When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  The score remained tied as the game went into the bottom of the ninth. The Yanks blew a huge opportunity the previous inning, failing to score with the bases loaded and one out. But this inning, with one out and a man at first, Kitterer came to the plate again. He fouled off five 3-2 pitches in a row before driving the eleventh pitch of the at-bat into the right center gap. The ball went all the way to the wall and by the time the relay throw arrived at the plate, the Yankees had won the game 5-4.

  It did in fact take more than an hour to get out of the parking lot, but the time went much more quickly than usual. Ally and I listened to the post-game show on the radio and relived Kitterer’s last two at-bats repeatedly. There were other Yankees to applaud – a bullpen that provided four scoreless innings of relief, a couple of great plays in the infield, the timely hitting that got them back into the game – but a new Yankee legend had been unveiled. He could hit .183 and be back down in Scranton by August, but for now, he was larger than life.

  “Reese, you’re a lucky boy,” Ally said, patting him on the knee. He clapped in response, showing nearly as much dexterity in doing so as “The Kid” had shown in the bottom of the ninth.

  • • •

  It was of course a trudge back to Port Jefferson. We even hit a construction delay on 347 only a few miles from the house. Reese, unquestionably fed up with his hours in the car, flat-out screamed for the last fifteen minutes of the ride in spite of our best and varied efforts to appease him.

  I planned pasta puttanesca for dinner. But when we got home and settled Reese down, I discovered that we didn’t have any capers.

  Ally sat at the kitchen counter next to Reese’s high chair, helping him eat some pureed peaches. “Can you make it without them?”

  “You can have your food magazine subscriptions suspended for a question like that.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be a different dish?”

  “Yes, a blander, much-less-interesting dish. We need to go to the supermarket.”

  I moved to get Reese out of his high chair. I hated the idea of making him get in the car again.He would probably cry the entire trip.

  “Why don’t I just stay here with him?” Ally said. “He could probably use the break. Do you mind if we hang back?” She looked at me with Reese’s spoon still poised in his direction. But he had lost interest in eating and had both hands in his bowl.

  “No, that would be great, actually. You might want to get a washcloth before you pick him up, though.”

  The roundtrip to the supermarket was mercifully quick. I certainly understood Reese’s frustration with being stuck in his car seat. At this point, the last thing I wanted to do was drive again. But you really needed capers to make the dish right and I looked forward to it all afternoon.

  Ally and Reese were no longer in the kitchen. As I put the capers on the counter, I heard a loud thump followed by my son’s full belly laugh. I found them in the hallway. Ally was crawling next to the baby and then she suddenly collapsed comically onto the floor. Again, Reese found this hilarious. They turned in my direction.

  “We’ve been doing this for the last fifteen minutes,” Ally said.

  “Exactly this?”

  “Pretty much. I think the kid has a taste for slapstick.”

  She crawled forward again and Reese crawled next to her. Ally did her pratfall and Reese cracked up. This could go on indefinitely.

  I went back to the kitchen, and while I chopped tomatoes and put the pasta water on to boil, Ally and Reese played on the floor together. She did the crawling thing with him for another ten minutes before the joke finally wore off. After that, they goofed around in the family room while I finished getting dinner ready. Ally almost seemed disappointed when I told her it was time to eat.

  “I’m loose now,” she said after putting Reese in his high chair and sitting down at the dining room table. “Loose?”

  “Yeah, like after a great workout.”

  “Were the two of you doing aerobics?”

  “Kinda. The baby version. He’s very physical, you know.”

  “Sounded to me like you were very physical and he was very spectator-like.”

  She smiled. “Yeah. That’s probably true.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “The two of you provide me with a lot of exercise.”

  She tried the pasta and nodded. “Yum, great. Definitely needed the capers; I don’t know what I was thinking.” She looked over at Reese’s high chair and the teething biscuit he was working on. “Hey, where’s his?”

  Ally went to the counter and spooned some plain pasta into one of Reese’s plastic bowls, putting it down on his tray.

  “He won’t eat it,” I said. “Unless you snuck in some maple syrup while I wasn’t looking.”

  As I thought, Reese regarded the bowl indifferently while continuing to gnaw his biscuit. Ally reached for a noodle and held it up to him. Reese looked at her and then took it from her hand, stuffing it into his mouth. A moment later, he took another from the bowl.

  “I could tell he wanted it,” she said.

  The first dish I ever cooked that you really loved was spaghetti with anchovies and garlic. Not butter and parmesan. Not macaroni and cheese. I made both of those for you and you were fine with them, but you really got excited about this new dish. Anchovies. With lots of garlic. You ate most of my bowl. You were three, I think. It was as if you were saying, even then, “You don’t need to treat me like a kid, Dad.”

