Page 235 of ClickBack

I’m home.

Her answer comes while I am taking off my shoes.

Thank you. Tomorrow after five is good.

I sit on the edge of the bed. The place is quiet enough that I can hear a pair of sneakers tumble in the dryer down the hall. They shouldn’t be in there. I get up, stop the cycle, take them out, and return to the bed with nothing left to postpone the thinking.

I was a kid when I decided I wouldn’t be like my father. It was one of the first plans I ever made for myself. Be there. Show up. Know your kid’s coach without somebody having to tell you his name.

I built a whole idea of being a better man around a child I haven’t had.

That is not the same thing as wanting to raise one. I need to figure out how much of it is mine and how much still belongs to being pissed off at Dad.

Then there is Giselle. Her laugh in my kitchen. The way she puts her glasses on to argue with a number. How she looks when she forgets to pull back after reaching for me. I don’t think of that life as a smaller one. It is the first one I have wanted badly enough to consider what I would change to keep it.

I pick up the phone again.

I’m glad you told me. I didn’t make that easy tonight.

I send it without adding a question she has to answer before she can sleep.

At five thirty the next day, she answers on the second ring.

“Hi.”

“Hey, beautiful.”

She doesn’t speak for a moment. I lean against the kitchen counter and let myself hear that she stayed on the line.

“You done working?” I ask.

“For today.”

“You eat my food?”

“For lunch.”

“All of it?”

“I was upset.”

I laugh, and she does, too. It helps without fixing anything.

“I took what you said personally,” I tell her. “The age part. I was already waiting for you to tell me I’d be better off with somebody else.”

“I was close to saying it. I thought about that after you left.”

“Please don’t.”

“I won’t.”

“And I shouldn’t have treated you like bringing this up meant you were trying to end us.”

She lets me finish. Then she says, “I don’t need you to settle your entire future overnight.”

“Good. I didn’t.”

“Neither did I.”