“It’s very nice. How is Vivian?”
“Worried about her golf handicap, worried about you.”
“In that order?”
Yuki scoffed. “She said you don’t call her enough.”
“Whenever I call her, she’s on the golf course. And I’m sick of hearing about her handicap.”
“It’s twenty.”
“Did she tell you about the neighbor’s Shih Tzu? That’s her latest fallback obsession when she exhausts the topic of golf.”
She gave him a weary smile, letting him know she wasn’t in the lightest of moods. It also telegraphed a dolorous shift to things more weighty than outdoor recreation and overly coiffed pets. “How are you, Sam?”
There was genuine concern in her tone and on her face. The question was a bit generic, but that made answering easier. “Better. I think the new meds are helping.”
“You should tell your mother that.”
“I do every time I talk to her, which apparently isn’t often, but she doesn’t believe anything I tell her.”
“Should I believe you?”
Sam eyed a container of kale salad and felt his stomach churn. It was too green, too filled with things humans weren’t meant to eat in his opinion. “You should, but that doesn’t mean you will.”
“Talk to me.”
Yuki was direct, impatient, and often abrupt. She never bothered with finessing a conversational segue because in her opinion it was time wasted that could be applied to more productive discussion, like problem-solving or decision-making. Her rigidly practical world view was decidedly masculine, one people often mistook for rudeness or self-absorption, but she was neither of those things.
She blamed her Japanese mother for that particular trait, but Sam had never seen it echoed in his mother-in-law, who was the very embodiment of charm, a skilled mistress of the silver tongue. Maybe she had a different personality when she was speaking Japanese, but he didn’t think so. Yuki’s abrasiveness read pure LA to him, nothing to do with her mother’s homeland.
“I went three nights without a dream.”
She gave him a nod of encouragement. “That’s good, Sam.”
“I think so. We’ll see what Dr. Frolich says about it today.” He helped himself to a potato salad without too much green, just pale mezzalunas of celery. “What about you?”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“But the separation’s been good for me.”
Just what he didn’t want to hear.
“Has it been good for you?” Yuki, always looking for quick, clear, incontrovertible answers to her questions, even if there weren’t any.
“If it’s good for you, it’s good for me.”
Her tiny shoulders slumped. “That’s a nonanswer.”
“I mean it. You needed space. You needed a break. And I can work on things without feeling guilty. Bad. For what I’m putting you through.” He spoke the words without much thought, but once they’d come out of his mouth, he realized there was truth to them.
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “That’s so stupid, Sam. I’m here for you. I didn’t leave because I wanted you to be alone to work on things.”
“I understand why you left, Yuki.” He reached out and covered her hand in his. “I think it’s good for you to have time off. And I love you. I always will.”
She sniffled and looked up. “I love you, too. You seem better. Dr. Frolich is working out?”
“So far.”
“You were so dead set against seeing a psychiatrist in the beginning. What changed?”
“I was sick of being sick.” That was the truth, but he really didn’t know if he was getting better or worse. That was another thing he wouldn’t tell her, another torment to add to his list. Secrets, lies, put on a brave face and maybe it will stick. Counterproductive maybe, but desperation had a way of constructing brilliant artifices. The only problem was they were built in quicksand and there was no way to know if they’d collapse, or when.
A single tear slid down her cheek, tracing a crooked, wet path on her skin. “I feel so guilty. I feel like I betrayed you, deserted you when you needed me most.”
Sam had never known her to ask for amnesty, which was essentially what she was doing, so he didn’t know how to respond. And if he was painfully honest with himself, he wasn’t feeling the generosity of spirit to lie and tell her what she wanted to hear.
When she finally realized he wasn’t going to assuage her guilt, she continued. “But it got to the point where I felt like staying would do more harm than good, that I couldn’t be any help to you without some time away. To rest, regroup, get strong again. Does that make sense?”
“You don’t have to justify yourself,” he finally said. “And stop feeling guilty. It’s a worthless emotion.”
“But it’s a powerful one. You know that. And you know how hard it is to escape it.”
He did know, and now he was feeding that same demon again, feeling guilty about her feeling guilty, which was exactly what he wasn’t supposed to be doing at this juncture in his life. “Let’s just take this one day at a time, okay? Twelve-step it to success, just like Bill and his friends.”
“Who’s Bill?”
“He’s one of the guys who founded Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Are you going?”
“I stopped drinking. I’m in spontaneous remission.” For a whole ten hours, give our brave veteran a Medal of Honor! “Did you know that seventy-five percent of people who recover from alcohol dependence do it without any help, including treatment or AA?”
“I take it that’s a no.”
“You can apply the philosophy to other things. One day at a time, Yuki. Keep telling yourself that.”
“Okay. But I suck at that.”
He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Yeah, you do.”
And she did suck at that. Aside from being a stringent pragmatist, Yuki was a highly regimented person, meticulously organized in every aspect of her life, and her mind was always a light-year beyond the present. On Sunday nights, she knew exactly what she would wear to work for the entire week, knew what meals she would prepare on what day. She kept a journal that outlined her six-month plan, her one-year plan, her five-year plan, her ten-year plan. She probably knew what date she would retire.
Unlike him, she knew exactly what her future would be, at least before a husband with PTSD had screwed it all up. He wondered if she knew whether he was in her future as she saw it now. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Her unexpected visit was a bright spot of joy, but he could also sense a dark, implicit tenor to it, a dismantling of something important at the core of it. Her manner was suddenly strange and desperate and seemed cold to him instead of familiar. She said she missed him, but maybe she missed the idea of him, missed what he had been before. And maybe the separation had been more than just good for Yuki—maybe it had set her free and that’s why she was here—to tell him that.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that their impromptu lunch ended in the bedroom, but it did—a sweaty, apocalyptic nirvana, the greatest farewell fuck ever before Yuki told him she had accepted a once-in-a-lifetime job offer in Seattle. It wasn’t the end, she promised. Please think about moving to Seattle, she implored, as if changing locale would fix everything. But he hadn’t been a part of her decision, and that said it all.