  You always had a sophisticated palate and I loved that because it meant that we ate as a family. I didn’t need to make one meal for your mother and me, and something flavorless for you. I remember the first time Tina Molson had dinner at our house, though. I made chicken cordon bleu – chicken, ham, cheese, nothing a kid hasn’t seen before – and she looked at her plate as if I put a reptile on it. It was a good thing we had some hot dogs in the refrigerator or Tina might have called the police.

  After that, we were always careful to make “simple” food when your friends were over. Marinara sauce. Burgers. Barbecued chicken. I thought it was so great that you were in on the joke – “Darcy’s coming over, gotta make something easy.” The only time we didn’t have to do this was when Melanie had dinner with us. She was always my favorite of your friends and yes, it had a little something to do with my overhearing her tell you that she thought I was cool, but it had a lot to do with the fact that she ate like a real person.

  You and I connected over food at a deeper level than we did anything else. Saturday morning shopping trips were our thing together. Menu planning was a major topic of discussion on Friday nights (at least until you stopped hanging out with us on Friday nights). We made some good meals together. And then there were all those lengthy conversations we had about restaurants and celebrity chefs. We talked about cooking the way other parents might talk to their kids about sports or pop culture or fashion.

  The thing is, I don’t know why we didn’t connect on other stuff as well. Now that you’re gone, I see you in me all the time. The music thing, of course. Movies too; you were the first person to mention Amy Adams in our house and you were totally right about her. I even noticed recently that we like many of the same colors and I have no idea how I missed that all these years. Maybe, back when things were fine between us, we both thought our shared interest in food was enough. Maybe if we bonded over all of these other things you might have felt you didn’t have enough to share with your mother (though considering the way you two were together, you would have bonded over the Weekly Pennysaver).

  The other thing is that I never regretted it until now. I’m supremely conscious of missed opportunities these days. Given what’s happened, it would probably have made me insanely clingy if you were still around. Guess you got out at the right time.

  But I made a great puttanesca sauce tonight. It’s too bad you weren’t there to have some of it.

  EIGHTEEN

  Avenue

  “I’m going to ask you an extremely personal question,” Codie sa
id on the phone a couple of nights later.

  “Go.”

  “Do you think you might have gone for me?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think, if circumstances had been totally, completely different, that I might have been the kind of woman to interest you romantically?”

  “There are at least a dozen reasons why I should-n’t answer that question,” I said tentatively.

  “Jeez, Gerry,” Codie said broadly. “I’m not coming on to you. I’m just having a little crisis of confidence and I thought I’d talk to a guy who would give me an honest answer.”

  “You’re having a crisis of confidence?” This in itself was surprising. Codie had always struck me as one of the most put together people I ever met. That she was having a crisis of confidence about her attractiveness seemed like folly to me.

  “I’ve been on twenty-eight dates this year. I counted the other night, if you can believe it. Of those, fifteen have been first dates, eight were second dates, four were third dates, and a whopping one was a fourth date. I haven’t gone out with a guy five times all year.”

  “You might want to get help on the counting-the-number of-dates-you’ve-had thing. As far as the rest of it is concerned, you’re in a little bit of a slump, that’s all. That happens with dating, doesn’t it? And this hasn’t exactly been a normal year.”

  “I know it hasn’t. But I was too depressed after doing this bit of analysis to pull out last year’s organizer. It wouldn’t be much different. Or the year before that, for that matter.”

  “And you think this has something to do with you?”

  “Kinda has to, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess it does. But it certainly isn’t because you aren’t smart enough, beautiful enough, or a clever enough conversationalist.”

  “Keep going with the compliments. I can use them right now.”

  “Codie, have you thought about the fact that you might be a little hard on your relationships?”

  She was quiet for long enough to make it clear that she hadn’t considered this. “What do you mean?”

  “How much do you talk about your job when you’re on a date?”

  “The normal amount.”

  “The normal amount for normal people or the normal about for Type A crazies like yourself?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “How different are your first dates from a lunch meeting with a new client?”

  Codie hesitated again before answering. “I know the difference.”

  “I’m sure you do. And I’m just guessing here based on, you know, a certain amount of insider information.”

  Codie sighed. “I don’t know; you might be right. I mean, there’s something to be said for dealing with the beginning of a romantic relationship like a business transaction.”

  “And it’s worked so well for you.”

  “I came to you for counsel, not sarcasm.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And some of this – at least recently – is your fault and Reese’s fault.”

  “Explanation, please.”

  “It’s your fault because I figure if I can talk this easily to my brother-in-law, then there must be other guys in the world I can get this comfortable with. And it’s Reese’s fault because ever since we’ve been hanging out together, he has me thinking about guys as potential fathers rather than just playmates.”

  “But that’s good.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. But it’s kicked me from hypercritical to some level of critical that science hadn’t previously identified. Not that I don’t love both of you dearly and even kind of appreciate what you’ve done to me.”

