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“Dogs,” I correct him. “I inherited Sierra’s dog Horatio after she was having trouble. To be fair, he wasn’t the best dog to begin with, but now that we’ve potty-trained him, that’s a step. As for my business, I’d say I’ve built up a pretty solid client base. Some weeks are busier than others, but that gives me time for a breather too. Although I do love it.”
Emerson takes my hand. “I’d like to see you at work sometime.”
“That’s easy.” I grin at him. “Just get some cliché quote on your arm, and it’s done.”
Emerson frowns. “You think I’d want something like that?”
Shrugging one shoulder makes my red dress strap slip down. I adjust it. “Everyone gets cliché quotes. The only thing I judge are those funny tattoo fails online—the ones with hideous pictures or misspelled quotes that mean something like ‘eat shit and die’ in another language.”
We both chuckle at that.
“Any favorites?” he asks.
“A few,” I admit. “I really like the watercolor tattoos, how they turn out, even if they don’t last well.”
“Some of the best things don’t,” Emerson says, frowning again for a period to his sentence.
I fall silent myself.
Is he wondering, same as me, if we belong to that class of ‘best things’?
Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.
Probably.
Back when we were kids, and Josie and I loved roller coasters, she’d ride on them screaming while I’d be swearing that ‘we’re all gonna die.’ I’m not sure when jumping to the worst conclusion became my MO, but somewhere along the way, it did.
“What about you?” I find myself saying, mid-fork-fiddle. “What’s life like for the Emerson Storm?”
Emerson snorts. “Now you’re just making me sound like a tool. I get gigs here and there. Life has been a bit chaotic lately, with all the scandals Dad’s company and my brothers have been through. And Dad’s passing away, of course. Plus, every one of my brothers getting married.”
“I miss Dad like crazy,” he continues. “Barely get to talk to Mom, either. It makes you wonder.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say, putting my fork down and looking at him.
He pauses, brow creasing, as if he were half talking to himself.
“They were so in love,” he says, his narrowed eyes still not meeting mine. Almost as if he’s seeing small marionettes of them acting out the whole thing on the adjacent table. “So good together. Dad was expansive, Mom was cautious. They brought out the best in each other, and then...”
He shakes his head. “I’m being stupid.”
“No,” I protest.
“I am,” he declares, a frown forming around the words. He picks up the clouded glass of water I hadn’t even noticed on the table, then puts it down, still frowning. “I’m talking about them as if I knew them, as if I were more than six when they broke up.” His shoulders shift with a restless movement. “All I really know about them I heard from Dad when he got drunk with me one time years back and was in a wistful mood. God knows, he was always a romantic when he was plastered.”
He looks at me head-on, his gaze suddenly as lucid and sharp as a penknife. “He cheated on her, you know. Dozens of times. It was when things were going bad, but still. That was what did it in the end. That was what broke her heart. Now, she can’t even visit us without it hurting more.”
I reach for his hand, a tensed claw on the tabletop. “I’m sorry.”
He lets me take it, although his hand doesn’t relax with the contact. It’s like holding a marble sculpture of a hand.
“It’s fine,” he says. “That’s another way we learn, right? From our parents’ mistakes.”
I nod, since what he said is one of those limp truisms that sound true.
His allusion brings to mind my own parents, the quintessential ‘good’ parents, still in love, good-natured, and caring. And yet utterly foreign to me.
They’ve been baffled since I was four and wasn’t like perfectly well-adjusted Josie. I think they still aren’t quite so sure of what to make of me.
“I think we have to be careful,” I find myself saying, “that in avoiding making past mistakes—whether our parents’ our ours—we don’t make more in turn.”
Emerson eyes me. “Now, that sounds like a riddle.”
“I don’t know,” I say, talking to the water, now only hazed with the last of pink amid a swath of indifferent navy from the sky above. “It’s always seemed to me that by people saying that ‘relationships are too much work’ and ‘not worth it’, they’re just avoiding being hurt. They’re just scared. Sure, sometimes they might have some avant-garde reason for it, defying stereotypes and such, and that’s not to say that there aren’t other ways to be happy, just...” I trail off, chuckling. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”
Emerson is looking at me curiously, but he nods, eyes focused past me.
