Cal fucking loves it.
But he can’t say any of that. His mother would assume he was drinking again. Or that his upcoming marriage won’t be real. Or that there’s something degenerate about all of them. She’d worried about him when he moved to LA for that very reason. All he heard about for months beforehand was how dangerous the city could be, how much trouble he could get into, particularly in the music scene. She went on a lot about drugs. She hadn’t thought to mention liquor.
“Zac’s good.” He pauses. “He’s married now. And has a son.”
“Oh?” She sounds doubtful. It irritates the holy hell out of him.
“Yeah. He got really lucky. Anya’s amazing. We’ve become really close friends and she’s incredibly supportive.” If that comes out sounding a bit like a dig, well, it’s too late to fix it now. “And he’s a great father. Patient and loving. PJ’s a happy kid.”
She clears her throat. “I’m very pleased for him.”
“I’ll pass it along.”
“And you? Are you...” She clears her throat again. “Are you seeing any nice girls?”
He can’t do this. He can’t open up a whole box of thoughts and feelings for her that he’s only just begun to make sense of himself, not at her whim, because she finally bothered to call. It feels alarmingly good to be talking to her, but he’s also got a whole vat of anger brewing that he has no idea how to deal with. He’s not sure he’s allowed to be angry, that it’s reasonable or fair for this anger to exist when he was the one who failed them all in the first place, but the anger is here all the same.
He says, “You know, uh, I’m in the grocery store.”
“Oh. That’s—do you have to go?”
“I should. Uh. Ice cream’s melting.” Not that there’s any ice cream in his cart. There’s only a dozen jars of baby food. Peaches, bananas and pears. PJ has a sweet tooth that rivals Cal’s. Anya makes wry comments about it actually. Further proof that he’s your son. It gives Cal a desperate, grateful sense of greedy happiness every time he hears it. He hasn’t dared to call PJ his son out loud himself yet, but he’s thought it. He’s thought it a lot.
He can’t tell his mother about that either. And really, if he can’t be honest about his son, what’s the point? “Sorry. It’s not a great time.”
“No, I hate to keep you. I already—anyway. I’ll let you go.”
“Okay.”
But then neither of them hang up, not even when the long pause stretches into something anxious. It takes having someone come down the bread aisle, to force Cal to move his cart to the side, to say excuse me, for his mother to say, “I can tell you’re busy. I’ll let you go.”
“Yeah. I should...” He’s trying to think of whether he should say I love you or not. He does love her. But he’s afraid that she won’t say it back. And it seems like even if she did say it back, it would ring hollow. Surely if they meant it when they said it before, it wouldn’t be something they could go almost seven years without repeating.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” she says, while he’s thinking, and his brain stops short in his skull. He would think he has a concussion from that abrupt halt if it wasn’t for the fact that he hasn’t actually been moving.
“Uh,” he manages.
“Soon,” she insists. “Your father says hello. Take care.” She pauses one more time. “I love you, Calvin.”
“Uh,” he says again, and tries to make the nerves that lead to his mouth do something, but it doesn’t much matter. She’s hung up. She didn’t give him a chance to say it back—or not. He adds a healthy dose of appreciation for her consideration to the messy soup of feelings bubbling inside him.
He puts his phone away. He’s been squishing the loaf of bread in his hand. No one else will buy it looking like this. He winces and puts it in his basket, then grabs a second, unsquished loaf for Anya. He’ll eat the mangled one himself so it doesn’t go to waste.
The call grates on his nerves as he finishes shopping. His distraction is such that he forgets several things on his list and doesn’t realize until he’s checking his phone in the car and has to go back in to pick them up, mindful of the melting ice cream—bought primarily because otherwise it means he’s a liar—in the trunk. He’s lucky he doesn’t get into an accident on the way home.
When he walks into the kitchen, Anya’s making dinner—there’s chicken in the oven that smells fantastic and she’s at the table, bent over a big glass serving bowl of spinach-and-pear salad, glaring at the contents and mumbling about the ratio of red onion to pear. The first time she made it for him, Cal was dubious at best about the combination of flavors. It’s one of his favorites now. Zac is beside her making stupid faces at PJ to get him to eat.
He bends to kiss Anya’s cheek and gets a grope on the ass from Zac. He brushes a hand over PJ’s head so that the baby—his son—beams up at him with a big smile, three nubby white teeth showing.
He unpacks the groceries and reminds himself that you have to begin as you mean to go on. He’s going to have an engagement ring on his left ring finger any day now, and he intends to live up to what it will stand for. No more secrets. No walls.
Cal takes a deep breath, braces himself, and says, “Hey, can I talk to you guys about something kind of important?”
Anya straightens, her gaze going wide and curious, even as Zac’s eyebrows climb into his hairline.
“Will wonders never cease?” Zac asks, probably only half-joking. “He can be taught.”
“Shut up.” Elbowing him, Anya turns a sweet smile on Cal. “Of course, Cal, you can tell us anything.”
And it turns out she’s right.
Part Three
Epilogue
Zac
It’s Anya’s turn to pick the movie, and predictably she chooses some aesthetically gorgeous but boring piece of art house fluff. Zac loves his wife but she has terrible taste in movies. He gets it ready to stream under protest, telling her about all his firsthand experience with critics being stupid and pretentious and having no sense of fun, but Anya ignores him, sailing into the kitchen. As much as a seven-months-pregnant woman can sail, anyway, not that he would ever, under pain of death, suggest otherwise.
“Cal!” Zac bellows up the stairs, and he gets a distant yell of acknowledgment back.
Zac finds PJ toddling down the hall, and he scoops his son up and keeps going, applying wild raspberries to PJ’s neck and grinning at the maniacal child laughter he gets in response. In the kitchen, he pauses, toddler thrown half over his shoulder, and jerks his chin toward the ceiling and the man upstairs. “Should we intervene?”