Page 4

4

Ben Stirling

I’m on the swing on the front porch when I see him approaching. The fence between our properties steps down to five feet and then four when it gets to the street. I see his hair first, a mop of glossy dark curls that bounce when he walks. I consider ducking into the house, but he calls a cheery, “Hey, neighbor,” which puts an end to that.

It’s fine. I’ve been meaning to go over and introduce myself for the past few days.

He struggles briefly with the latch of his gate, stopping and setting something down before kicking it open, slipping through it, and letting it slam shut behind him.

We have a picket fence with an arch. It’s picture-perfect white timber with soft yellow climbing roses trailing over it. There are a ton of tiny buds visible, but they haven’t gone into bloom yet. He stands under the arch and smiles like someone who's normal. Someone who likes people and spring and putting names to faces, or at least putting faces to voices previously only heard through two holes cut into a fence.

“Jelly!” cries Luca, running down the path and opening the gate. I get to my feet and make my way to the steps.

Jeremiah has two coffee mugs, one in each hand. He gives me one, and then we’re left doing an awkward this-hand-no-that-hand handshake that requires us to move our drinks from our right hands to our left before we’re able to make contact.

His handshake is soft and firm at the same time and unnaturally warm from holding the hot drinks. It heats my palm in a way that makes me realize I was chilly on the swing before he got here.

“You must be the famous Jeremiah,” I say when I remember that talking is something people typically do when they meet each other for the first time.

“You must be Luca’s dad,” he says.

I raise my free hand and turn my mouth into the best guilty-as-charged look I can muster. “Yep. That’s right. People who don’t call me Daddy, call me Ben.”

Wait. What?

Is it me, or did that sound dirty?

Because that’s not what I meant at all.

His head dips, forcing him to look at me through thick dark lashes. I can’t tell if his cheeks have pinkened from what I said or if he’s had too much sun.

“Ben Stirling,” I clarify, lowering my voice considerably and bobbing my head to assure him I’m a respectable member of society.

Without meaning to, I give him the usual once-over. The quick left-right that allows me to search his eyes for signs he recognizes me.

I don’t find any.

He has no idea who I am, and for once, I’m not sure if I like it or not. I used to hate being recognized, especially when I was somewhere I had a right to expect privacy. Somewhere like my own front yard. It made me uncomfortably aware of myself, what I was wearing, and what I was saying. It made me feel obvious and rude for taking up so much space.

It’s strange how losing something will make you miss it, even if you weren’t wild about it in the first place.

“I, uh, I wasn’t sure how you took your coffee,” he says. “So I made one with cream and sugar”—he gestures to the mug in my hand—“and one without.” He raises his mug as if he’s making a toast. “I can swap with you if you’d like. I don’t mind either way.”

“Sugar and cream is fine, thanks.”

His lips curl up, and he breaks into a smile that affects his entire face and is out of proportion with the occasion. I guess he’s one of those people for whom joy lurks close beneath the surface. Maybe it’s why Luca likes him so much.

“Jelly, can I show you the plane I’m building?” Luca asks.

“Sure, buddy.”

Luca dashes into the house, and I wave Jeremiah over to the swing, unsure what else to do with him. The swing rocks from our weight and then settles. I take a tentative sip of my coffee, testing the temperature, and when I find it perfect, I take a more meaningful one.

“Mm, it’s good. Thank you.”

It is good. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too much cream. Just right, and a hot beverage that is just right is something I’ve come to appreciate more and more since becoming a single father.

“I made it,” he says. It seems like an unnecessarily obvious thing to say, and I must look a little unsure how to respond because he quickly tacks on, “The cup, I mean. I made the cup. I also made the coffee, but I’m talking about the cup. I made it on my wheel.”