  “This’ll work itself out,” I said softly. “It actually sounds like it’s in the process of working itself out already.”

  “You think there’s a fifth date in my future somewhere down the line?”

  “Without question. And Codie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If circumstances were utterly, totally, a million percent different, I would have gone for you.”

  “You would have?”

  “Yes. If you weren’t my sister-in-law and if you didn’t look mind-bogglingly similar to Maureen, I would have found you scintillating.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I mean, I still find you scintillating but, you know, not that way.”

  “That’s unbelievably sweet.”

  She sounded happy. I was thankful that I could make her feel that way. “When are you coming out again?”

  “Sunday?”

  “Can’t this Sunday.”

  “Next Sunday?”

  “How about sometime this week.Wednesday?”

  “Nope, date – like it matters. Tuesday? No wait I have that schmuck from Peregrine Communications. Thursday?”

  “You’re on.”

  “Kiss the baby for me. And Gerry? Thanks. You’re a rare commodity.”

  • • •

  “Lisa is here,” Ally said. “Are you ready to go?”

  I turned in my chair at the computer to see her at the door. “Yeah, I was just checking my e-mail.”

  “Anything?

  “No, nothing,” I said with a shrug. “You look spectacular.”

  I wanted to take Ally somewhere fabulous. Though we were together most of every weekend and several days during the week, we went out relatively few times. Ally seemed satisfied with the bifurcated evenings that existed before and after Reese went to sleep, and it was certainly the easiest way to go. But I didn’t want our relationship to be come so completely domesticated that we didn’t have nights where we dressed up, ate slowly, and didn’t have one ear cocked toward the baby’s room. This was important to me. So I got us reservations at Chimera, easily the most elegant restaurant in Suffolk County.

  Ally wore a blue sleeveless dress that landed just above the knee. I never saw her dressed this formally before and it was breathtaking. From the waves in her hair to the contours of the dress, she flowed and I noticed all over again how gorgeous she was. It was at times like this that the hungry teenager really took over in me. I wanted to undress her nearly as much as I just wanted to stare at her for hours. I got up from my chair, held her close to me, and kissed her deeply.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No, really, thank you.”

  I had been to Chimera only once, several years earlier, and forgot how beautifully appointed it was. Everything in the room was a form of illusion, from the sheer curtains that divided the reception area and the dining room, to the candles at the tables whose flames somehow changed color, to the menus that revealed different items depending on how you turned them to the light. It was like being in some grand magical parlor and yet it managed to do this without seeming like a silly theme restaurant.

  We ordered a bottle of wine and held hands across the table. It felt good to be in this setting with this woman. Saturday nights had perhaps all too quickly evolved into playdates with Reese, and I liked that we weren’t wearing jeans, putting on funny faces, or getting down on all fours. Though the natural progression of our time together was increasingly comforting to me, there needed to be an element of dating to our dating.

  “By the way,” Ally said while we looked at our menus, “while you were in the shower, Reese said ‘avenue.’”

  “He said ‘avenue’?”

  “It might have been ‘Evinrude.’ Or it could have been ‘am I nude?’ I suppose.”

  “Any reason why he would have said any of these things?”

  “He wouldn’t explain.”

  Reese was trying out syllables for a couple of weeks now and recently began stringing them together. These seemed to bear no relation to the words we said to him and certainly no relation to anything he might actually want to say. I don’t think he really understood the point of verbal communication yet, but he definitely seemed to enjoy the sound of his own voice.

  “I wonder if he’s going to sing well,” I said.

  “He’ll need som
e work on his phrasing. Did Maureen sing?”

  “She was terrible. Fortunately, she was fully aware of her limitations. No, if he has that gene, it came from me.”

  “You sing?”

  “You don’t know that I sing?”

  “Was it in a brochure I forgot to read?”

  “You’ve never heard me sing?”

  “Along with the iPod. That doesn’t count. Is the piano yours?”

  “Yeah, the piano’s mine.”

  “That’s great. Maybe you can serenade me sometime. Wanna know what else he did when you were in the shower?”

  “Algebra?”

  She smirked. “Don’t mock. He winked at me.”

  “You mean that ‘hey baby, how’s about coming over to my crib’ wink? He does that to all the girls. I tried to explain to him that it’s rude.”

  “You’ve seen him do it?”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I got that. But he really did it.”

  “I think the technical term is ‘twitch.’”

  “No, he really did it. I winked at him and then he winked back.”

  “You winked at him?”

  “Yeah, I do that sometimes.”

  “You were making advances at my son?”

  “You’re turning a wonderful story into something smarmy.”

  I smiled. “No, really, it’s great. Except I don’t think kids can do that kind of thing at his age.”

  “He did it, I’m telling you.”

  I looked down at my menu, chuckling. “Did you notice him cruising around in the family room today? I think he’ll be an early walker.”