20. One More Thing We Need to DoThirty-Four Years Ago

One More Thing We Need to Do

Instead of getting back in the car, Sam walks.

I try to keep up as he turns onto Green Street, then onto Crown. He seems to know where he wants to go and keeps walking at double-time until he gets there—walking straight into Rough Draft Bar & Books, which is apparently partially a bookstore and partially a bar, because he walks past the shelves of books and up to the counter where he orders two IPAs.

"I don't want one," I say.

"That's good. Since they're both for me."

He puts a twenty on the counter and takes both glasses from the bartender, moves them over to a two-top.

"I guess I'm driving home."

He ignores this. "What did you think of her?"

"What does that matter?"

"I'm curious," he says.

Except that he is not actually curious. He is crazy about her in that way that nothing anyone else says matters.

So I try to think of what he's really asking. I try to think of what Taylor was trying to ask of me. Careful with him.

"I think that if you don't want it to be over with her, it felt like maybe it's not too late," I say.

"No. It's too late."

He says it with a finality that surprises me.

"How do you know?"

"She got married two weeks ago, for starters."

"What?"

He nods. "The guy is a friend of her older brother's. She says they didn't get involved until after we broke up, but I don't know. I don't know how she defines involved," he says. "He's an orthodontist named Sherman. He runs triathlons and plays the drums in a local band. And he's fucking old. He's older than you."

"Thanks for that."

"You want to meet him? His office is around the corner."

"No, I do not."

"He's got teenagers. She loves them. She loves him. She moved into his house after telling me she would never leave the farm." He pauses. "I thought I was the problem, you know? That our family was too messed up for her, or she didn't want to deal with living in a city, or I waited too long to ask her to marry me… but I just thought wrong."

"What do you mean?"

"It was all of those things and none of them," he says. "She just wanted him."

I feel that in my own chest, in my own heart—what is breaking open in him. What he has lost. What, apparently, he is wondering if he ever had.

Two weeks ago. Sam had to come to grips with this heartbreak two weeks ago—two and a half weeks after losing our father. Too soon after deciding that losing our father wasn't what it appeared to be.

I ask the question, gently.

"So… why did you want to stop here?"

"Can't help it. She's always where I want to stop."

Sam stares out the window.

He is lost in thought. And clearly not interested in talking.

I focus on driving, the snow coming down harder now, blanketing the farmland, fogging up the windshield. We are moving slowly, but I don't want to run out of time. I don't want to drop my brother off without being there for him. And sometimes being there for someone means staying quiet. But sometimes it means telling him the one thing no one else has managed to say.

"Have people been telling you that Dad is still with you?"

He keeps his eyes fixed on the window, not answering.

"Because they keep saying that to me. That he is with me. It sometimes helps to hear that and it sometimes just reminds me how alone I feel since losing him, like I had this invisible safety net underneath me my entire life and now it's just gone…"

"I think we hang out with different people."

"What I'm trying to say is that we don't always make the best decisions when we're grieving," I say.

"Meaning what exactly? I shouldn't have shown up to see my married ex-girlfriend today?"

"That. And also you may want to hold off on sending out any wedding invitations until you're sure that's what you actually want."

He turns and looks at me. "I thought we established that you're not the best person to be giving me advice."

"It's not exactly advice," I say. "More like an observation."

As if on cue, my phone starts buzzing. A calendar reminder comes up on the screen: ELLIOT/AUSTIN . It's a reminder for Austin's piano recital. Village Auditorium. 11:30 a.m. tomorrow. I flip the phone over, but not before Sam spots the name Elliot.

"What's that about an observation?"

"I have to get my life in order too. Believe me I know that. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong about this."

"Fine. So your observation is that I shouldn't move on with my life because we lost Dad?"

"No," I say. "My observation is that I think you are settling for a life you don't actually want."

I try to think of how to say it so that he hears me, what I see when I watch him. What became apparent to me when I saw Tommy watching him too.

"I think you don't really want to work at the company. You certainly don't want to devote your life to it."

"I'm good at my job."

"I'm sure you are. That's different from doing it for the right reasons."

"What are you talking about?"

"What if I could promise you that Dad never cared about you staying on at the company? Would you still want to be there now? Because I'm telling you, it was never about you working there. Or working with him. He just cared about having you close."

"You don't know that…" he says.

"Except that I do. I also know that there are only so many big hands you can lose before you stop wanting to place a big bet. Your injury, the breakup with Taylor. Now Dad. When do you decide you've lost enough?"

"Is this your version of a pep talk?"

"I'm just saying, extremely gently, that I think Morgan is a part of that same desire. To feel like you are on solid ground. But I'm not sure the ground gets to feel so solid for us anymore."

He looks torn about this, like it's opening something up in him, something he really doesn't want to touch. Which I get. I'm there with him. In this way, at least, I'm right there with him. When you lose too much in quick succession, it feels unmanageable to risk losing anything else.

"I believe, in my gut, that we make bad decisions when we are operating from fear," I say. "Take it for what it's worth. But, it seems to me, that your less-fearful self is still hoping for something else."

"And what's that exactly?"

"A different life."

I expect him to keep arguing. I expect him to say I'm wrong and I'm missing the thread again. But he gets quiet. He opens the window, keeps his gaze on the highway lights.

"You know, not too long after we got involved, Taylor asked me what playing baseball felt like," he says. "I went into this long explanation about how Dad coached my Little League ball team when I was five, the travel teams I played on my whole childhood, how I knew by twelve years old that playing ball was the only thing I wanted to do with my life."

He turns and looks at me.

"But I didn't understand that she wasn't asking for the biography. The history. She was asking what playing ball felt like. No one had ever asked me that before, so I didn't get it." He shakes his head. "And every time I see her, I want to tell her I have an answer now, as if that will change anything."

"Well. Tell me."

"It always felt like a kind of proof." He shrugs. "I know that sounds corny, but it did. Not proof of something so large as God or death, but not so removed from those things, either. Like proof that a given moment was happening. These are my arms and this is my breath and what am I going to do about it? How am I going to work it out to get from here to there? I always had an answer. Without even trying, I had that answer. And after I got injured, I went looking for that type of certainty everywhere. I don't know. Being with Taylor felt like the closest I'd come to finding it…"

I take that in as I steer down the Henry Hudson Parkway, New Jersey showing up across the river, Upper Manhattan in view.

"Except maybe now it's the opposite," I say.

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe when she walked away, it left you with the job of trying to prove it to yourself," I say. "That the two of you mattered."

He sighs. "This car ride sucks."

I let out a laugh as he looks back toward the window, signs for Harlem starting to appear, the sparkly lights of New York City coming through the windshield in the distance. I see something come over his face, a sadness he can't quite push away.

"I don't know about how it was with you, but Dad was never big on offering me romantic advice, which made sense, three divorces in. But when Taylor and I broke up, he took me out for dinner and we both drank a little too much and he made this big point of saying that you only get so many chances."

"Chances to do what?"

"To fix what you get wrong."

That hits hard. The truth of it.

"Dad said that?"

He nods. And I try to picture our father offering that up. Our father avoided weighing in on our personal lives. Which made me wonder if he was talking about Sam's personal life, or if a little too much alcohol had him talking out loud to himself. And if that was the case, what in his own life did he think he'd gotten wrong? That he still hadn't been able to fix?

I shake my head, not sure how to figure that out. "That doesn't sound like Dad," I said.

"Why do you think I remember it?"