I look down at the vessel in my hands. It’s a light dusty pink. Taller than average for a coffee mug and narrow enough that my hand almost curls all the way around it. It has a snug lid with a triangular opening that pours well. The lid is a slightly darker shade than the rest of the mug. There’s something organic about it. It’s imperfect but purposefully so. There are gentle dents and grooves that weren’t immediately obvious when I first saw it, but it fits into my hand like it was designed specifically for me, or if not specifically for me, at least for a man with hands the same size as mine.

“Impressive,” I say.

Jeremiah smiles like he did before, only this time, there’s no doubt he colors under my praise. The funny thing is, it doesn’t seem to bother him that he’s blushing. He wears his feelings on his face and doesn’t mind that he does it. It gives me pause. A brief hiatus that takes me out of the moment and allows me to gather my thoughts.

I like him, I realize.

He’s nice. Comfortable and relaxed. He’s the kind of person who goes through life not hurting anyone or trying to be something he’s not.

“Is this what you do for a living?” I ask. “Pottery?”

“Well,” he says, crossing his legs and turning his body toward me, “it’s kind of a long story, but yes, I do pottery. I love it, but I also love photography and a bunch of other things.”

He’s enthusiastic and passionate about what he does. I vaguely remember the feeling.

“What kinds of other things?”

“I’m someone who starts more things than I finish,” he says unapologetically. “I started a degree in psychology, but I never accepted them telling me it was a science.” He twists his mouth and shakes his head. “The study of the mind and behavior, a science? I think not. Everyone is so different I honestly can’t with the studious attempts to generalize. I’m not sure it adds value to the discipline, and I’m not sure it’s helpful.”

He appears to feel very strongly about the matter so I nod in agreement, though I’m not entirely sure I follow his argument.

“After I dropped out of that, I enrolled in physiotherapy.” He shakes his head again, this time with a little laugh at his own expense. “Boy, was that a big mistake. I hated it. Stuck with it for almost two years because I didn’t want to be a quitter, but it was killing me slowly. I couldn’t do it. It was awful. I dropped out of that bad boy at the end of the second year and did a course in remedial massage instead. It was woo-woo as fuck. I’m talking beaded curtains and incense, the whole nine, and I loved it. My teacher was way into tantra and was always dipping into this really hot sex stuff.” He hears himself and blinks as if he’s having a hard time believing he just said that. He shakes it off with a spluttery laugh. “Anyway, so basically, I do a little pottery, a little photography, a little massage, oh, and I teach a yoga class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Wow,” I say with a raised brow and a chuckle. “Are you sure you’re doing enough? You’re making the rest of us look bad.”

“What can I tell you.” He shrugs, eyes lighting up so brightly that, for a second, I feel like I’ve been transported back to a time when everything wasn’t heavy. “I’m a jack-of-all-trades…master of none.”

I turn the cup he made slowly, taking it in from different angles. It’s good work. Maybe great work, but I don’t know enough about pottery to say for sure. I do know I like it, though, and I haven’t seen anything like it in a store. “I don’t think that’s true.”

Luca comes tearing onto the porch with the force of a whirlwind behind him. “I’m tweaking the plane, Jelly,” he says urgently. “I’m adding a propeller onto the roof so don’t go yet, okay? It won’t take me long.”

“Take your time, bud,” says Jeremiah. “The aerodynamics are going to be off the hook.”

There’s a disturbance in the air when Luca leaves. Calm takes a second to settle, and when it does, the fact that I’m on a swing with a complete stranger with nary a social grace still left in me is suddenly palpable. Before the silence has time to stretch out and become uncomfortable, Jeremiah says, “So, what brought you to Seattle?”

I prepare to deliver the usual response. We have family out here, and we always planned to end up in Seattle when I retired. Instead, I hear myself say, “My wife died. Car accident.”

The words land and sink down around us. For me, at least, there’s a brutality to them. A ferocity that makes it feel like I’ve spoken out of turn or said something inappropriate.

