook a feast, and the family would gather for a Sunday dinner to celebrate. That was how it was meant to be, he insisted. That was the first realization that my upbringing was dysfunctional, and my parents were blind to it. What I’m trying to describe is a form of emotional abuse. It prevailed through my childhood but failed once I made it clear I wouldn’t stand for it anymore.”

Jules helped herself to key lime pie. “You were their only child,” she said. “A brilliant one, too. Maybe I’m overstepping, but they should’ve cherished that.”