He kept the windows open in the car. Ninety degrees or nine degrees.
He talked about going ice fishing on Lake Washington every winter. He never went.
He couldn’t turn off a movie, no matter how awful, until he’d made it to the credits.
He thought champagne was overrated.
He thought thunderstorms were underrated.
He was secretly afraid of heights.
He only drove a stick shift. He extolled the virtues of only driving a stick shift. He was ignored.
He loved taking his daughter to the ballet in San Francisco.
He loved taking his daughter on hikes in Sonoma County.
He loved taking his daughter for breakfast. He never ate breakfast.
He could make a ten-layer chocolate cake from scratch.
He could make some mean coconut curry.
He had a ten-year-old La Marzocco espresso machine that was still sitting in its box.
And he was married once before. He was married to a woman whose father defended bad men—even if he thought it was a little simplistic to call them bad men, even if he thought it was incomplete. He accepted his father-in-law’s work because he was married to this man’s daughter and that’s who Owen was. Owen accepted his father-in-law out of need, out of love, and maybe out of fear. Though he wouldn’t have named it as fear
. He would have named it, incorrectly, as loyalty.
Here’s what else I know. When Owen lost his wife, it all changed. Every single thing changed.
Something broke open in him. And he became angry. He became angry with his wife’s family, with her father, with himself. He was angry about what he’d allowed himself to turn a blind eye to—in the name of love, in the name of loyalty. Which is part of the reason why he left.
The other reason is that he needed to get Bailey away from that life. It was primal and it was urgent. Keeping Bailey anywhere near his wife’s family felt like the greatest risk of all.
Knowing all that, here’s what I may never know. If he’ll forgive me for what I feel like I have to risk now.
The Never Dry, Part Two
The Never Dry is open now.
There is a mix of the after-work crowd, a few graduate students, and a couple on a date—spiky green hair for him, tattoo sleeve for her—completely focused on each other.
A young, sexy bartender in a vest and a tie holds court behind the bar, pouring the couple matching manhattans. A woman in a jumpsuit eyes him, tries to get his attention for another drink. She tries, simply, to get his attention.
And then there’s Charlie. He sits alone in his grandfather’s booth, drinking a glass of whisky, the bottle resting beside it.
He runs his finger along the glass, looking lost in thought. Maybe he’s playing it back in his head, what happened between us earlier, what he could have done differently when he met this woman he didn’t know and his sister’s daughter whom he only wanted to know again.
I walk up to his table. He doesn’t notice me standing there, at first. When he does, instead of looking at me with anger, he looks at me in disbelief.
“What are you doing here?” he says.
“I need to talk to him,” I say.
“Who?” he says.
I don’t say anything else, because he doesn’t need me to clarify. He knows exactly who I’m talking about. He knows who I’m angling to see.