Page 94 of Bad Words

I laughed. “Yeah, less begrudgingly now. Anyway, that’s the context. As for the review…” Brian picked his pen back up and waited. I winced, rubbing one hand through my hair. “I’m still of two minds about everything that’s … I mean, I remember that day clearer than any single other day, I think, from my twenties. My college graduation, the day Bill flew out here, the actual book sale—I don’t remember any of those as clearly as the day of the review. Maybe some of that is the drastic before and after, right? Like, when I woke up that morning, my whole future seemed rock-solid, guaranteed, written in permanent ink, and by the time I went to sleep that night, it was all gone.

“At the same time, I mean … it is Selina’s job, and all she cares about is doing it with integrity. And obviously that has to mean being honest, even if…”

“If it feels like…” Brian said, nodding, jotting notes.

“Yeah, even if on my end, it feels like this is the worst possible thing that could happen to you as a writer. So, I had this knee-jerk response. Like, you just think, ‘What are this person’s qualifications,’ ‘What kind of a person does she have to be to … to do this to people.’ But she’s not trying to speak for everybody. She’s just a person with an opinion. Which is something that I’ve told myself so many times in so many contexts now, and some days it makes everything feel more manageable, and other days it makes everything worse.”

Brian’s eyebrows had risen, but he kept writing. “Wow. Yeah. Okay.”

“Sorry.” I laughed. The back of my neck felt hot. “I guess I’ve been trying to process a lot of this.”

“No, no worries, man.” He set down his pen and took another sip of his coffee. “Are you trying to decide whether to let things go?”

“I don’t know.” I hesitated. “Maybe it’s the opposite. Like I’m trying to figure out what to hold on to.”

The rest of the day was a blur of fog. In late afternoon, my mother and I walked westward toward the sea, and she asked, unprompted, “Pijay, have you been seeing anyone?”

“Not really.”

“Not really. What does that mean?”

I curled my hands in my jacket pockets, glancing up the street at the headlamps, diffuse ovals through the fog. “Nothing. Yeah. It means no.”

“You know I liked Kate.”

I laughed. “That was five years ago, Mom.”

“Still! You took such good care of each other.”

I didn’t answer. My relationship with Kate had been defined by her life in residency, urgent, rigid, and scheduled. I’d dropped everything to see her when she was available. I’d molded my life around the shape of hers like wet clay pushed against a hard object. It bothered me, sometimes, that nobody in my family had seemed to recognize this, the way I’d started to slip-slide so completely into her life.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you dating?”

“Me?” My mom laughed. “Of course not.”

“Wait, why of course not? I thought you met someone at that book club.”

“Oh, Alan. Pff. Wrong for both of us.” The wind lifted my mother’s hair, blowing a few strands across her face. She caught it back and bundled it up at the crown of her head with one of her plastic clasps. “To tell you the truth, I find it a lot easier, being alone. There’s no trouble, no dramatics. After your father, everything was such a relief … the relaxation of it, you know. My systems had been in overdrive for so long.”

I’d heard some variation of this from my mother since I was twelve years old. I didn’t know why, now, the words disturbed me.

“Um, that overdrive feeling,” I said. “How do you know whether that’s a positive or a negative?” I paused. “Because it’s not like being interested in somebody is a quiet feeling, either, right? So, I mean, how do you know if you’re feeling agitation or excitation or whatever it is for the right or wrong reasons?”

My mom looked up at me, a sad tilt to the creases around her eyes. “Well, I don’t know, Pijay. I never knew.” She laughed. “That’s why everything happened this way, isn’t it?” And she slipped her arm through mine and walked me to the sea, where we watched the waves turn over and over.

I flew back to New York the next day. I’d imagined California would open my head up and scrub my skull cavity clean somehow, but as the plane hit the tarmac at JFK, I felt no measurable difference in my thoughts, in my level of contentment, clarity, anything. I opened my phone. The notifications began to roll in. Chan Pan Support Group, Sibling Megatext, The Obviously Evil Bird Archive, Arthur, Bill, Dad, some unsaved number that was probably spam, nothing from Selina.

She wasn’t obliged to text me, of course. She’d started our previous conversation, so maybe the onus was on me to reach out, if I wanted to speak with her again.

And I did. I could admit that much to myself: I wanted to speak with her, the way I’d want to scratch an itch, the way I’d want to satisfy hunger, but I didn’t know where that instinct came from, or whether it was the type of instinct that led anywhere good.

Unthinking, I opened the spam text, only to realize that it wasn’t spam.

Hi Parker! Sorry this text is so late. Bookstores get crazy around the holidays. But it’s Emily from Word I wondered would you want to have dinner sometime? Again, no pressure if you think it’ll make anything weird for the launch! We can also keep it totally professional!

I was still deciding how to respond when I unlocked our apartment door an hour later. “Hey, he’s back,” said Arthur as I unlaced my sneakers. He lay on the sofa in a half-open bathrobe, his work laptop balanced on his stomach.

“I’m back,” I said. “Listen—are you busy?”