CHAPTER 8

“Twinkle, twinkle.”

He feels someone kick his foot. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

Jeremy cracks open his eyes. “Twinkle, twinkle little fart,” Jeremy manages.

“How I wonder where you fart.”

Standing before him, a boy with light brown hair, spilling out unkempt from the sides of his red wool hat with earflaps. He’s got black rain boots and the trendy puffy blue ski jacket that Jeremy had given him at the beginning of the school year. Kent bobs his head and torso side to side, herky-jerky, as if moving to some unheard music, the rhythm of an energetic boy.

“You look like a collage,” Jeremy says. He’s getting his bearings. He’s sitting in a beanbag, arms wrapped around an iPad.

“Did you sleep here? You seriously smell like a fart. Seriously.”

Jeremy inhales. Boy’s got a point. Kent and Emily must be here on the way to school and work. How many times has Jeremy told Emily to make coffee at home to save the money; and pastries aren’t good for the boy: even the raisin bran muffin brims with sugar.

Still, he smiles. His last interaction with Kent was the worst they’d ever had. Some stupid disagreement as they sat on the living room floor, trying to make sense of the strewn pieces of a rocket ship puzzle. Jeremy suggested looking for the corners first.

“I have a better idea,” said Kent. He was sorting the pieces by color, looking for the ones that might go together.

“Only if you want to be here all day,” Jeremy said.

“Get your own puzzle.” Kent said it absently, something from the mouth of a babe. But Jeremy laughed haughtily. Something cruel. But he at least was able to check the counterattack that nearly spilled from his mouth, even though the bad taste didn’t leave Jeremy for days.

Kent turns and Jeremy follows his gaze to the counter. With a modest smile, Emily orders coffee. She’s got high black boots and a long black skirt and a light purple blouse, her shoulders covered by her near-black hair, and Jeremy can practically taste the pheromones across the café. He thinks: Emily, something bad is happening. Someone’s messing with me.

And, then: But just in case no one’s messing with me, just in case something really bad is happening, get away from here. Take Kent to your brother’s house in Reno.

Emily tilts her head toward the guy standing next to her at the counter, listening to him. She laughs.

The guy is tall and wiry — built not unlike Jeremy, fuller brown hair suggesting he’s younger. Brownish skin, one of those hybrid ethnicities, half something and half something else. Is he seriously wearing a stone-washed jean jacket?

He puts a hand on Emily’s shoulder, friendly, close to intimate, maybe not quite there.

Kent says: “Ready?”

Jeremy looks at the boy.

“Old McDonald Had a Fart.”

Part of their ritual, turning Mother Goose rhymes and songs into potty humor. Relief washes over Jeremy; whatever tension is long since past.

“Eee-eye, eee-eye-oh. And on that farm he had a cow,” the boy continues, off pitch, a little self-conscious. “With a poo-poo here and a poo-poo there.”

Emily looks over. Jeremy watches the cascade of analysis and emotion: why is my son talking to this strange man unfurled on the beanbag chair; oh shit, that’s not a strange man. Her face turns to puzzle pieces. One looks like anger, one like pity, and one like fear, not from the threat of a stranger but of the familiar.

She turns and says something to the guy she’s with — the guy she spent the night with? — then clears her throat and begins her last-mile walk to Jeremy.

Jeremy represses an urge to stand to meet her. Realizes he wants to save that movement for when it might really count. Before Jeremy can look down, in an effort to communicate his fake nonchalance, the old flames lock eyes.

“We’re late, bunny. Let’s get a move on.” Emily’s balancing her coffee and a juice and a couple of pastries on a compostable brownish takeout tray. “What are you doing here, Jeremy?”

“You can’t be serious,” Jeremy says. He juts his chin toward the guy. “The 1980s called. It wants the denim jacket back.”

“Let’s go, bunny, we’re late.” Then to Jeremy: “Let’s do this later.”

“There isn’t going to be any later.”

Typically obtuse for Jeremy; he must be setting up some line of attack. But Emily senses that it’s dramatic in a way that Jeremy usually avoids until he’s launched his final verbal offensive. Which is why moisture glistens in her brown eyes, sympathy, yearning for understanding, not recrimination. His heart thump-thumps, a drumbeat urging him forward into an embrace or confession. He clears his throat.

“Kent, bunny, can you go wait by the piano while I talk to Jeremy.” She extends a raisin muffin to the boy. He holds it, but doesn’t move. Emily grits her teeth at this impossible situation, her stubborn son and stubborn former lover. “It’s not healthy for you to be here.”

“Not healthy?”

“Jeremy …” She knows the essence of what’s coming, if not the exact words.

