Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

I close my eyes. How am I here again? On the phone with Jake? How is Jake the one who is helping me? When we ended our relationship, Jake said I’d always felt absent to him. I didn’t argue with him—I couldn’t. Because I was a little absent. It had felt like something was missing with Jake. The very thing I’d thought I had with Owen. But if Jake is correct about Owen, then Owen and I didn’t have what I thought we did. Maybe we didn’t have anything close to it, at all.

“I appreciate the offer. And right now it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“But…” he says.

“From what you’re telling me, we got here because Owen ran away,” I say. “I can’t run away too, not until I get to the bottom of this.”

“Hannah, you really need to think of Bailey here.”

I open the hotel room door and peek in. Bailey is sound asleep on her bed. She is curled up in the fetal position, her purple hair sticking out like a disco ball on the pillows. I close the door, step back into the hall.

“That’s all I’m thinking of, Jake,” I say.

“Not yet it’s not,” he says. “Or you wouldn’t be trying to find the one person that in my opinion you should be keeping her away from.”

“Jake, he’s her father,” I say.

“Maybe someone should remind him,” he says.

I don’t say anything. I look out over the glass walls and into the atrium below. Work colleagues (complete with their laminated conference name tags) are lounging in the hotel bar, couples are heading out of the restaurant hand in hand, two exhausted parents are carrying their sleeping children and enough LEGOLAND paraphernalia to open a store. From this far away, they all look happy. Though, of course, I don’t really know. But, for just a moment, I wish I could be any of them as opposed to the person I am. Hiding in a hotel hallway, eight floors up. Trying to process that her marriage, her life, is a lie.

I feel anger surging inside of me. Ever since my mother left, I pride myself on the details, seeing the smallest things about a person. And if someone asked me three days ago, I would have said I know everything there is to know about Owen. Everything that matters anyway. But maybe I know nothing. Because here I am, struggling to figure out the most basic details of all.

“Sorry,” Jake says. “That was a little harsh.”

“ That was a little harsh?”

“Look, I’m just saying that you’ve got a place here if you decide you want it,” he says. “Both of you do. No strings. But if you decide not to take me up on that, at least make another plan. Before you go ripping that girl’s life apart, convince her you know what you’re doing.”

“Who knows what they’re doing in a situation like this, Jake?” I say. “Who finds themselves in a situation like this?”

“Apparently you do,” he says.

“That’s helpful.”

“Come to New York,” he says. “That’s as helpful as I know how to be.”

Eight Months Ago

“I didn’t agree to this,” Bailey said.

We were standing outside a flea market in Berkeley. And Owen and Bailey were in a rare standoff. He wanted to go in. The only place Bailey wanted to go was home.

“You did agree,” Owen said. “When you agreed to come to San Francisco. So how about sucking it up?”

“I agreed to get dim sum,” she said.

“And the dim sum was good, wasn’t it?” he said. “I gave you my last pork bun. As a matter of fact, so did Hannah. That’s two extra pork buns.”

“What’s your point?” she says.

“How about being a good sport and heading inside with us for thirty minutes or so?”

She turned on her heels and walked into the flea market, ahead of us—the requisite ten feet ahead of us, so no one would guess we were all together.

She was done negotiating with her father. And, apparently, she was done celebrating my birthday.

Owen gave me an apologetic shrug. “Welcome to forty,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not forty,” I said. “I’m twenty-one.”

“Oh, that’s right!” He smiled. “Great. Then I have nineteen more chances to get this right.”

I took his hand, his fingers locking around mine. “Why don’t we just go home?” I said. “Brunch was so nice. If she’s ready to go home…”

“She’s fine.”

“Owen, I’m just saying, this isn’t a big deal.”

“No, it isn’t a big deal,” he said. “It isn’t a big deal for her to suck it up and enjoy a lovely flea market. She’ll be fine walking around for a half hour.”

He leaned down to kiss me and we started to head inside. To find Bailey. We were just through the front gate when a large man on his way out stopped walking and called out after Owen.

“No way,” he said.

He was wearing a baseball cap and a matching jersey, stretched out over his stomach. And he was carrying a lampshade—a yellow, velvet lampshade with the price tag still on it.

He reached out to hug Owen, the lampshade awkwardly knocking Owen on the back.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said. “How long has it been?”

Owen pulled away from him, careful to disentangle himself in a way that kept the lampshade safe.

“Twenty years? Twenty-five?” he said. “How does the prom king miss all the reunions?”

“I hate to tell you, pal, but I think you have the wrong guy,” Owen said. “I’ve never been king of anything, just ask my wife.”

Owen gestured to me.

And the guy, this stranger, smiled in my direction. “It’s good to meet you,” he said. “I’m Waylon.”

“Hannah,” I said.

Then he turned back to Owen. “Wait. So you’re telling me that you didn’t go to Roosevelt? Class of 1994?”

“Nope, I went to Newton High in Massachusetts,” Owen said. “You got the year right though.”

“Man, you are a dead ringer for this guy I went to school with. I mean the hair is pretty different and he was more jacked than you. No offense. I was more jacked too, back then.”

Owen shrugged. “We all were.”

“A dead ringer though.” He shook his head. “It’s probably a good thing you’re not him though. He was kind of a dick.”

Owen laughed. “Take it easy,” he said.

“You too,” Waylon said.

Then he started to walk toward the parking lot. But then he turned back.

“Do you know anyone who went to Roosevelt High in Texas?” he said. “Like a cousin or something? You’ve got to at least be related.”

Owen smiled, gently. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “Hate to disappoint you, but I’m not even close to the right guy.”

Sorry, We’re Open

Jake’s words pound in my head. Owen Michaels doesn’t exist. Owen isn’t Owen. He’s deceived me about the most central details of his life. He deceived his daughter about the most central details of hers. How is that possible? It feels entirely impossible, considering the man I thought I knew. I do know him. I still believe this, despite the evidence to the contrary. And this belief in him (in us) will either show me to be a steadfast partner or a complete fool. Hopefully those don’t turn out to be the same thing.

After all, this is what I thought I knew. Twenty-eight months ago a man walked into my workshop in New York City wearing a sports jacket and Converse sneakers. On the way to the theater that night, he took me to dinner at a small tapas restaurant on Tenth Avenue, and he started to tell me the story of his life. It began in Newton, Massachusetts, and included four years at Newton High followed by four years at Princeton University, a move to Seattle, Washington, with his college sweetheart, and then a move to Sausalito, California, with his daughter. There were three jobs and two degrees and one wife before me, who he’d lost in a car accident. It was a car accident he could barely talk about more than a decade later, his face cloudy and dark. Then there was his daughter. The highlight of his story—the highlight of his life—his headstrong, inimitable daughter. He moved with her to a small town in Northern California because she’d pointed to it on a map. And said, let’s try ther e. And that was something he could give her.