One True Theory of Love (26 page)

Meg eyed the man expectantly and waited for her mother to introduce them. “Meg, this is Andy,” Clarabelle said. “He’s an interior designer at Christopher’s Fine Furniture and he’s going to help me redecorate the house!”

“Dad’s only been gone a few days,” Meg said. “Don’t you think maybe you should wait? And where are you getting all this money you’re spending?”

“I’m fifty-five, Meg!” Clarabelle made gung-ho fists. “Life is short. I don’t have a second to waste!”

“You’re fifty-eight, Mom.”

“Exactly my point!” Clarabelle looked over Meg’s shoulder to the Loop Group table. “Is that a pitcher of drinks I see? And is that your handsome boyfriend?”

“It is on both counts,” Meg said. “Would you like a margarita? We have that or Coronas.”

Clarabelle looked at Andy, who gamely shrugged.

“Why not?” she said. “It is Tuesday night, after all.”

“Exactly,” Meg said.

Clarabelle greeted Kat and Harley and Ahmed and introduced them to Andy. As Meg poured their margaritas, the sound of opera wafted over to them. Clarabelle’s face pinched in annoyance.

“This is the man who wanders around singing opera every night,” she said to Andy, rolling her eyes. “I told you about him. Cuckoo!”

Meg looked helplessly at Ahmed. Opera Bob was one of her favorite people in the entire world, and of course she couldn’t expect her mother to appreciate his beautiful soul—she’d never appreciated Phillip’s, after all—but neither would she permit Clarabelle to mock Bob or trample on his artistry.

“It’s a gift, Mom,” she said. “We all appreciate Bob.”

Ahmed smiled at her. “Another beer, Meg?”

“Yes, please.” Thankful for him, she smiled back. Ahmed appreciated Opera Bob. Ahmed would never mock him.

“Andy said we could move a whole room of display furniture into the house to see how it looks before I make any final decisions,” Clarabelle said. “Isn’t that nice of him?”

“It’s nothing short of amazing.” Meg gave Andy the once-over. He looked like a decent person, but for all Meg knew, he preyed on older women who’d been recently dumped. For all she knew, it might be a very profitable niche. “Do you do this for everyone, or just for my mother?”

“Your mother’s a very persuasive woman,” Andy said.

Clarabelle laughed. “My house is decades out-of-date,” she told the others. “My ex-husband never wanted to spend money on new furniture. As long as a sofa had half a spring, that was good enough for him. Meg’s childhood bedroom
still
has that horrible green shag carpeting.”

“He’s not your ex-husband, Mom.” Meg spoke through gritted teeth. “You’re still very much married to him.”

Clarabelle shook her head. “I’d say our marriage effectively ended the day he began his affair with that woman.”

Meg slapped her hand on the table. “He’s not having an affair!” As Clarabelle rolled her eyes, Meg turned to Ahmed. “He’s not. She just can’t see any other possible reason why he might have left her. Even though he told her exactly why.”

“You’ve got your father on such a pedestal,” Clarabelle said.

“Can I speak with you privately, please?” Meg could barely say the words without yelling. The others wisely stayed silent. Opera Bob’s serenade ended as Meg and Clarabelle walked to Meg’s apartment.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Clarabelle said. “I thought he’d never stop singing.”

Meg turned on her mother the instant she’d shut the door behind her. “This is not okay. You’re entitled to your anger,” she said. “I know you’re hurting—I’ve been where you are now. But you can’t bash Dad like that, especially in front of Ahmed. It’s important to me that he likes Dad, and he doesn’t know him all that well yet, so your disparaging him just isn’t very helpful.”

“Your father is having an affair,” Clarabelle said icily. “I smelled her perfume in his car. And this health kick! He’s such a phony. He doesn’t care about his health! He cares about getting laid!”

Meg tried to rein in her anger. “When you look for reasons to be suspicious, you’ll always find them. Dad left you because you crushed his spirit. His words.”

“He sat around like a bump on a log for thirty-five years.” Clarabelle glared at her. “Crushing his spirit—that’s ridiculous!”

“Couldn’t you have gone to just one baseball game with him, Mom?”

“For thirty-five years, I asked your father to take me dancing,” Clarabelle said. “
Thirty-five years.
And did he ever? No! Not once!”

“Tit for tat,” Meg said. “Maybe if he’d taken you dancing, you would have gone to a baseball game, and maybe if you’d gone to a baseball game, he would have taken you dancing. But neither of you gave an inch, and now you’ve ended up alone.”

“He’s not alone,” Clarabelle yelled. “He’s with her.”

“Who’s
her
?”

“Sandi! That big-bosomed twit. That’s what these men do. They ditch their wives for cheaper, sluttier women and then blame their wives to appease their guilt.”

“But, Mom.” Meg put her hand on her mother’s arm to make her point. “That’s not what happened here.”

“This is what men do.”
Clarabelle extricated herself from Meg’s grip. “By definition. They have affairs, and then they lie about them.”

“Not all men, Mom.”

Clarabelle shook her head. “You never saw the signs. Even when they were staring you right in the face, you never saw the signs.”

When Ahmed and Henry arrived back at the apartment just then, Meg tried to see them both through Clarabelle’s doubting eyes, her man and her man-to-be.

But she couldn’t.

All she could see was their goodness.

