Truly(52)

Ben steered May away from the shirtless men.

“This is great,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “Where’d the city go?”

He pointed to the right. “That way. See, there’s one building, fucking up the view.”

“Oh. Bummer.”

“Yeah. The meadow was designed so you wouldn’t be able to see anything but outdoors, but some zoning moron gave that one the green light.”

“I can’t stand those people.” She didn’t sound like she meant it, though. Her face was full of light when she spun toward him. “You know, those people who are like, ‘Amazing mountain. I think I’ll stick my house right in the middle of this ridge and ruin the view for everybody else’?”

“You hate rich people?”

“No, only the annoying ones. And honestly, if I met them, I’d probably be like, ‘Oh, you have a lovely house.’ ”

That made him crack a smile. “I thought you were one of those people, about to get hitched to Einarsson and all. Don’t the Jets’ wives all live in big piles of granite in some rich Jersey suburb?”

She made a jokey, disgusted face. “I did. For a few weeks.”

“Did you hate yourself for it?”

The wrong thing to say. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

“Ah, hell. I was kidding.”

“I know.”

He couldn’t think what to tell her, so he held out his hand and said, “Come on, let’s walk.”

May meshed her fingers with his and leaned into him. After a while, she cheered up again. She smiled at a kid, then pointed to a little dog that looked like a rat. Its owner was pushing it in a stroller, which Ben didn’t find quite as strange as she did. She said this proved her theory that all New Yorkers were at least a little bit crazy.

He felt brighter just being next to her. Like she could transmit all that enjoyment to him by touching him. Inoculate him against every dark obsession, every bad memory.

They passed a group on blankets, a mom with an infant in one of those sling things, another dangling a toy in front of a baby barely old enough to sit up. Some bigger kids were playing a few feet away, trying to get a kite to fly. May couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“What is it?” he asked when they’d passed.

“I hadn’t realized,” she said. “I thought babies in New York … You know, you see them on the street in Manhattan in their strollers, or on the subway, and you feel so sorry for them. Getting carted around, bumped into. All the dirt.”

“What, you thought they were all working in garrets and getting black lung?”

She punched his arm. “No. But I hadn’t imagined this. It’s nice. I can see how it would work now, kind of. Having a family here.”

They walked toward the far end of the meadow.

“You want a family?”

Even as he asked it, he wondered what he was doing. It was a question you asked a woman you wanted to be with. Testing the waters, trying to find out if getting in over your head with her was a good idea.

It wasn’t a question he had any reason to ask May.

“I do, sure. I had one all planned out.”

She sounded wistful, but not sad, so he pushed a little more. “What was your imaginary family like?”

“Two kids, a boy and a girl. Dan was not consulted, mind you.”

“Didn’t he want kids?”

“Someday, sure. But I wouldn’t have even considered it while he was still playing football. The NFL sounds glamorous, but it’s an awful job. The hours are endless, the work’s a grind, there’s no job security, and it seems like they’re always in PT for one injury or another. I’d have been a single parent, basically. And there wasn’t any way to guess how long he’d be playing or where we’d live or anything, really. That’s one reason we waited so long to move in together. The first couple years we were dating, he thought he might be released, and I was afraid to get too attached. Then he had a great season right as his contract was ending, and he got the offer from New York. I wanted to go with him, but he said maybe we should wait and see how the Jets panned out, first.”

“That’s a lot of uncertainty to put up with.”

“I didn’t think of it that way, like I was putting up with him. I thought it was just what you did, when you loved somebody.”

“You don’t sound so sure now.”

“I’m not.”

“That you should have put up with it, or that it was love?”

“Both, I guess.”

Ben took her lowered eyes and quiet voice as his cue to steer them into the more comfortable territory of sarcasm. “The money’s good, though.”