24. A Musical InterludeThirty Years Ago

A Musical Interlude

After the recital, Austin is surrounded.

He has a mess of people all there to support him. His mother is there and her fiancé, a mix of cousins and friends. I give him a hug, and I feel him instinctively look behind me for my father. My father who normally would be there with me.

"Are you alone?" he asks.

Before I answer, Austin blushes, embarrassed that he has forgotten my father has died. Or, maybe, just confused by it. I bend down and meet his eyes, kiss him on the forehead. Don't feel badly, I silently say. I forget too. All of us grown-ups still forget all the things that we wish we didn't have to remember.

"What do you say?" I ask. "Hot chocolate next Thursday?"

He nods, his smile growing big again. "Deal."

I start to slip out the back exit when I feel a hand on my back. Elliot. He is handsome in a way that is startling, even in his hospital scrubs, even with his two-day shadow, his eyes tired from last night's late hospital shift.

We walk out to the street together. "Do you have time for a quick cup of coffee?" he asks.

I think of his hand on my back, my desire to burrow into the comfort he is bringing me. Then I think what it's already cost me to even consider that.

"I can't," I say.

I shake my head no. And maybe it's the way I look at him, the finality, that stops him. Because he tilts his head, and it seems like he registers that I'm not just talking about coffee. I'm talking about the rest of it. This dance we've been doing since we've reconnected, what it has set the stage for us potentially to do.

I need to stop it now, if for no other reason than this. Even if I don't know how to reach toward Jack, again, even if it may be too late, the least I can do is stop reaching away from him.

Elliot sits down on the ledge. He is almost awkward sitting there, as much as someone that tall and handsome can ever be awkward, his legs taking up half the sidewalk, his arms clasped in front of him.

"This is causing problems?"

"That's not on you," I say.

"I think at least some of it is," he says.

He shrugs, and I know he is trying to take the blame for reaching out to me again after my father died. But it doesn't matter. The fault here is mine to hold alone.

I take a seat beside him and try to think about how to say it. There is the part that he knows too. How comforting it is to see what I see in his eyes. Our shared sadness. The shared knowledge of what has been lost. My father, Elliot's friend. This is why talking to Elliot has felt simpler, more manageable, than leaning into Jack. This is why I've been connected to him again. Elliot knew the best of my father. I wanted to be around that a little longer.

Then there's the other part of it, the part I'm just starting to understand myself: sometimes a goodbye can feel interrupted. My goodbyes to both of my parents were. The two of them were there one day, gone the next. No warning. And, in a way, the first time Elliot and I said goodbye was incomplete. Even if I was starting to figure out then that we were meant to be friends, our relationship ended because we were trying to do the right thing for his family. To honor his wife's request to try again. Maybe that's also what we are doing here. We are rectifying the incomplete endings that we can.

But it doesn't mean the goodbye was wrong—not the first time, and not this one. One way or another, we needed to find our way to this moment. We were supposed to find our way to this moment. Where we say goodbye again to the idea of us, in a way that sticks.

"Can I ask you something?" I say.

He looks up at me.

"You know when I called you the other day and asked you about the last time you saw my father? I feel like you didn't want to get into what really happened. What you guys really talked about. Am I wrong?"

He pauses, his eyes getting serious, his jaw clenching in spite of himself. "Nora, it's not what you think…"

"Okay, so tell me what I'm missing."

"Well. We talked about you a little bit," he says. "He knew that you needed some space from him. He was a bit heartbroken too."

"Because of my mother?" I say, confused.

"No, other things. But he got it. He really did. I'm saying it badly because I can't get into it all. For ethical reasons…"

"Ethical reasons? Was he sick? What was going on with him?"

He is quiet, and I know he is holding back from saying what he thinks he can't share.

"He wasn't sick. I just… I'm just trying to say that he knew how much you loved your mother," he says. "He knew how loyal you were to her. And he valued that."

Jonathan's words come into my head: Your father was nothing if not loyal.

"I think the important thing is that he loved you so much, Nora," he says. "He didn't blame you for pulling back from him. He didn't blame you for anything."

"Who did he blame?"

"At the end of the day? Just himself."