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“Without a doubt.”
I wanted to spend the night but I didn’t want Summer waking up and I wasn’t there. She’d been delighted to hear that Evie and I had made up and that she was back in my life. But when I said we were dating, I could see that was confusing. She didn’t quite know what to make of that, so for her sake, Evie wasn’t spending nights there and we tried not to be too overt with displays of affection.
We were taking small steps, taking nothing for granted.
I took Evie and Summer for a visit at my brother Brett’s wine farm in Napa Valley. We were not close but I thought it might be nice to get away and for Summer to see her cousins. Summer hadn’t been there in years. The farm was beautiful, a French-style Tuscan affair built of stone with wide views of the hills. Brett’s wife, Nadine, had inherited money from her father and when Brett was tired of trying his hand at politics in DC, they’d come down to Napa to grow grapes. Their pinot noir was not bad at all. Brett was five years older than me, sometimes it felt more like twenty. It had always been hard for us to get along, we were just too different.
But this was a good weekend.
As soon as we’d arrived, the cousins came to show Summer the stables and the new foal that had been born the week before. Nadine gave Evie a big hug and insisted on showing her the house. Brett and I went outside, he told me about work, asked how I was doing. Dinner was a huge and noisy affair, the boys arguing and Summer laughing and us drinking too much wine.
Afterwards, while the women cleared the table, I helped Brett get wood for the fireplace outside.
“Evie is lovely,” he said, glancing at me. “But she’s…”
“Young?” I suggested. That always seemed to come up when people talked about us.
“No,” he shook his head with a smile. “I was going to say normal.”
I pretended to be hurt.
“I’m not normal?”
Brett gave me a look. “Bro, you’re many things, but normal is not one of them. Remember that teacher at school who said you were a free radical?”
I remembered that. I had thought it was a compliment at the time, until I later learnt more about chemistry and realized it had not been intended to flatter me. He meant that I was unstable, that I could damage people, and myself. At the time, I had been a rebellious teenager and perhaps, it had been a fair comment. The one thing I liked about free radicals, was that they were capable of independent existence. For a long time, there was nothing else I’d wanted more than to be left to do my own thing, even in a relationship. But Evie had changed that. I no longer wanted to be alone anymore.
“I mean Star wasn’t normal, even before you got married. And I’m thinking of that girlfriend you had in high school, Cassie? Didn’t she go on to do some weird stuff?”
I was trying to keep my cool, I didn’t want to get into an argument.
“Cassie is an installation artist in New York, she does well. I’ve seen her work. I don’t always understand it, but she’s done well for herself,” I said.
Brett wanted to say something else and I interjected, “Look, I know what you mean, Brett, but I’ve changed, okay? I’m not the man I used to be.”
He bit his lip and nodded. “You realize she’s going to want to get married, have kids, the whole shebang?”
I nodded but I did feel something shift.
I hadn’t thought about that specifically, no. Now that he’d mentioned it, I wondered about it. I hadn’t enjoyed the marriage experience that much. Or at all, to be honest. Not that I’d ever wanted to get married in the first place. But there had been a time in the beginning, in that first year when Star and I had gotten to know each other, when I thought she was the only woman for me. I wouldn’t have called it love. But in a way, we fitted together, it worked, for a while. When she proposed one night, both of us stoned, having waited for the dawn to break over the mountains in some off-the-beaten-track location, it had seemed like a great idea. A crazy idea, sure, but I was all about the crazy ideas. Especially back then, I didn’t worry too much about things failing, not working out.
“We tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves, it’s just you and me from now on.”
It wasn’t the most romantic of proposals, but I had liked it. I had liked our wedding too, and when we moved in together, that had been groovy. Then, she got pregnant and had the baby and suddenly, nothing was good anymore. We weren’t sleeping, the baby was always crying and she hated the way she looked and the fact that I was always leaving to go to work. I couldn’t wait to get away from all that, to be honest. Bury myself in code, forget about the dirty kitchen and the screaming wife.
The thought of having to go through all that again, that was a sobering thought.
When we left the next morning after breakfast, there were warm hugs all round.
“Don’t wait so long before you come again,” Brett said.
As we drove off, Summer told us how they’d played games all night long. She was excited, said she and one of her cousins had exchanged email addresses and would be playing again online.
“What’s up?” Evie asked me as we got home.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You haven’t said a word the whole way back.”