“What’s not healthy is that raisin bran muffin. Tons of sugar. What’s not healthy is bringing home some strange man. It’s in all the literature. You’ve got to be sure he’s the guy. It’s sending Kent really confusing messages.”

“I’m right here,” says Kent. “She didn’t bring him home.”

“Not healthy, Jeremy? Like starting a fight in front of Kent? Like showing up at a café blocks from where we live; there’s a café every half block in this city. Like …” She pauses. She looks around, happy that no one seems to be paying attention, but still lowers her voice further. “I’m not doing this.”

“He’s definitely not Jewish.” He’s looking at the guy who was with Emily and who now sits in a ratty high-backed chair near the front trying hard to pretend he’s flipping through a broadsheet.

“That’s sheer desperation, and obnoxious, and neither, for that matter, is Kent’s dad, or you.” She pauses. “But you do need a coping mechanism.”

He’s fighting for footing. “Did you notice his shoes?” Emily looks at the guy for a lingering second, looks back at Jeremy.

“You are brilliant, Jeremy. I’m not disputing that. You are so kind when you want to be. Kent cherishes you. But you have the biggest blind spot of anyone I’ve ever known. You only see trees.”

“The shoes and the jacket don’t match. Something’s off about that guy. There’s a lie in him. I’m guessing he picked you up at the gym, or after work. You fell for his apparent goofiness. You like a project. But this guy is a charade. He’s using you for something.”

“All trees. No forest.” She shakes her head. She’s practically seething. Enough so that Jeremy lets himself look at her directly, another move he tries to avoid when in a heated conversation because it also can send the message: okay, I’m listening; you might have a point.

“You can’t see the big picture, Jeremy. It’s pathological. You nit and pick and nitpick and nitpick. Challenge and refute. Then, when you finally let down your guard, whenever we got so close, you’d nit and pick and then go nuclear. You destroy everything in your path, tree by tree by tree.”

Jeremy has to pause before responding. He’s impressed by her reasoning, flawed though it is. Usually, she’s led by succinct, true emotion, famous for such profundities as “I’m feeling sad.” It’s how she prefaced the final breakup with Jeremy, after lovemaking on the futon in her living room that was, on its face, intense, but in which Jeremy sensed her absence.

“I know you’re bitter about how things turned out,” Jeremy says, which is true but also ridiculous because Jeremy’s equally bitter.

She ignores his bullshit. She looks up to see, thankfully, that Kent has receded to the piano bench, where he’s munching his muffin.

“It’s not me, Jeremy. It’s everyone. Jeremy, to be blunt, I don’t think you’ve got a friend left. Not a single ally. Not that people wouldn’t help you. You won’t let them. Remember the log cabin?”

“Harry’s messing with me, Emily.”

She laughs. She bursts out. It’s a genuine laugh, a honey drip of irrepressible amusement.

“Harry didn’t want to fight with you. He wanted to help you, and you just attacked him. Get out of the trees, Jeremy. And probably you should stay out of this neighborhood. It’s really not healthy for you.” She looks at Kent. Unstated: It’s really not healthy for Kent. He loves you. You know how much he loves you.

Jeremy feels a vibration in his pocket. He extracts his phone. It’s a call from a private number. He’s about to send the call to voice mail. A call from a private number. He remembers what’s going on with his computer. Who is calling?

He swipes his finger across the screen. “Hold on,” he says into the phone. He cups his finger over the microphone.

“Kent is the forest, Jeremy,” Emily says. She looks him in the eye, draws him in. He wants to put his head on her lap. “Please don’t bother us.”

Jeremy’s arm shoots up. He holds up his hand as if to say: wait, please. With his other hand, he cups the phone against his chest so that whoever is on the other end of the line can’t hear what he’s going to say. He looks at Emily, the slight cherub in her cheeks, the emerging crow’s-feet around her deep brown eyes, a picture of softness and beauty, someone he, when he’s feeling charitable and condescending, likens to the Giving Tree in the book by Shel Silverstein that he often read to Kent. She gave, Jeremy took, and it seemed to work for everybody.

She senses something powerful in him. “Is everything okay?”

Now is the moment, he thinks. Now he can tell her that he needs to tell her something.

“Where were you last night?”

She raises her eyebrow. Are you kidding me?

“I was on a date. I didn’t spend the night at his house. He came by this morning to take me to coffee. He’s a nice guy, a friend, and nothing more. For now. And you are not entitled to know anything further about my life, Jeremy. If not for Kent, please, do it for me. I need to be able to live without fighting.”

She shakes her head and starts walking away. Jeremy feels his heart thump, unable to respond. So he switches his attention away from it, and to his head. “Hello.”

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