"I know that, dear," my grandmother said, as if the knowledge didn't mean much, really. "But you must understand that even love is not an excuse where inescapable realities are concerned." Her smile grew broad and a lot more light-hearted, but her gaze remained firm, maybe even a little cold. She seemed caught between bursting with delight at the prospect of a great-grandchild in her life and wanting to break a wooden spoon over my head. "I know you're in love and happy, and I'm overjoyed for you both, but Jonathan, what were you thinking?"
I didn't really believe she wanted to hear the kinds of things I thought about when I was in bed with Katie. I shut up and drank some milk.
One of the reasons Michelle and I had been driven apart-besides the fact that she'd started growing overly fond of guys named Sycho-Kila and Wrecking Ball-was that she didn't want kids. A strange urgency sporadically possessed me. Some might call that instinct, others ego.
Anna couldn't keep from glancing over at the wall where she'd rearranged some of the photo collages. "Marriage might not hold the same sanctity it did several decades ago, but rearing children is another matter altogether. There is no greater responsibility or commitment."
"Despite the facts at hand not painting me as the most responsible person in the world, do you really think I'd be a second-rate father, Anna?"
"No, you will be a wonderful father." The severity cleared from her face as she imagined Christmas with laughing children again, a season full of presents other than ties, cologne, gift certificates, and cold cash. Lots of colorful paper and breakable parts, with un-followed directions in Japanese wafting to the floor. "But a stable family life is equally important."
"If one can be made, I'll make it."
"Of that I am assured."
"Are you?"
"That you'll do your very best at whatever you put your mind to? Yes, absolutely. Always, dear. However, I fear that these … complications might work against yours and Katie's relationship."
"So do I."
"Lord, that sounded shamefully indifferent. I apologize.”
“Don't. I know what you mean."
I got up and stood at the collages, witnessing my grandfather reading a copy of Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus. I had a first edition at the store that I couldn't look at without thinking of this picture: a man I'd never met nor even heard much about. Anna remained oddly silent about him, and I often thought the worst of him for that. It's difficult to give the dead the benefit of the doubt.
He and Anna had married within weeks of first meeting back in the late 'forties, when they were both still teenagers. He appeared to be a stolid man, lanky, a little thick in the middle but with arms of a mason or blacksmith. Actually, he'd been a milkman, starting his route at four in the morning, finishing by nine, and spending the rest of the day reading. He squinted, refusing glasses, with thick bushy thickets of overgrown eyebrows curling from their edges as if threatening to overtake his forehead. My mother said I'd inherited my love of books from him, my tenacity, and the fact that I was lactose intolerant but liked milk. Fine. Anything, anything at all, so long as I didn't get those eyebrows.
I hadn't spent the night at Katie's, as I'd been doing for the last eight weeks. After dinner she'd suggested a night apart and I'd agreed, though it seemed ironic that we needed time apart to work out our troubles about not spending enough time together. My bedroom felt like an open barn: huge and empty.
Katie hated Manhattan and had so far only spent one four-day weekend with me there. Though she enjoyed fine restaurants and theater, she despised the inherent speed and congestion of New York City, and all that it implied. Currents shifted every second, from street to street, hitting patches of warehouses, underground clubs, and classical brownstones and museums, layered side by side. The Koreans tumbled together on Korean Way, Italians down Canal; condensed passages of shops and youth down on St. Mark's and over by NYU, music and shouting, lots of blaring horns and sirens, and laughter. It annoyed her, turning off one block with a certain atmosphere and suddenly entering another with a completely different charge.
The homeless brought out her generosity, and for the first day she handed a buck out to whoever rattled their Styrofoam cup at us. She couldn't ignore anyone and stared wide-eyed at their approach. She may as well have had her PIN # tattooed on her cheek. At one point, five destitute men were lured from the shadows by her obvious innocence. It was like a scene from a Romero zombie flick, as the circle slowly closed around us and she handed out money.
"I feel sorry for them," she told me.
"I know.”
“You don't seem to care.”
“You get used to it.”
“I never could."
Of course she could, I thought-you had to in order to function in Manhattan, or any major city. You simply didn't have a choice. It wasn't until after we'd made love that night and I saw the quiet panic in her eyes that I realized I'd been wrong. She did have a choice and had already made it . . . to never return to the city. I felt vaguely troubled that the burden of our being together had fallen to me, and that the decision for our future had become mine alone.
Anna took my hand. "You're not interested in moving your shop here, are you?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“I didn't think so. Then why allow this facade to continue?”
“Certainly you know the answer to that," I said.
"Because you don't want to lose her. But prolonging the inevitable will only hurt her more in the end.”
“I don't know what the inevitable is."
Since I hadn't eaten, I didn't need to digest before my run, and I knew of a surefire way to get out of this conversation. "Hey, since we're already speaking about matters of the heart . . ."
She disliked redirection as much as I did, and grimaced. "Oh, please, Jonathan, now really . . ."
"Come on. How serious is it between you and Oscar? And is he going to make you take up skeet shooting?"
"We are friends, as you well know."
"I know he acts like a teenager, and I think I even caught you tittering once or twice."
"I do not," she said emphatically, "titter."
"Yes, you do. I heard it while you were acting giddy."
Her eyes widened. "And I most positively do not, under any conceivable circumstances, act giddy."
"Anyway, I'm going to see just how much pedestrian traffic there really is downtown."
"The two of you will work this out."
"Things have to break one way or the other."
I snapped the leash to Anubis' collar and we had a tug-of-war for about five minutes before I finally wore him down. "Not the park," I told him. "Just a little jog downtown. I promise, not the park."
He didn't look like he believed me.
I stood in front of the flower shop. Weather could shift radically in Felicity Grove, and yesterday's storm had collapsed into a warm, sun-packed day. Katie wouldn't get here before eleven; morning sickness had hit her hard, and the daily ritual of anguish left her so drained she usually went back to bed for a while. In those early hours, holding her in the bathroom and watching her suffer, she looked frail and weak and completely incapable of chasing ketchup-covered kids around a restaurant. With her hair sticking to her sweat-stained face, she still tried to smile for my benefit, and I always wanted to make love to her right then.
I tried not to think that Anubis was the reason why people weren't walking by me. He gave frowns of consternation, fully understanding that nobody in this town would buy Emerson's MayDay for twenty-four hundred dollars. We walked a little farther down to Fredrickson Street, and I watched the parking lot of Kinion's Hunting amp; Tackle fill and empty for twenty minutes. At only ten in the morning, a dozen men had already bustled into the store needing to purchase their Springfield M-6 Scouts, improved and updated from the original U.S. Air Force M-6 Survival Rifles, stainless steel construction with optional lockable marine flotation devices. I wondered if the ducks they shot would know the difference.