Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

They both chuckled a few times without saying anything. It could be years before they saw rain like this again.

“How’s the baby?” she asked.

He beamed. “She’s magical. I mean, for the first ninety days, their eyes don’t really lock onto anything besides the breast and the mother’s face, so I was starting to feel left out. But on that ninety-first day? AB looked right at me and I was a goner.”

Caleb and Haya had named their six-month-old Annabelle but Caleb had been referring to her as AB since the second week of her life.

“Well” — Caleb raised his glass — “cheers.”

She met his glass with her own. “To dodging pneumonia.”

“We hope,” he said.

They drank.

“How’s Haya?”

“She’s good.” Caleb nodded. “Real good. Loves being a mom.”

“How’s her English coming?”

“She watches a ton of TV. It really helps. You can have a solid conversation with her now if you have a little patience. She’s very... deliberate about choosing her words.”

Caleb had returned from a trip to Japan with Haya. He spoke halting Japanese; she spoke barely any English. They were married within three months. Brian didn’t like it. Caleb wasn’t the settling-down type, he’d say. And what were they going to talk about over the dinner table?

Rachel had to admit that it colored her opinion of Caleb when he introduced her to the luminous, mostly mute, subservient woman with the kind of face and body that could launch a thousand wet dreams. What else had bound him to her, if not that and that alone? And was the master-servant vibe she got when she saw them together an outgrowth of some hidden he-man fantasy he’d always secretly pursued? Or was Rachel just being bitchy because it hadn’t escaped her notice that while Caleb had married a woman who didn’t speak English, his partner Brian had married a shut-in?

When she brought that up to Brian, he said, “It’s different with us.”

“How?”

“You’re not a shut-in.”

“I beg to differ.”

“You’re just going through a phase. You’ll rebound. But him? Having a kid? The fuck’s that all about? He is a kid.”

“Why’s it bother you so much?”

“It doesn’t bother me ‘so much,’” he said. “It’s just not the right time in his life.”

“How did they meet?” she said.

“You know the story. He went to Japan on a deal and came back with her. Didn’t come back with the deal, by the way. He got undercut by some—”

“But how does he just ‘come back’ with a Japanese citizen? I mean, there are immigration laws designed to keep people from just popping into our country and deciding to stay.”

“Not if she’s here on a legal visa and he marries her.”

“But it doesn’t strike you as odd? She meets him over there and just decides to chuck her life aside and join him in America, a country she’s never seen where people speak a language she doesn’t know?”

He gave it some thought. “You’ve got a point. What’s your theory then?”

“Internet-order bride?”

“Don’t they all come from the Philippines and Vietnam?”

“Not all.”

“Huh.” Brian said. “Internet-order bride. The more I think of it, I wouldn’t put it past him. We’re back to my point — Caleb’s not mature enough for marriage. So he picks someone he barely knows who can barely communicate.”

“Love’s love,” she said, throwing one of his own preferred bromides back at him.

He grimaced. “Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a point, but she did wonder if he was talking about himself in those moments, about his fears regarding the fragility of their own relationship and the potential calamity that could be wrought by bringing a child into it.

An icy thought slid through her before she could stop it: Oh, Brian, have I ever really known you?

Caleb was giving her a curious smile from the other side of the table, as if to ask, Where did you go?

Her phone vibrated on the table. Brian. She resisted the childish impulse to ignore it.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said warmly. “Sorry about earlier. Friggin’ thing just died. Then I was worried I’d forgotten my adapters. But I did not, my wife. And here we are.”

She got out of the booth, moved a few feet away. “Here we are.”

“Where you at?”

“Grendel’s.”

“Where?”

“That college bar by your office.”

“I know it, I just can’t figure out how you turned up there.”

“I’m with Caleb.”

“Uh, okay. Help me out here. What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on. Why would something be going on? It’s raining like holy hell but otherwise just grabbing a drink with your partner.”

“Well, that’s great. What brought you over to Harvard Square?”

“A wild hair. It had been a while. I got an urge to visit some bookstores. I went with it. Where you staying this time? I forgot.”

“Covent Garden. You said it looked like a place Graham Greene would have liked.”

“When did I say that?”

“When I sent you a picture last time. No, two times ago.”

“Send me one now.” As soon as the words left her mouth, adrenaline flooded her blood as if poured from a bucket.

“What?”

“A picture.”

“It’s ten o’clock at night.”

“A selfie from the lobby then.”

“Hmm?”

“Just send me a picture of you.” Another sunburst of adrenaline exploded at the center of her. “I miss you.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll do that?”

“Yeah, sure.” A pause and then: “Everything okay?”

She laughed and it sounded shrill to her own ears. “Everything is fine. Perfectly fine. Why do you keep asking?”

“You just sound funny.”

“Tired, I guess,” she said. “All this rain.”

“So we’ll talk in the morning, then.”

“Sounds great.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

She hung up and went back to the booth. Caleb looked up as she sat, his thumb working his cell phone keypad as he gave her a smile. She was a little amazed at people who could do the talk-with-one-person-text-with-another trick. It was usually computer geeks and tech nerds like, well, Caleb.

“How’s he doing?”

“He sounded good. Tired but good. Do you ever go on any of these trips?”

Caleb shook his head and continued tapping away on his phone. “He’s the voice of the company. Him and his old man. He also has the business acumen. I just keep the trains running on time.”

“Are you demurring?”

“Hell, no.” After a few more distracted seconds, he pocketed his phone. He folded his hands on the table, looked at her to let her know she had his full attention again. “Without me and people like me in the here and now, that two-hundred-year-old lumber firm wouldn’t last six more months. Sometimes — not every day but sometimes — the speed of a transaction can save a couple, three million dollars. It’s that fluid out there.” He waved his fingers at the global “there.”

The waitress returned and they ordered another round.

Caleb opened the menu. “Do you mind if I eat? I walked in the office at ten this morning and didn’t get up from my desk again until I walked out at five.”

“Sure.”

“You?”

“I could eat.”

The waitress returned with their drinks and took their orders. As she left, Rachel noticed a man around the same age as Brian, forty or so, sitting with an older woman who gave off a stylish professorial air. She could have been sixty, yet it was a sexy-as-hell sixty. Normally Rachel would have studied her to see what about her gave off that impression so forcefully — was it her clothes, the way she sat, the cut of her hair, the intelligence in her face? — but instead Rachel focused on the man. He had sandy blond hair going gray over the ears and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He drank a beer and sported a gold wedding band. He also wore exactly what her husband had worn this morning, sans the raincoat — blue jeans, white T-shirt, black pullover sweater with an upturned collar.