I slowly work my gaze from the mug in Jeremiah’s hands up his chest and neck, pausing at his throat to check him for signs of discomfort. I find none. His Adam’s apple doesn’t budge. He doesn’t swallow or smile. His jaw and lips don’t move. I steady myself for the final ascent. His eyes. That’s where the pity lives in most if not all people. I search for the discomfort. The unease of not knowing how to reply to what I’ve just said.

I’m met by a steady cerulean gaze. An ocean becalmed. Shallow water without so much as a ripple. It draws me in without making me flinch.

“I know,” he says lightly. “Luca told me.”

That means something to me, but I’m not sure what. In the beginning, right after it happened, Luca couldn’t stop talking about it. He told everyone. Cashiers at the grocery store, kids at hockey practice, Uber drivers. Everyone. And then he stopped. As time passed and we got farther from the event, he stopped mentioning it. Stopped telling people. Started keeping the name he knew her by— Mommy —as something precious that exists between him and me only.

Jeremiah doesn’t blink or look away. Neither do I.

“What was she like?” he asks.

The question stuns me, partly because I’m not expecting it and partly because it feels like a gift. An opportunity to say her name. An opportunity to bring her back to life for a second. “How to sum Liz up in a few words?” I say more to myself than to him. I mull it over and harrumph softly when I get there. “She was kind of wild, kind of unpredictable, and also steady. Really steady, really dependable, and soft and sweet in ways she only showed me. She was one of those people who always had my back. Not a little. She had my back in a way that was borderline crazy. Even if I was wrong about something, she’d have my back in the moment and come back to the issue later, when we were alone, to give me hell about it.”

He smiles and something about the way he does makes me keep talking.

“Everyone says not to make big decisions in the first couple of years after the loss of a loved one. They all say it. Every therapist, every support group, every article, they all say, ‘Now’s the time for survival, not the time to make changes.’ And I get it, believe me, I get it. I’m sure it’s very good, sensible advice. It’s just that when I woke up on the one-year anniversary of her death, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get air in our old house. I couldn’t open my eyes and see the paint colors she picked out, and I couldn’t see the closet with her clothes in it.

“I also couldn’t move her things out and see the closet bare. I tried that. I packed her things up at one point and felt so crazed by the empty shelves that I unpacked them again. I don’t know what stage of grief that is, but believe me, it’s not a good one.

“The bathroom cabinet made me angry without her products in it, and I hated everything about the kitchen without the sound of her yelling, ‘Put the plates in the dishwasher, not on the counter above it.’”

I take a much-needed breath and say, “I pulled Luca out of school for a few days, and we flew out here to visit Liz’s parents and her sister Amy. I thought we needed a break. A little change of scene, you know? Some time for him to play with his cousins. Honestly, I don’t even know how it happened. We were just driving up the road on our second day here, and I saw an Open House sign. I stopped the car for no discernible reason, and Luca and I went in. By the time we came out, I owned the house.”

Thinking about it now gives me the same feeling I had then. Bone-deep disbelief with an unhealthily large side-serving of confusion. I lean closer to Jeremiah and whisper, “I’m not even sure I like the house.”

Actually, I’m pretty sure I don’t. It’s not my style. I like newer houses with wide-plank flooring, lots of glass, and a pared-back, uncluttered style. This house has narrow-plank hardwood floors that creak when you walk on them, pediments and shutters galore, and a ton of Palladian windows. On top of that, it’s way, way too big for Luca and me.

The back of my neck begins to sweat as I’m hit with another onslaught of an increasingly familiar feeling.

What the fuck have I done?

How did we get here?

“I’ve made a terrible decision,” I say to myself as much as to him. “We left Tampa. We left my team. We left all our friends. All Luca’s friends, and his school, and his mites club and, and…”

“Sometimes you gotta make bad decisions,” Jeremiah finishes for me. He says it with a great deal of authority. It’s not at all where I was going, and it startles me out of my rambling. “Sometimes you’ve got to do the wrong thing.” He nods slowly as he doubles down. “Sometimes you’ve got to take everyone’s well-meaning advice, roll it into a tight ball, and drop-kick into the stratosphere because sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing for you.”

