Chapter 24

Gabe loves the aquarium.

We visit the touch tanks first, and I boost him up so he can stroke his chubby little fingers through the anemones’ tendrils and watch them close like pupils in bright sun. He runs his fingertips over the nubbly surface of the sea stars and draws back in delighted alarm when a wave swamps the tank.

Jack stands a little ways back, and when I look over at him, he’s watching Gabe with unmasked affection, and something in my own chest contracts, hard and dangerous.

I’m not sure who I’m afraid for, Gabe or me or Jack.

After the tanks, we wander into the dark tunnel of the coral reefs, with their brightly lit windows. Gabe raises his arms over his head for a pick-me-up, and Jack lifts him up and points out the various creatures semi-camouflaged in the reef.

“Look,” Jack says, pointing with Gabe’s finger. “It’s Dory.”

We get treated to Gabe’s recounting of the plot of Finding Dory. Well, a mostly coherent version. There is a lot of stuff about the Hank the Septopus, and not all of it makes sense.

We wander through shorebirds, where Jack explains to Gabe that the funny-looking black and white and orange birds are puffins.

“There are puffins on my cereal,” Gabe says.

“Yep,” Jack says.

“Why?”

“Well, maybe because the cereal is puffy, and so they called it that, Puffins, and then they thought it would be cute to put a picture of a puffin on the box.”

“Why?”

Jack slides me an alarmed look. I shrug.

“I guess they needed to put something on the box to make it fun to look at so people would want to buy it,” Jack hazards.

“Why?”

I am struck by giggles. We’ve been in the “why” phase for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve heard Gabe treat Jack to a full-on encounter.

Jack narrows his eyes at me, a death look, and I try to rein in the giggles but give myself the hiccups instead. “You deserve that,” he says in an undertone. To Gabe he says, “Because they need to sell the Puffins so they can make money.”

“Why?”

Jack is starting to look panicked. “Because they’re a business and that’s the point of business. Making money.”

To both of our surprise and amusement, Gabe doesn’t ask “why” again.

“You think he understood that explanation?” Jack asks me, as Gabe runs ahead up the ramp toward the next exhibit.

I shake my head. “No.”

“So why’d he let me off the hook?”

“I think he sensed that you were in over your head.”

He rolls his eyes and shoves me playfully. I shove him back. I barely rock him from his feet, and the lack of give is so satisfying I want to do it again. My hands want explore more of that bicep muscle I just wrapped my fingers around, to follow the individual bands around his arm, into his shoulder, down to his sculpted chest. I let him walk a little ahead of me so I can get my mind off the subject of Jack’s anatomy—this is a family show after all—but walking behind Jack turns out to be a terrible way to get my mind off the way he’s put together, so I run to catch up to Gabe instead.

Gabe is enraptured by the underwater dome, the fish surrounding us 360 degrees, overhead and on all sides. He runs and darts and puts his hands on the glass like all the other toddlers. Jack and I stand a little way back, letting him move freely through the room, because there’s really no trouble for him to get into except stepping on other people’s feet, and everyone else in the room is either a kid or a parent, so I’m not too worried.

“I’m glad we did this,” Jack says.

“You don’t wish you were watching the game?” I tease.

He shakes his head, not matching my teasing, but watching Gabe through serious eyes. “I was scared of him,” he says.

I don’t get what he means at first.

“Of Gabe,” he clarifies. “Especially when he was little. It always felt like I’d break him. So it was easier to let my mom and my sister do all the work.”

I think my mouth falls open.

“And then, you know, they were good at it, they were the ones who knew how to do everything, so I kind of let it go on like that. But I’m glad. Glad I’ve gotten this chance. I don’t think—if what happened with you and Big Dick hadn’t happened, I don’t know what it woulda taken for me to spend more time with him.”

I close my mouth and catch my breath and finally figure out what I want to say.

“I’m glad, too.”

I wasn’t sure this morning. About this whole trip. About the idea of all of us doing something together that felt like what a family would do together. Mom and dad and kid.

Every time Jack and I have been together this week, I’ve felt myself slipping a little farther down a slope whose shape I know and whose pull I’ve never been able to resist. The only thing keeping it safe was that it was just sex.

But this isn’t sex. And it isn’t Jack’s easy friendship, tossed at me like a fleece wrap at a football game. This day, this trip, is a promise I’m pretty darn sure Jack can’t make.

Gabe comes running over and throws himself into my lap. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I want goldfish.”

It’s lunchtime, so we take a break and get hot dogs in the cafeteria, Gabe kneeling up on his chair, so bubbly and bouncy, full of the stories of what he’s seen, that I’m afraid he’s going to fall over from sheer uncoordinated excitement. Jack is on alert too, poised with a hand that hovers near Gabe’s squirmy little body, and I realize it’s one of the first times I’ve been able to sit back and just watch because someone else is worrying about whether Gabe will fall off the chair.

Instead, Gabe reaches out and brushes too close to his soda cup, and Jack lunges to catch it and knocks it over, a tsunami across the table and Gabe.

“Sh—”

Jack cuts the epithet off and rakes his gaze over the situation, taking stock. “You want the kid or the napkin run?” he asks, as Gabe, swamped in icy drink and startled by the toppling drink and Jack’s near-outburst, explodes into sobs.

I’ve never had a choice before. It’s always been the screaming kid and the napkin run, and if I’m lucky some well-meaning wait staff or elderly woman with a grandmotherly air will blot at the puddle for a few seconds before wafting back to their own concerns.

Gabe has one hand knotted in Jack’s shirt, so I run for napkins, and in a few seconds he has Gabe calmed down and I have the soda cleaned up.

I walk the wad of icy napkins to the trash can. As I turn back, I see that Jack is working Gabe out of his drenched shirt. He’s already dug in the backpack for a change of clothes, which are draped over the back of the chair.

It takes my breath away, actually, how perfectly right the scene looks. And how I don’t mind standing slightly outside it and watching Jack pull the new T-shirt over our son’s head.

I could get used to this, I think, and then, my heart squeezing painfully in my chest, Shit.