Page 81 of Meet Cute Reboot
“You’re not even reading the placards,” I said. “How do you know all this?”
“I wrote a paper about it for my senior year American History class.”
By five o’clock our feet felt like ground sausage and our legs screamed for recliners and glasses of painkilling Pinot Noir. The city was blustery that day with low, moisture-laden clouds that couldn’t decide whether to spit rain or snow—a typical Chicagoan December. We’d headed up from Charleston to spend the weekend before Christmas with my parents. Part of my Christmas gift to Cassie had been touring Chicago’s best historical museums with her. Part two would come later.
We took the “L” back to my neighborhood. She snuggled next to my leather coat, her body feeling cozy and warm next to mine. When she thanked me for pretending to be interested in history, I rested my finger beneath her chin, lifted her face toward mine, and relished her deep brown eyes before telling her I wasn’t pretending. Anything she loved, I loved, and then I pressed my lips to hers, immersing myself in her softness for a good thirty seconds.
When we parted, an elderly lady across from us wearing a plastic head wrap and clutching a cane scowled at us. “We’re in public,” she said, grimacing at my hand which had found its way up Cassie’s thigh. Fair enough. I’d forgotten where I was. An easy enough thing to do when I had Cassie tucked under my arm.
I kept her there as we exited the train and walked the six blocks to my childhood home. The clouds had settled on snow, a tiny pellet variety that pelted our cheeks and foreheads. Christmas lights on porches and eaves provided entertainment in the premature darkness.
Back at the house, Mom already had dinner ready. Dad had paused his usual gallivanting to spend time with his son, although I almost wished he was absent. Mom put up with hischeating, but she wasn’t natural about it. In Dad’s presence she stiffened, her voice took on an edge, and she spoke in terse sentences laden with double meanings.
When they’d both mercifully gone to bed, Dad in the downstairs bedroom and Mom in the master suite upstairs, Cassie and I sat in front of a fire in the living room nursing our second glass of Pinot Noir. My feet and legs were sufficiently numb, but the rest of me was as hot as the flames licking the firewood.
“I don’t understand why she stays,” Cassie whispered, as though Mom might be hiding in the woodwork listening in, which was quite possible.
I peered over my shoulder, checked the dining room, and looked for Mom-sized shadows. I was pretty sure we were in the clear.
“It’s complicated,” I answered.
Cassie furrowed her brow.
“She’s lonely. Her parents are gone. Her sister moved to Seattle. She doesn’t get out except to the ladies’ group at the yacht club and she complains that they’re all phonies as soon as she comes home.”
Cassie fingered the long stem of her glass, her pink fingernails glinting in the firelight. She snuggled closer to me, just beneath my arm. I stroked her shoulder as I contemplated the translucent orange and red flames that somehow, in a mysterious act of chemistry, were keeping us warm.
“I still don’t understand why she puts up with his cheating,” Cassie said.
I didn’t have a better answer than I’d already provided, so I continued studying the fire, contemplating the impermanence of each flame as it leaped up only to disappear a millisecond later.
“Why does he cheat?” Cassie asked.
A laugh rumbled from my chest. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
“You must know. You followed in his footsteps.”
My muscles tensed. I looked over at Cassie to find her staring at me, a hardness to her features that conveyed distrust.
“I’m not my dad,” I said.
“But you cheated on your girlfriends.”
I pulled away from Cassie, just enough to turn and give her proper focus.
“My grandpa was MIA when Dad was growing up. He had to fend for himself. Create his own definition of “happy.” But I don’t think he ever found a happiness that satisfied him. He’s still searching. He’ll find it in a woman, and then his happiness grows stale. When it does, he moves on to the next.”
“Is that why you cheated?”
I clenched my jaw. Concern pulled my eyebrows inward. I hated that my past made Cassie distrustful in the present. Worst of all, I didn’t have an answer for her. I could go deep, say, like father like son. Or I could offer the more accurate truth, that I was just a dumb kid. But would either explanation calm her fear that I might cheat again, this time on her?
“I was selfish,” I said. “And insensitive. And mostly just stupid.”
Cassie looked down at her glass, into the depths of her wine. What she saw didn’t satisfy her, because when she looked at me again the vague distrust still hung on her features.
I walked over to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace and pulled out the book that was hiding her second gift. Cassie eyed me warily as I walked the square box back to the couch.
“What’s this?” she said when I handed it to her.