Page 100 of Caught in a Storm
He walks her down to her car. Robyn reaches for the door handle but stops, and they stand together for a moment. There are so many as-alwayses with Robyn, Billy thinks. She looks great, as always. She smells good, as always. She looks stressed, as always. He points up the street, toward Thames. “You should stop by Gustavo’s on your way,” he says. “He’d love to see you. Tell him to put a pretzel on my tab.”
She leans against her car. “You okay?” she asks.
“Who, me?” he says. “Living the dream over here. You?”
“Being alone is weird,” she says. “It was fun at first—uninterrupted me time, you know. Now I just can’t believe how quiet everything is, especially when Caleb’s with you.”
Over the years, Billy’s go-to loneliness-fighting trick has been to fend off the quiet by any means necessary. Music, Orioles games on TV, the Steinway.
“I thought about seducing you tonight,” she says.
“Oh yeah?”
“I had it all planned out. We’d get back together. Grow old in a state of mild contentment. You’d die before me, because I’m in better shape than you. But first, yeah…seduction.”
Relationships are like trying to fire rockets into space: if you miss your launch window, sometimes you have to just scrap the whole thing, which is what happened to them back in the day. He spots the Jiffy Lube sticker at the top of her windshield and makes a note to himself to remind her next month to get an oil change. “Why didn’t you?” he asks.
She swats a mosquito. “Eh,” she says. “You would’ve rejected me. Or worse, you wouldn’t have rejected me, but you’d have been thinking about her the whole time. Which would’ve made me think about her, and that would’ve been weird.”
“Plus, we would’ve had to kick Caleb out of the house.”
“Ugh,” she says. “That kid’s such a cockblocker.”
Billy laughs. He’s known her half his life, and he’s never heard her say the word cock. “Good kid, though.”
“One of the best,” she says.
Robyn gets in her car and starts the engine. She opens her window and turns down the blasting NPR.
“I’m sorry I didn’t chase after you,” Billy says.
“I know,” says Robyn. “Sometimes I am, too.”
* * *
—
Time goes fluid for an hour or so as Billy slides plates, glasses, and dishes into his new cupboards. Shitty housewarming gift or not, the new Tupperware from Robyn fits perfectly in the pantry and will surely come in handy. He wonders now which option he’d have chosen: rejecting Robyn or accepting and thinking of Margot. He hopes the former, for the sake of being a gentleman, but he’ll never know for sure.
Billy has resisted the urge to play Burnt Flowers since Margot left, but he’s listening to their second album now on wobbly vinyl, enjoying Margot’s drum fills between Nikki’s lyrics.
“Hey, Cay, you awake?”
Upon inspection, Billy finds that his son is not. When Caleb was a baby, Billy would check in on him at night and find him sleeping in the craziest imaginable positions, as if he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart mid-escape. Now, though, he looks peaceful, legs up on the armrest, because he’s at least six inches too tall for the couch.
“Cay?”
Billy tosses a blanket over Caleb’s legs and takes the laptop off his chest. The movement causes the machine to blink to life, and the screen lights up. Billy doesn’t mean to look, because it’s probably best not to know what eighteen-year-old males are looking at on their computers. The images he sees, though, are entirely wholesome. A sunset. Some mountains. College-age kids in a lab wearing protective goggles. A chef tossing pizza. A pretty girl of East Indian descent in a crimson hoodie. Billy scrolls. Everyone looks so smart and happy, young. The landscapes are beautiful—mountains, sunshine. When he realizes that it’s the Stanford University website, though, Billy has to sit on the armrest.
“Oh, Cay,” he says. “You idiot.”
Chapter 55
Tonight’s 6 p.m./9 p.m. call from Poppy comes in the form of a text message. Margot is alone, taking five, drinking black coffee in a small glass room that’s filled with instruments, like a musical graveyard.
you there? Poppy asks.
Am I where? Margot replies. I could be anywhere.
