Today's Reading
And he wasn't exaggerating. We strolled through the 4-H barns filled with Holsteins and Clydesdales and, yes, a thousand-pound pig. We breathed through our mouths, the air pungent with the smell of manure, thick with dust. When he casually laced his fingers through mine, I felt as if silver coins were falling through my insides.
"So, what's next?" he asked when we exited Agriculture Hall, squinting into white sunlight. "We could get a bite to eat or...There's always monkeys racing on greyhounds."
I laughed. "You're joking."
"Come on." He grinned. "They're my daughters' favorite."
Daughters.
A feeling of ice in my lungs.
"What?" he asked. And then, "Oh, crap. You didn't know I had kids. Three. They're amazing. Exhausting, sometimes terrifying, but amazing." Everything about him—his eyes, face, voice—lit up with love for those kids. Nick used to look like that.
I glanced away, trying to compose my face. I'd never seen him with kids at the Y, and when he hadn't mentioned them the other night, I had thought...had let myself think... My face burned. I couldn't go out with him again. It would be unbearable to be around children, and even if I could let myself love a child again...
"Hey." He stooped to meet my gaze. "You okay?"
"Just surprised. Three, wow!" My voice sounded cartoonlike and as fake as my smile. "What about their mom? Is she...Are you..." I wasn't sure why I was asking, especially when I had already decided I couldn't see him after this.
"Are we divorced? Yes. Thoroughly. Completely. Happily. Well, I don't mean I'm happy that we—actually, I am. We were a mess; the marriage was a mess." He looked at me helplessly. "And now this conversation is a mess. Were you ever married?"
I'd always said no to this question because it shut down the other question, which was unanswerable: Do you have kids? But this time, the lie I'd told a dozen times before, that tiny inconsequential no, dissolved in my throat, and a sad flickering yes came out instead, the neon green of Nick's name flashing meteor-like across my thoughts. I didn't know what else to say, though, how to joke or indicate with a rueful smile that it no longer hurt. It did. It always would.
Whatever Erik saw in my face, he abruptly, thankfully, switched gears. "Come on, let's get a drink. I'll show you a picture of my kids."
We found a table in a German-themed beer garden beneath a blue-and- white-striped umbrella. He handed me his wallet, the plastic picture sleeve open to a photo of three children, dark-haired like Erik.
"The best things in my life." He pointed. "Spencer, Hazel, and Phoebe."
"Your daughters are twins?" He nodded.
It was a studio portrait. The girls, infants in red velvet dresses, chubby legs in white lace tights, sat together in a plush armchair. The boy, Spencer, stood beside them. A Christmas tree in the background. "They're beautiful," I said. My face felt rubbery. After a moment, I handed the wallet back.
He stared at the picture before folding the wallet shut and sticking it in his pocket. I think I asked how old the kids were, but my voice was polite and as faraway as the silver speck of an airplane moving across the sky. I didn't hear what he said. And then we were quiet, but it wasn't the comfortable silence we'd shared at the custard stand. Everything felt wrong.
"I guess the kids were part of my wanting a moratorium the other night," Erik finally said. "It's not that I don't love talking about them, but things are...complicated." He stared off toward the fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel turned against the endless blue sky. "I just wanted simple for one night, you know?" He raked his hand through his unruly hair. "You must think I'm a lousy dad."
"I don't think that at all."
"Really?" Relief flooded his eyes. "I'm glad." And then, "So, what about you? Any kids you accidentally forgot to mention?"
Accident.
A word from another life.
It took most of my thirteen months in the hospital to say that word, accident, without faltering. I wanted more than anything in my life for that afternoon to have been an accident, but I wasn't sure. Once I'd looked up the word, as if my confusion were a matter of definition. Accident: sudden and unexpected event.
The definition had stopped me. Hadn't there been warnings? Could it be an accident if it wasn't unexpected?
I couldn't meet Erik's eyes, gluing mine instead to the bright circle of the Ferris wheel. It had stopped, the small carts swaying against the sky.
...
