Well?” Cal asked, watching Billy expectantly.
“Bliss,” Billy said. “Sheer bliss. But where did you learn how to make it?” She was referring to the spaghetti carbonara Cal had prepared for dinner. She wrapped more of it around her fork and popped it into her mouth, and Cal smiled, pleased with her reaction. No need to tell her now that it was the only dish he knew how to cook really well. He’d gone grocery shopping in town and met her at her place after she’d gotten home from work. She’d perched on the kitchen counter, sipped the red wine he’d brought, and watched as he cooked the spaghetti, fried the pancetta, beat the eggs, and tossed it all together. She’d wanted to help him, but he’d refused. Not because she’d burned their dinner, but because he’d wanted to do something concrete and tangible for her. And she had let him. It was a simple thing, he knew. So why did it feel as if he had crossed into new territory—not only in their relationship but also in his life—tonight?
“My college roommate’s mother taught me how to make it,” he explained, only now picking up his fork and digging into it himself. “I used to spend Thanksgiving with them on the East Coast, and they pulled out all the stops. I mean, they made the whole traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner, but they also made a separate traditional Italian dinner, too. And some of those recipes had been in their family for generations.”
“Mmm. Well, this one’s a keeper.” Billy sighed, reaching over to the bowl of grated Parmesan cheese he’d set on her kitchen table and sprinkling some more of it onto her pasta. “But since when does the Butternut IGA sell pancetta?”
“Oh. I bought that in Minneapolis. That and the . . . wine and the Parmesan. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”
She blushed then, a soft, lovely blush made even lovelier by the flickering light of the candles on the table. She was wearing an eyelet summer blouse and blue jeans, and her glossy, dark hair was loose on her shoulders. How was it possible, he wondered, that every single time he saw her, she was even prettier than she’d been the time before? Was she really changing? No, he thought. She wasn’t. He was the one changing.
He caught site of Murphy now and smiled. While Cal had cooked the pasta and made the sauce, Murphy had lingered nearby, wagging his tail and looking hopeful. But after Billy had given him a treat and patted him, he’d wandered over to a corner of the kitchen and lay down on a small rag rug that was obviously there for that purpose. Now he seemed content, though he was keeping one soulful eye on the two of them in case they decided to toss any food his way.
Cal took a sip of his wine. The attraction was still there between them, he knew, but while it had been nearly out of control the last time he’d seen her—he pictured the two of them entangled together in the Porsche—it was different now, thrumming gently between them like an underground river. Maybe it was because she was so preoccupied; she’d been unfailingly pleasant tonight, as always, but Cal sensed that she was only half there with him.
“You must miss Luke,” he said.
“I do miss him.” She looked up from her plate. “It’s more than that, though. I think . . .” She put her fork down, and her fingers came up to her temples in a gesture that combined both fatigue and stress. “I think I might have made a huge mistake with him. I mean, huge as in unforgivable.”
“I can’t imagine you doing anything unforgivable,” Cal said. “Especially to your son.” She had never struck him as anything other than an incredibly conscientious mother.
“No, I mean it. This time I might have.”
“What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”
She hesitated. “Do you remember the story I told you that night at the Corner Bar?”
“Every word of it.”
She looked surprised.
“The one about the teenage girl who went on a fishing trip with her dad to Alaska?” he asked. “She had a fling with the guide, and later, when she told her parents she was pregnant, her dad went back to the lodge. But he couldn’t find the guide.”
“That’s the one,” Billy said, looking faintly amused. “I’m impressed you remembered it, given the amount of scotch you’d imbibed that night.”
“It was an interesting story,” Cal observed. “I thought it had a happy ending, though.” Right now, Billy looked anything but happy.
“It did, for a while. But before the girl’s dad died—wait, I’m going to stop telling this in the third person, if that’s okay?”
He smiled. “That’s fine.”
“Before my dad died last year he hired a private investigator and found the fishing guide. And he gave me his contact information, too, in a sealed envelope. I put it away in a safe deposit box. I didn’t tell Luke. But I opened the envelope on Friday night, after I got back from driving him to camp.” She paused, considered Cal. “So you see . . . the guide didn’t just disappear. He was living on Vancouver Island the whole time. He’s got a boat charter business, a wife, two daughters, and . . . a son, of course.”
“So he . . . knows about Luke?”
“That depends. I wrote to him that night. He—his name is Wesley, Wesley Fitzgerald—might have gotten the letter by now. Or not.”
“And . . . Luke?”
“And Luke . . .” Here there was a sigh from Billy, and her fingers went to her temples again. “I told Luke about it for the first time on Friday on the drive to camp . . . It all came out.” Something about the expression on Cal’s face made her say, “I know. It wasn’t the way I wanted it to happen. I think, in retrospect, I wanted to contact his dad first and make sure he was okay with all of this. But on the way to the meet-up place, Luke said he wasn’t going on the hike, and I couldn’t make him go. He said he was going to go to Alaska, alone, to find his dad. And I just panicked. When I first told him, he was excited. But then he was angry, too, and hurt, I think, that I kept it from him for so long.”
