Who Do You Love(125)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

He shook his head. “That isn’t what I want.”

“I’ll always care about you,” I said, knowing how limp and wan the words sounded, how they were the opposite of what he’d wanted to hear. Even rage, even fury was passion. Now he didn’t matter enough for me to be angry.

“You’ll find someone.” I made a face. “You found me, didn’t you?”

He shook his head without answering, and walked to the door. I remembered listening to him packing and leaving a week after I’d confronted him at the restaurant, the sound of his suitcase bumping down each stair. I still felt frozen, like all of this was happening in a movie that I was watching; like it was hurting, but it was hurting someone else.

In my bedroom, I took off my makeup and smoothed expensive and allegedly restorative cream on my face. The pajamas felt as good as I’d hoped that they would, and my hair, unpinned, fell in a luxuriant tumble, the curls still dark-brown and glossy. Standing in front of the mirror, I unbuttoned the two top buttons of my shirt and looked at my scar. It had faded some over the years, the livid pink softening, the raised, corded knot of it so familiar that I hardly even noticed it.

Now I touched it gently. You should have something pretty, right there, I remembered Andy saying. Did any love ever feel as sweet as first love? Were we all just damaged goods now, battered cans in the grocery-store sale bin, day-old bread, marked down at the register, hoping that someone would look past the obvious flaws and love us enough to take us home?

You could find him, the voice in my head whispered. My laptop was in my office, one room over. I could punch his name into the search bar and read a hundred magazine pieces about the doping and the disgrace. Maybe I’d find a “Where Are They Now” story, and maybe it would say where he lived, what he was doing. Did he ever think of me?

Probably not, I decided. He certainly had other things to occupy his mind. “Hello, young lovers,” I sang as I put a glass of water on the bedside table, plucked a few dead blooms out of the bouquet on top of my bookshelf, and tucked myself into bed. All of my mem’ries are happy tonight. I’ve had a love of my own.

Andy

2015

Because there seemed to be no one else available or interested in the job, Andy took the first week of May off from work, went to Philadelphia, and began the process of sifting through Mr. Sills’s belongings. He divided it into piles, sorting things into trash cans and crates—toss, recycle, donate, see if anyone wants. The old newspapers and magazines went to a used-book store, after Andy called the Free Library to make sure there wasn’t a demand for stacks of National Geographics from the 1970s. The antique teapots and china plates, the hand-painted gold-rimmed teacups, all got wrapped, boxed, and driven back to the shops from which some of them had surely come. The mirrors went to Goodwill, along with the paintings, although Andy kept the picture of the yellow parrot for himself. “It really brightens up the place,” he said when he hung it above his television set in Brooklyn. Andy found a charity that sent a moving van and three glum-looking men to collect the TV set and the furniture (he later learned that the men were doing community service after they’d each received their third DUI).

After four days, the apartment was almost empty, except for the corduroy chair that had been Mr. Sills’s favorite, the photo albums and the scrapbooks, and a few boxes that still needed sorting. Andy settled in with a contractor-sized trash can beside him, and started to page through the books. Some of them were family albums that began generations ago. Andy recognized Mr. Sills as a little boy only after he began wearing glasses. He watched his friend grow from a smiling kid in old-fashioned knee-length shorts that became long pants, to a young man in an army uniform, to a groom wearing a dark suit and a serious expression, to a new father, with his arm wrapped protectively around a pretty, slim woman who cradled a wrapped bundle in her arms.

There were hundreds of pictures of the family of three throughout the years, at a dozen different occasions, church picnics and parties and trips to the shore. Andy wondered if there’d ever been an attempt at other children, but Mrs. Sills hadn’t appeared pregnant in any of the shots, so maybe she’d never conceived again, or maybe they’d decided that one was enough. Within the jumble of images of a small family enjoying the pleasures of a happy life in the city—block parties and fireworks viewings, boys in drooping swimsuits splashing in the kiddie pools or, later, graduating to the deep end and cannonballing from a diving board—there was one shot that was always the same. Every April 14, Mr. Sills and his wife would pose with DeVaughn on his birthday.