He says it quietly, voice so earnest and kind it almost makes me laugh. “I gotta say, Jeremiah, I’m kinda on the fence about whether you did the right thing dropping out of psychology. You could’ve really helped people…or something.”

The or something makes his lips quirk.

“Yeah, well”—his tone drops to one that’s conspiratorial, almost professional—“I was planning on becoming a sex therapist ’cause…er, basically, I’m kind of a perv, but then I realized I was headed for a life sitting in a dusty room fighting an irrepressible urge to yell, ‘ Just leave him already! ’”

I don’t almost laugh this time. I laugh from my belly. From low down. From the old days. From the before time. It’s a rough, harsh sound that darts around my body, jabbing at various pressure points in my ribcage until I’m doubled over.

There’s an almighty crash from inside that has me on my feet at a speed only parents of small children are able to achieve. Luca appears in the doorway at the same time I do. He looks sheepish.

“So,” he says, dragging the word out. “Bad news about the plane. There was a problem with the wings.”

“Oh no, what happened to the wings?”

“They don’t work.”

“What do you mean?”

“The plane took off at the top of the stairs, like this”—he uses one hand and a swift motion to show me the trajectory—“it flew for a little while, but then it went down.”

“Luca, did you throw your plane down the stairs?”

“No, Dad,” he says like I’m failing to grasp a very simple concept. “I didn’t throw it. I flew it.”

Oh Jesus. The LEGO. He’s been working on that plane for days. He’s used a veritable shit ton of bricks to build it. So much LEGO. There’s going to be LEGO in every corner of the house.

I’ll never walk barefoot again.

His mouth dips down and the shadows in his eyes wobble.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I say quickly. “We’ll pick up the pieces, and I’ll help you build another one.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“No, it won’t be the same, but we’ll keep trying until we build something you like just as much. I promise.”

“I better get going,” says Jeremiah, getting off the swing. “Sorry about your plane, buddy.”

“Next time, I’ll show it to you before doing the test flight, Jelly.”

I open my mouth to tell him there won’t be more test flights anytime soon, but Jeremiah gives Luca a smile that wipes away the wobbles and says, “Deal,” so I let it go.

“I’ll see you at the fence later,” calls Luca as I walk Jeremiah to the gate.

“Yeah, you will.” Jeremiah laughs.

“Sorry about that,” I say when Luca’s out of earshot. “I meant to check with you earlier whether you’re okay with all the attention. If it’s too much, please let me know, and I’ll talk to him.”

“No, no, it’s fine. He’s good company.”

“Are you sure? ’Cause I know he goes a mile a minute, and once he starts, he can’t stop. It can get a bit much if you aren’t used to it.”

“I’m sure.” He says it like he’s certain. Not just about this but about lots of things in life. “He’s a great kid, Ben.”

I know it’s something people say. It’s a social norm. It’s like when you meet someone’s pet. You’re obligated to say that it’s cute whether it is or not, but I still feel a quick burst of pride because Jeremiah is right. My kid is a great kid.

“I’m glad you moved in. It was too quiet before you guys got here.”

When he’s on the other side of the boundary, and the gate has been latched, I return the mug to him. As soon as I do, I realize my faux pas.

“Oh. I, uh, I made it for you,” he says. He holds the mug near the top. I hold it near the bottom. His fingers brush against mine. Neither of us is sure what to do next. I let go of the mug quickly. He tries to hand it back to me, changing direction and taking it back as I reach for it. I drop my hand to my side. He continues to hold his out.

It’s an awkward-as-fuck mess.

I reach for it again, determined not to be rude about a gift, but this time, he snatches it away deliberately and clutches it to his chest with a cheeky smile.

“I’m taking it with me,” he says, “so I have an excuse to bring you coffee tomorrow.”