She picked up her fork again, but now only to poke halfheartedly at the pasta on her plate. “And then, after I told him everything, I dropped him off at Split Rock Lighthouse and sent him off on this two-week trip. I feel terrible now. I’m worried about how he’s doing, knowing all of this. I’m wondering, too, how he’s feeling . . . about me.” Her voice dropped on this last word, so that she practically whispered it. “I mean,” she said, her voice still so soft that he needed to lean closer to hear her, “Luke knows I had his dad’s contact information for a year, for more than a year, and I didn’t do anything with it. Didn’t get in touch with his dad. Didn’t tell Luke. Just . . . decided to put it all off until sometime in the future when everything would suddenly be clear to me. I was trying to protect him from all the unknowns. But what I’m wondering now is whether or not Luke will be able to trust me again. Or, if not trust me, at least forgive me.”
Her blue eyes were shiny with what might have been tears, but she didn’t cry. She smiled, or tried to smile. “Sorry. I should have warned you. Not exactly bedtime story material, is it?”
Cal said nothing. His first impulse was to comfort her. And he almost—almost—reached for one of her hands. They were both on the table now, smooth and graceful in the candlelight. But something stopped him. It was the understanding that Billy needed more from him than that now. The thing was, he wasn’t a parent. He couldn’t second-guess her decisions as a parent, even if he was inclined to. And he wasn’t inclined to. He wasn’t, by nature, a judgmental person. Furthermore, he knew intuitively that she was a good person and a caring mother. “I think,” he said finally, “that at the time you made the decision not to tell Luke, you thought it was the right one. Whether it was or not—and there’s no point in revisiting it—you’ve come forward now. You’ve told him. And as for him forgiving you”—he hesitated—“I’m remembering myself at thirteen. I think if there’s one thing kids that age are good at doing, it’s moving on. They’re much better at letting go of the things we hold on to even when we shouldn’t hold on to them. The trust thing—I don’t know. It might take some time for you to regain it. Then again, it might not. Life at his age is so . . . so fluid. There’s so much happening. Sports, and girls and, if he’s like me when I was his age, more girls.” He smiled. “And if he does have a relationship with his dad . . . well. That’s all the more reason for him not to dwell on it.”
Now he took one of her hands, which was soft. He held it and ran his thumb over her knuckles. She squeezed his hand back. “What if Wesley doesn’t answer my letter, though? Or he does, and he says he wants nothing to do with Luke?”
“Then you’ll . . . you’ll deal with it. One step at a time, though, Billy. Just . . . one step.”
“I think I can do that,” she said, her fingers moving to caress his hand. And he noticed, for the first time, the faint bluish circles under her eyes. She was tired. Of course she was. She was exhausted. She probably hadn’t been sleeping well. Should he ask her if she wanted him to leave? He didn’t want to leave, though. He wanted to be there for her, even if all he could do was hold her hand.
“Cal?” she said, tightening her fingers around his. “That night I drove you home from the Corner Bar? That was a turning point for me, in a way. After I got back, I thought about what you’d said, about . . . your wife lying to you about wanting to have children. And I realized I was doing the same thing to Luke. I was lying to him.”
Cal shook his head. “No, it’s very different, Billy. You were trying to protect Luke. Meghan . . . I don’t know who she was trying to protect, unless it was herself. She . . .” He stopped. “I’ve never told anyone this before. I mean, I told you and Allie she didn’t want kids, but I didn’t tell you how I found out.” Billy looked at him questioningly. “Do you have time for another story?”
“Always,” she said, with the trace of a smile. She fingered the rim of her wineglass with the hand that wasn’t holding his.
“All right, let’s see. Where to start . . .” But there was only one place to start, and that was with him finding the file. Still, Billy needed a little backstory. “So . . . this was about three months ago, give or take a little. Meghan was at a spa weekend in wine country with two of her friends. It was something they did every year.” The point of these weekends was not to drink wine—which Meghan thought was too caloric—but to get various scrubs and wraps and treatments done. This was more detail than Billy needed, though, and he was determined, to keep any bitterness out of this telling, if possible. He started again. “While she was away, I was paying our taxes, and I needed some information from her on her medical deductions. I didn’t want to disturb one of her herbal wraps or whatever, so I went into her home office and looked in her file cabinet for the medical deductions folder. I didn’t have any trouble finding it. Every one of her files was perfectly labeled. Except for one. It was blank. And damn it, I was curious,” he admitted. “An unlabeled file?” That, of course, was the antithesis of Meghan’s organizational style, which bordered on the fanatical. “Anyway, I took out the file and I flipped through it. At first I couldn’t even understand what I was reading. Then, when I did finally understand it, I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Am I losing my mind? Or do these forms belong to someone else—a friend of Meghan’s, maybe?’ They were hers, though. They had her name, her personal information, everything. I made myself go through them again. All of them. The postoperative instructions, the hospital bill, the credit card receipt. Not surprisingly, she didn’t submit any of this information to our insurance company.”
