“But, hey, not everyone’s a dog lover,” he says now, willing to move on.
“Right.” She snakes the lime wedge off her glass and squeezes the rest of the juice into her glass. “And I’m sure Muddy’s a lot happier with his new family. Those kids really adored him.”
“Yeah, seemed to.” He understands that his job at the moment is to reassure her that they’ve done right by Muddy, that he’ll be fine without them and happy in his new home, a friend of Gwen’s.
“I suppose it means we won’t be good parents, though.” She sets down the vanquished lime beside her glass.
“Wait, what? How do you make that leap?”
Her shoulders rise, as if it’s obvious. “It’s what people say. You know, first you have your dog baby, and then, once you can handle that, you’re ready for real babies.”
His eyes narrow, and he wonders if she really believes this or if she’s trying to bait him, feel him out about kids.
“Huh,” he says, noting a certain dreaminess that’s crept into her eyes. They haven’t talked about kids in any meaningful way before, despite the fact that they’ve been dating for a year and a half. Hell, they’re not even engaged. “Well, we’re not most people, are we?”
Her gaze settles back on him, its wistfulness evaporating as quickly as it arrived so that Jason can’t be certain it was even there in the first place. “No. We’re not,” she says succinctly, as if that might be a bad thing instead of good. Her fingers work to fold her cocktail napkin into miniature squares, and Jason gets a funny feeling that those squares might soon turn into angry shreds of paper. Gwen flips her ash-blond hair over a shoulder, a punctuation mark on their conversation.
What unspoken words have just passed between them he’s not sure, but he hopes he hasn’t already screwed up the vacation. His eyes roam around the bar, taking in the mostly older guys in polo shirts and loud shorts. A few sit with their wives or, Jason supposes, girlfriends. He and Gwen are by far the youngest couple here, which makes sense, given that it’s a weekday and most people are probably working on a Tuesday afternoon. The Seafarer definitely caters to a particular clientele, which is to say the ridiculously rich. Back in the dead of January, when it had been snowing for seven consecutive days and they were climbing the walls of their apartment, Gwen had clicked on the hotel website and scrolled through the photo album, calling him over to take a look. It was impossible not to be impressed—all that marble, the dark-paneled lobby, the sweeping staircase, the views of the water. The history of the place.
“We should go sometime,” she’d said nonchalantly. “You know, for a romantic getaway. Or a special occasion. Once it reopens.”
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed—and then promptly forgot about it.
Now he reaches over to run his hand along her tanned arm, her skin, remarkably smooth. For a split second, he debates telling her right here—how he walked out on his students, how he’s been wasting his time at the library, hasn’t written a word in weeks. How he’s turned out to be a huge disappointment but doesn’t care because any whiff of idealism he might have possessed—that he might actually influence the next generation of students for the better—has vanished. But he shakes the thought off. Gwen is killing herself to make this getaway special, and in typical fashion, Jason can only think of ways to screw it up. Why can’t he appreciate a good thing when it’s within his grasp?
“Buy you another daiquiri, darling?” he says instead, slipping into the Southern drawl that sneaks up on him from time to time, usually when he’s had too much to drink. (Jason hails from Virginia but he’d be loath to call it home.)
Gwen holds up her drained glass and grins. “Thought you’d never ask.”
When he attempts to flag down their waitress, the sound of church bells—his ringtone—goes off on his phone. He flips it over to see it lit up with a text from a number he doesn’t recognize.
Dude, I can’t believe you failed me. You’re such an asshole, especially for someone who can’t teach.
“Can you please put that thing away?” Gwen’s tone telegraphs mild annoyance. “I don’t see how you can possibly relax with your phone going off every ten minutes.”
“Sorry,” he says and shuts it off. The little fucker, Jason thinks. Final grades were posted yesterday. Only two people could have sent that text, and it’s sure not the young woman he failed. She’d never have the balls to address him as dude. It can only be Charlie—contemptuous, fall-asleep-in-the-back-of-class Charlie. Jason is tempted to fire back a response immediately, something like, Well, Charlie, what did you expect? When you don’t do the work, you don’t get an automatic pass.
Instead, he slips his cell into his shorts pocket and thinks he’ll deal with Charlie later. Much later. Like maybe never later.
Friday, June 11, 2021
FIVE
When he questions her later, Riley tries to think if, in fact, she saw anything out of the ordinary. While it’s true that they were all sitting at the table adjacent to the window—the table that would have provided the best view (had one of them been glancing out the window at that exact moment)—Riley can’t recall any relevant details. Her hands are still shaking while the officer sitting across from her, probably midfifties with a sizable belly and kind brown eyes, waits patiently for her to say more. She knits her hands together in her lap, willing them to calm.
“Take your time,” he says gently, as if he’s accustomed to interviewing perfect strangers about perfectly morbid events.
Riley closes her eyes briefly, trying to conjure up an image across the black scrim of her mind. Tom and her future mother-in-law were debating something at the time. What was it again? Oh, right. Whether or not they should serve only cold hors d’oeuvres since the wedding will be in July. But then that would mean that they wouldn’t have Tom’s favorite—pigs in a blanket. She’d been thinking to herself what a ridiculous conversation it was to be having when the crash stopped everything.
What does a person see when someone falls from the sky? How do you fathom the unfathomable? The questions dart around her mind like birds fluttering through the low branches of a tree. Was there a glint of yellow that crossed her field of vision when she gazed at her fiancé at that precise moment? The man whom she loved very much, but with whom she was losing patience for failing to rein in his mother? She knows that the stranger was wearing a yellow dress, but did anything catch Riley’s eye when she fell? A flash beyond the window that she might have mistaken for something else? But, no, there’s nothing. Just more nuthatches flying around in her mind. Riley shakes her head, defeated. “I’m sorry.” It comes out sounding apologetic, as if she should be doing a better job of being a star witness. “I can’t think of anything.”