E
arly Thanksgiving morning, Meg and Henry went for a hike with Ahmed at the Tanque Verde Ranch. Ahmed brought along three forks, whipped cream and a pumpkin pie he’d baked, and they ate it right from the pie plate, which Henry thought was the coolest thing in the world, and which Meg hoped might be the start of a nice tradition.

The rest of the day was not very celebratory. Meg spent most of it with Henry and her nieces, avoiding Amy and Clarabelle as much as possible. She dreaded what she had to do later: play hardball with Jonathan. She had to preempt him before he made his next move. Patricia Lerner had rightly counseled that he could show up anywhere—at their apartment, at school, at Amy’s. If his goal was to build a relationship with Henry, he might show up where he knew Henry would also be.

To prevent that, Patricia had advised Meg to contact Jonathan and let him know that if he intended to seek visitation with Henry, she’d file court papers seeking back child support, roughly a hundred thousand dollars. If Jonathan didn’t pay, he’d face jail time.

Meg knew it was the right strategy, but nonetheless it was a call she did not want to make. Yet that night, after she’d gotten Henry off to bed and after backing down several times, Meg dialed his cell phone number to completion.

“Hello?” Jonathan said.

“It’s me,” she said.

That was how they’d always greeted each other.
It’s me.
As if there could never be anyone else.

His voice softened. “Hi there, me. I was just thinking about you.”

It was a funny thing about a voice and the time it could erase.

“Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” he asked.

“Not particularly,” she said. “You?”

“I did,” he said. “Since I’m in the area, I took my old law school professor to dinner. Do you remember Professor Grimes?”

Meg was not about to make small talk with him. What did he think, that they were friends now? They had a shared history—that was all—which brought with it no obligations.

“You owe me in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars in back child support,” she said. “And I can have your ass thrown in jail if you refuse to pay it. If you intend to seek visitation with my son, I’ll fight you every step of the way.”

“Meg,” Jonathan said. “Meg, Meg, Meg.”

“Stop saying my name!” It was too intimate, coming from him.

“I always think of you in the fall,” he said. “I’m not sure why.”

Meg knew why and the thought made her heart beat recklessly. They’d been at their best in the fall, as they’d shared the start of new school years, new lockers, new sports teams, new coaches, new dorm rooms. Fall was all about stepping into the future, about moving forward, and for so many years, they’d moved forward together, into a future where they couldn’t imagine being apart. She thought of him most strongly in the autumn, too, with each new class of kindergartners she welcomed, with each start-of-the-school-year shopping trip with Henry.

“I’m seeing someone,” she said. “You should know we’re very happy.”

Jonathan chuckled. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“I’m serious,” Meg said.

“So am I,” he said. “I’m not here to make trouble for you, Meg. I have no intention of disrupting your life, or Henry’s. I know I don’t have that right. I just . . .” His emotion was palpable as he stopped to take a deep breath. “You were a very important person in my life for a very long time, and I was horrible to you. I regret my behavior, and I’ll regret it to my dying day, and I’m sorry. And that’s why I keep calling. To tell you that.”

Meg had fantasized about a moment like this, about Jonathan begging for a forgiveness she’d never, ever grant. She’d imagined all sorts of mercilessly clever responses, none of which suited what she was feeling at the moment, because what she was feeling was sad.

Inexorably,

gapingly,

weepingly,

convulsively

sad.

This was
Jonathan.
After all this time.
Her
Jonathan, calling for
her.

Meg had to get off the phone. She had to hang up and crumple into a ball and hug her pillow and cry for the innocent, good-hearted girl she’d been. She knew she couldn’t hold her tears back for very long. She’d say anything—
anything
—to get off the phone. So when Jonathan said he had something to give her and suggested they get together the next day, Meg said yes.

To Jonathan, she’d always said yes.

M
eg sat on top of a picnic table at Himmel Park while she waited for Jonathan. She filled her lungs, held her breath to the count of eight and then released it. She did it again, and again, and again as she tried to talk herself into being calm.

But it was hard being calm while sitting in a park she’d been bringing Henry to since his birth, being in sight of the greatly feared-by-all-moms long slide, from which he’d once fallen and had to be rushed to the emergency room in fear of a concussion.

She’d been alone that day in her worry. Her fear of something bad happening to Henry never abated, never for one moment, and she knew part of it was pure motherhood—to
be
a mother was to be afraid—but part of it was also the abject knowledge that if something horrible
did
happen to Henry, no one would share the exact depth of her pain. It was the converse of how she felt sometimes as her heart filled with glory as she watched Henry run down a soccer field in this very same park and longed to have someone to turn to and say,
Look at our boy. Just look at him!

Ahmed was there for her now, but Jonathan should have been there all along. He shouldn’t have left her like he had, without even trying to work things out. Who knew? Maybe Meg would have stayed with him. Maybe she would have forgiven his infidelity, and maybe they would have gone on to have a happy marriage and more babies. Maybe it would have all worked out.

But he’d never even wanted to try.

When Jonathan emerged from the parking lot, sighted her and headed her way, Meg held herself absolutely still as she processed the sight of him. He now carried himself like his father, who’d died when they were in college. It was in the shoulders, mostly, how they curved forward just slightly, barely enough to cancel out the military-straight bearing their personalities likely would have preferred. Back in high school, the only time Meg had caught that posture on Jonathan was when he was weary after long runs. But now it seemed to have become part of him, this folding in on himself. He wore khaki pants and kept his hands in the pockets of a red jacket. He’d always looked good in red.