He stopped again and reached for his wineglass. “Turns out she’d gotten a laparoscopic tubal ligation,” he said. Billy frowned slightly. “She had her tubes tied,” he clarified. “Which, as you probably know, is only recommended for someone who’s looking for a permanent method of birth control. Someone who’s sure she doesn’t want to become pregnant in the future. Here’s the thing, though. As far as I knew, we’d spent the last year trying to have a baby. She told me she’d gone off birth control pills—which, obviously, she had, but only because she’d found a more reliable form of birth control.”
“When had she . . . ?”
“Gotten the procedure? Seven months earlier. I did the math. She’d done it while I was at a conference in Chicago. And when I got home from that, I remembered, she’d seemed fine. Of course, it was outpatient surgery, with a pretty quick recovery time.” The other thing he’d remembered, which he didn’t share with Billy now, was that she hadn’t felt like sex for about a week after he’d gotten back. He’d been disappointed. Less about the sex than about the fact that he’d sat next to a couple with a baby on the flight back from Chicago, and the baby was so goddamned cute that he couldn’t wait to get home and keep trying to have one with Meghan. “Anyway,” he said, pushing on, “after I found the file, I spent the rest of that weekend in a fog. I kept dodging her texts and kind of wandering around our apartment, drinking scotch. By the time she got home—I’m not going to sugarcoat this—I was drunk. Dead drunk,” he added flatly. “I’d finished a whole bottle of scotch by myself. That, and the one night here at the Corner Bar, are the only two times I’ve gotten drunk in recent memory. The night Meghan came home was a doozy, though.”
“Oh, Cal,” Billy murmured, a worried frown line appearing between her eyes.
“No, it was okay. I didn’t lose it. Not completely, anyway. And when I confronted her, she was . . . she was so in control.” That was Meghan, cool under pressure, right up until the end, he thought to himself. It was one of the things that had first attracted Cal to her, when he’d met her on a job right after he had moved to Seattle. That night, though, there was a part of him that had wished she would crack a little. She didn’t. Instead, after he’d said he was leaving, she’d followed him upstairs and, being careful not to touch him—she’d understood, intuitively, that he wouldn’t tolerate that—she’d tried to reason with him. Tried to minimize the damage she’d done and rationalize her reason for doing it. She wasn’t parent material, she said, and she never would be. Her own parents had been cold and distant. Besides, she’d argued, her and Cal’s life together was so good without children. Why would they want to risk disrupting that? And their careers would suffer, especially hers. Having children would interrupt the momentum they’d worked so hard to build. Cal had tried to shut out what she was saying, but in the time it took him to throw some clothes into a suitcase and let himself out of the apartment, he’d still heard enough of it.
“I don’t understand something, though,” Billy said. “If you hadn’t found this out that weekend, how was she going to explain it when she didn’t get pregnant?”
“I asked her that,” Cal said. “Later, in a calmer moment. I asked her how far she was willing to carry the charade. She said she was hoping, over time, to convince me that we would be happier without children. The crazy thing, though, was that if she’d told me from the beginning she didn’t want children, I would have understood. I don’t know if I would have seen myself having a future with her, but I wouldn’t have judged her. By keeping it from me, and then, of course, by outright lying about it, she undermined our whole relationship.” What he didn’t say to Billy was that somehow, over the last month, his bitterness toward Meghan had dissipated. Was Butternut or Billy responsible for that transformation? Then again, he couldn’t really have had one without the other. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, a tentative though still lovely smile.
“The thing is, Billy,” he said, stroking her fingers, “your not telling Luke is very different from Meghan’s not telling me. You’re a parent with a child you’re responsible for. And there were, and still are, a lot of unknowns about contacting his dad. But more important, you’ve told him now. And you and Luke will work it out together.”
She returned the pressure on his hand. She took a sip of her wine, but it looked to Cal like she’d lost her appetite. Most of the spaghetti carbonara sat untouched on her plate.
“It’s good cold,” Cal offered, indicating her plate.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s delicious. I think I’m just too tired to eat. I didn’t even know that was possible for me.”
“You need a good night’s sleep more than you need dinner,” Cal said, releasing her hand. He stood up and reached for her plate and his. She tried to help him, but he waved her back down. She sat there contemplatively while he cleared the table and put the leftover spaghetti into the fridge.
“Don’t do any more, Cal,” Billy said when he started to load the dishwasher. “I’ll finish up in the morning.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. Come on. I’ll walk you to the door.” When they stood in the open doorway, facing each other, she swayed against him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t very good company,” she said.
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re always good company,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.
“I’m going to bed early,” she said. “What about tomorrow, after I get home from the library? I don’t expect you to cook for me again, but maybe we can get something at the Corner Bar.”
“I’d love that,” Cal said, running the back of his hand over her cheek. What he really wanted to do more than anything right now was take her in his arms, carry her into her bedroom, and tuck her into bed. But he thought it might be misinterpreted. So instead he said, “Good night. And Billy . . .”
“Yes?”
“You’re a good mom. Don’t forget that.” After he gave a waiting Murphy a pat on the head, he left, closing the door softly behind him.